One of the AI-created images of CDMX in 2049, from a Twitter user
“Postcards” from a futuristic Mexico City have gone viral after a Twitter user @lapetitemachine posted what he said were images of the country’s capital in the year 2049, as created by Artificial Intelligence or AI.
The images show what appears to be a dark, dystopian future for the city, with dilapidated structures, rainy streets, a flood of neon light, and graffiti on subway cars and buildings.
And it looks like OXXO isn’t going anywhere — the store’s logo appeared prominently in three of the images. The most disturbing picture perhaps, because of its too-close-to-home probability was of a polluted skyline over the capital, with a hazy red sun glimpsed through the contaminated clouds.
Thousands of Twitter users “liked” and retweeted the images, posting some fatalistic but also tongue-in-cheek reactions:
“Me coming home from my 12-hour cyberwork shift in the acid rain, where a hologram of Dr. Simi detects my presence and starts talking to me about [the pharmacy’s] cheapest prices (their prices 300% higher than 20 years before),” said one follower of the post.
le pedí a una IA que imaginara a la CDMX del año 2049 y este fue el resultado: pic.twitter.com/uLoWxnJQJp
Another described the aesthetic as “dystopian OXXO/cyber-punk”.
Users explained how, to create these kinds of images, an AI would “read” thousands of images of the city until it detected patterns — like the combination of OXXO + CDMX — that were then incorporated into an algorithmic “vision” of the future.
Not all predictions of future urban life are so apocalyptic: AI is also being used by scientists to create positive, sustainable, and technologically advanced models for future cities in hopes that as the world continues to urbanize, cities will find ways to cope and thrive among the world’s many challenges.
El Hijo del Santo is the son of the late Lucha Libre legend El Santo. El Hijo is says goodbye to the sport this week, exactly 40 years after his father did.
Forty years ago this week Mexico’s most famous Lucha Libre star retired from the ring, and now his son, El Hijo del Santo, will do the same — but not without one final fight.
El Santo (real name Rodolfo Guzmán) is far and away the most popular Lucha Libre fighter ever to have wrestled in Mexico and one of the country’s most recognizable pop culture personalities in general.
Known for his fierce protection of his identity, El Santo is said to have only removed the silver mask that covered his entire face and head twice in public. Once in one of his 50+ Hollywood films, when he revealed his face to a love interest (even then using a body double), and another just a few days before he died from a massive heart attack at age 66 in 1984, this time revealing a partial part of his face.
El Santo was a typical rudo or bad guy for most of his career in the ring, but beloved by the public despite his evil ways. He retired on September 12th, 1982 after a bloody battle between he and his accomplices, wrestlers Huracán Ramírez, El Solitario, and Gori Guerrero, and the much younger foursome Perro Aguayo, El Texano, Signo, and Negro Navarro.
El Hijo del Santo’s father, El Santo — the original wearer of the silver mask — was a beloved legend in Lucha Libre even though he played a bad guy. Marrovi/Creative Commons
Months after his retirement his son, aptly named El Hijo del Santo (Son of Santo) entered the ring for the first time. In January, El Hijo del Santo announced he will also be retiring from the ring. Jorge Ernesto Guzmán Rodríguez (El Hijo de Santo’s real name), has also become a famous masked face in Mexican wrestling, fighting for both the AAA and the Worldwide Lucha Libre Council (CMLL) as a free agent.
Another generation continued when Hijo del Santo’s own son, Santo Jr., stepped into the ring in 2016. Father and son fought a match together, seen here in one of Santo Jr.’s first events. Screen capture
For the past two years, El Hijo says he has been mentally preparing to retire from the ring, and recently it was announced that he is willing to perform once more for CMLL in a fight that will cost the council 160,000 pesos or around 8,000 USD for 15 minutes. El Hijo can also be found on the website Cameo these days where fans can pay for a personalized message, hello or Happy Birthday, for anywhere between 45 and 80 dollars.
At his press conference Wednesday, the president emphasized the need for the National Guard to be under the control of the army.
The ongoing presence of the armed forces on the nation’s streets is essential to guarantee peace, President López Obrador said on Wednesday as lawmakers in the lower house of Congress prepared to vote on a constitutional bill that would allow the use of the military for public security tasks until 2028.
In a late-afternoon vote, the Chamber of Deputies passed the bill with 335 votes in favor coming from members of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, Morena, the Labor Party (PT) and the Green Party. The opposition only managed 152 votes against the bill, which came from members of the National Action Party, the Democratic Revolution Party, the Citizen Movement Party, as well as two opposition votes from PRI deputies. The bill will now progress to the Senate.
However, the bill was slightly amended before it came to a vote, after Labor Party Deputy Reginaldo Sandoval requested that the military be used for civilian security tasks only until 2028, not 2029, as had been proposed.
López Obrador, who said last week that he had changed his mind about the need to use the military for public security, had told his regular news conference Wednesday morning that the majority of lawmakers were acting “responsibly” with regard to their consideration of the PRI’s proposal.
National Defense Minister Luis Cresencio Sandoval defended the integrity of the armed forces at a military event on Tuesday. Presidencia
“I congratulate [the lawmakers who support the bill] … because it’s about guaranteeing peace and tranquility in the country,” he said.
The president said that the government needs more time to “consolidate” the National Guard, the three-year-old security force that superseded the Federal Police. He emphasized the need for the National Guard to be under the control of the army – the Senate passed a bill to that end last Friday – to combat corruption, including collusion with criminal groups, a crime of which former security minister and Federal Police chief Genaro García Luna is accused.
“What we want is to professionalize, institutionalize and moralize the National Guard, which will [eventually] be the most important institution for guaranteeing public security,” he said.
López Obrador railed against National Action Party (PAN) lawmakers opposed to the bill presented by the PRI, using a range of pejoratives including “corrupt,” “irrational” and “hypocritical” to describe them.
“They’re admirers of fascists, supporters of heavy-handedness, practitioners of repression, torture, massacres and serious human rights violations, and now they want to appear as defenders of freedom and human rights,” he said.
The objective of the bill, he reiterated, is “to use the army, navy and National Guard [for public security tasks] so that we can live in peace, so that the main human right – the right to life – is guaranteed.”
Extending the government’s authorization to use the armed forces for public security is “not just a duty” for lawmakers but also a “great joy,” López Obrador claimed.
Mexican and international nongovernmental organizations have long warned of the risks of using the armed forces for public security tasks, noting that soldiers and marines have committed or allegedly committed a range of human rights violations, including extrajudicial killings, while carrying them out.
In a late-afternoon Wednesday vote, the Chamber of Deputies approved constitutional reforms to allow use of the military for civilian security until 2028, with a vote of 335-152. Screen capture
The Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA) said in a 2021 analysis that the results of the militarized war on crime, launched by former president Felipe Calderón almost 15 years ago, have been “catastrophic.”
The analysis pointed out that Mexico had recorded some 350,000 homicides since Calderón deployed the armed forces to combat organized crime in December 2006 and noted that López Obrador has failed to demilitarize public security despite his criticism of the militarized model before he became president and his pledge to take the armed forces off the streets.
“On the contrary, he has deepened various aspects of the militarized model,” wrote Stephanie Brewer, WOLA’s director for Mexico.
Homicide numbers reached their highest level ever in López Obrador’s first full year in office – 2019 – and have only decreased marginally since then. Despite a 9.1% decline in murders in the first half of 2022, the president’s six-year term is on track to be the most violent in recent decades.
While many organizations are concerned about the ongoing – and enhanced – militarization of Mexico, the National Human Rights Commission (CNDH) said Tuesday it wouldn’t file any legal challenge against Congress’ approval of the reform that puts the National Guard under military control.
The commission said it understood the situation that justified the change and asserted that the security force wouldn’t be stripped of its civilian nature despite being commanded by the army in both an administrative and operational sense.
“Given the situation of violence that afflicts the country, this National Commission believes the intervention of the National Defense Ministry [in the administration and operation of the National Guard] … is acceptable from a human rights point of view,” the CNDH said in a statement.
Although López Obrador has assigned a range of additional non-traditional tasks to the military, including infrastructure construction and the administration of customs and ports, the rights commission charged that militarization has decreased rather than increased during the current term of government.
President López Obrador has already assigned a range of nontraditional tasks to the military, including infrastructure construction and the administration of customs and ports.
“What we’re living through today is a new process of transformation,” added the CNDH, which is led by Rosario Piedra Ibarra, an ally of the president.
López Obrador, who frequently stresses that his government is very different than those that preceded it, has claimed that federal authorities, including the military, no longer violate human rights. That assertion has been rejected by human rights experts and activists, including the international nongovernmental organization Human Rights Watch, which said earlier this year that a wide range of human rights violations have continued since the president took office.
For his part, National Defense Minister Luis Cresencio Sandoval defended the integrity of the armed forces at a military event on Tuesday, saying that under the current leadership, they always act in accordance with the law and for the good of the country.
The original version of the story has been updated to reflect the vote of the federal Chamber of Deputies on Wednesday.
The attack followed this peaceful protest by students from the Ayotzinapa teachers' college and family members of the 43 students missing since 2014. Voices in Movement
An army base in Chilpancingo, Guerrero, was attacked Tuesday by students from a teachers’ college formerly attended by 43 young men who were abducted and presumably killed in 2014.
Students from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers College threw stones, firecrackers and Molotov cocktails at and into the military base and pushed a driverless delivery truck into its main gate, forcing it open. They subsequently attempted to set the truck on fire but were unsuccessful.
The students also graffitied the base’s exterior walls with messages asserting that September 26 – the day on which the 43 Ayotzinapa students disappeared almost eight years ago – will not be forgotten and that Mexico’s army was responsible for the crime.
A retired army general is among 20 military commanders and soldiers wanted in connection with the abduction and presumed murder of the students, who disappeared in the city of Iguala after buses on which they were traveling were intercepted by municipal police. The mystery of what happened to those 43 students after that point has never been resolved to many Mexicans’ satisfaction despite the previous federal government’s issuing an official “historical truth” in 2015 of what supposedly happened to the Ayotzinapa 43, as they are frequently known.
The students left graffiti about the Ayotzinapa case on the base. An army general and soldiers are among 85 arrest warrants issued in the case last month.
Tuesday’s attack followed a protest outside the military facility, during which hundreds of students and parents of the Ayotzinapa 43 called for justice. Soldiers didn’t interrupt the protest, nor did they respond to the subsequent attack.
The federal Attorney General’s Office said on August 19 – the day former attorney general Jesús Murillo Karam was arrested in connection with the students’ disappearance – that a federal judge had issued a total of 83 arrest warrants for army personnel, police, government officials and members of the Guerreros Unidos crime gang, but the protesters complained that the warrants haven’t been executed.
Blanca Nava, the mother of one of the missing students, told the newspaper La Jornada that not one of the 83 suspects has been arrested.
Several events commemorating the 43 students will be held in the days leading up to the eighth anniversary of what Deputy Interior Minister Alejandro Encinas described last month as a “state crime.”
A march will be held in Mexico City on September 26, eight years to the day after the abduction of the students, a crime that triggered mass protests calling for the resignation of Enrique Peña Nieto, who was president from 2012 to 2018.
Tlaxcala native Irad Santa Cruz went to Spain to learn to be a pastry chef. He came back with a mission to discover the cuisine of his birthplace. Irad Santa Cruz
Mexican chef Irad Santa Cruz dreamed of making pastries in Spain, but when he got to culinary school in Valencia, his classmates tested him with some questions he wasn’t expecting about where he came from.
What’s special about regional cuisine from Tlaxcala, they asked? What are its most abundant ingredients?
He had to admit to them, and himself, that he didn’t know the answers.
“Discussing Tlaxcala is tough because if locals barely know anything about it, other Mexicans don’t even know where Tlaxcala is!” Santa Cruz says of his home state.
The center collects traditional recipes from older women in Tlaxcala, who are living repositories of the state’s cuisine.
He decided to return home to discover the cuisine of his birthplace. That process, which began in the kitchen with his childhood nanny and mother, ended up connecting him to traditional cooks across the region.
As he was introduced from señora to señora, he asked them for traditional recipes and gave them pastry-making classes in exchange. He met sisters Silvia and Ángela, who had over 125 varieties of heritage corn growing on their land. He hunted maguey worms and Chicatana ants with local insect experts and wild mushrooms with fungi connoisseurs. And he recorded it all down in slim notebook after slim notebook.
“I met with some traditional cooks … and they said to me, ‘Ah, we make this dish with this specific ingredient, but we don’t have that ingredient anymore.’ I realized that cuisine isn’t just food, cuisine is also ingredients,” Santa Cruz said. “It’s also utensils, people, physical spaces, tips, secrets, techniques. Food is the final product or the goal, but everything around cuisine is various actors and factors. …. if there’s no ingredients, there’s no cuisine.”
“I said to myself, ‘I have to go back to nature and get to know the ingredients.’ And I started to research,” he said.
Along the way, the Centro de Investigación de la Cocina Tlaxcalteca (Tlaxcala Cuisine Research Center) in Tlaxcala city was born.
It’s a mix of a cultural center, a cooking school and an archive, where Santa Cruz and his fellow foodie Edgar have a freezer full of local wild mushroom varieties, jars of alcohol-encased edible bugs and ears of corn the likes of which you have never seen, no matter how many trips to Mexican markets you’ve taken: blue corn that’s almost black with pink husks; “Veins of Christ” corn in creamy yellow-white with magenta stripes; “garlic” corn that has each kernel wrapped in its own tiny husk.
Each addition to the collection is the result of a network of relationships Santa Cruz has been building over the last 12 years with local farmers.
“We go to the places and see firsthand what the collection of these ingredients is like. We like to go to the site and connect with the pure essence of the place to get to know how it is, to experience the entire context,” said Santa Cruz. “Because sometimes products just arrive at our tables, and we never know all the labor and work behind them.”
A striking “garlic” corn variety; each kernel has its own husk.
This August, the center officially opened its doors to the public, offering culinary and learning experiences to showcase the area’s vast biodiversity and its ancestral knowledge. Scattered around the main room is local, handmade pottery, an artistic homage to the tortilla hanging on the wall and photos of Santa Cruz with various Catholic popes on their tours through Mexico.
There are also several massive binders of regional recipes painstakingly collected that Santa Cruz will bring out proudly if asked.
“One of the señoras would simply say, ‘Like this, like a handful,‘” he recounts about recipe collecting. “They were almost like empirical recipes that were given to me, and I would just write them down. I realized that you couldn’t replicate something like that because your handful isn’t the same as my handful.
“So I invited the cooks here to my kitchen, and we started to do something we call ‘to testify.’ That means from what they taught me, I would make the dish, and the person who gave me the recipe would approve or reject [the final product].”
For a chef who once dreamed of making European-style confections, Santa Cruz has sunk deeply and wholeheartedly back into his roots. Part of his mission now is finding ways to connect big-city chefs with small-town farmers for the mutual benefit of both. In fact, that’s how I met him.
I was given his name by Elena Reygadas, one of Mexico’s most well-known chefs and owner of the award-winning Rosetta restaurant in the Roma Norte neighborhood of Mexico City. The day I met her, she waxed poetic about a particular collector of honeypot ants that Santa Cruz had introduced her to the last time the insects were in season.
She told me that I had to connect with him.
Santa Cruz is a go-between, a “conductor,” he insists, preferring the term to what he feels is the more pejorative “intermediary” because he takes no cut from the business dealings between farmers and chefs.
Instead, like a culinary Cupid, he is hoping that his work will highlight the ingredients of his home state in dining rooms across the country.
One of the center’s projects is to preserve the biodiversity used in Tlaxcalan cooking. Santa Cruz discovered while collecting recipes that some ingredients were no longer available.
“My concern is only that they meet each other and that the farmer knows that they have something of special value in an industry that needs them and that the industry has the economic wherewithal to pay that farmer a fair price,” Santa Cruz said. “If the price is fair, the farmers won’t quit farming, and the chef will be able to say, ‘I have the very best product.’”
Opening the research center to the wider public is sure to expand the network he has already created, and when he finds a sponsor for the printing of his recipe book, he’s sure it will crack Tlaxcala cuisine open to the wider world.
Even so, he said, he’s not anywhere close to done.
“I have only been to about a third of the state, not even half,” he explained. “It’s been 15 years and we haven’t even gotten to half of the smallest state in Mexico! We want Mexicans and the world to know about [what’s here], to feel it, to know that it’s true, that it exists, that it’s alive, that it’s current and that if we don’t take care of it, this heritage is going to disappear.”
To visit the Centro de Investigación de la Cocina Tlaxcalteca and find out how to take classes there, contact them on Instagram or Facebook or via email at [email protected].
A team of European scientists published a paper earlier this year that details an “ultra-emission event” at Pemex’s Zaap-C platform detected using data from European Space Agency satellites.
Pemex responded last Wednesday, saying that a government-commission study confirmed there “there were no large emissions of methane” at the platform.
The state oil company said in a statement that last December’s emissions had a 22% concentration of methane, while the remainder was made up of nitrogen and other gases “that don’t affect the environment.”
Members of the Land and Atmospheric Remote Sensing research team at the Polytechnic University of Valencia. Luis Guanter, center; Itziar Irakulis-Loitxate, second from right. UPV
Only 2,224 tonnes of methane – 5% of the amount cited by the scientists – was emitted, Pemex said.
Two of the four scientists who used the satellite data to detect methane plumes from the Pemex platform asserted that they definitely didn’t mistake nitrogen for methane.
Itziar Irakulis-Loitxate and Luis Guanter of Spain’s Polytechnic University of Valencia said in a statement sent to the news agency Reuters that nitrogen is not visible to the sensors they used to detect the methane leak. “There is no way of mistaking one for the other,” they said. “The startling emissions we reported were 100% methane, plain and simple.”
Methane, the main constituent of natural gas, is much more harmful to the environment than carbon dioxide and is considered a major contributor to global warming. Irakulis-Loitxate and Guanter told Reuters that the satellite methods used in their study are shedding light on emissions that would otherwise go unreported.
A European Space Agency satellite photo of Pemex’s Zaap-C platform in the Gulf of Mexico, showing the leak. The researchers who reported it say they are certain of their findings. ESA
“Methane is a huge challenge across the [gas and oil] industry. Ideally, operators would embrace this new information,” the scientists said.
Guanter said in an interview with the newspaper El País earlier this year that reducing methane emissions was crucial to combating climate change. “In the short term, it’s the gas to attack,” he said.
Irakulis-Loitxate and Guanter told Reuters that their satellite observations also showed that the flare at the Zaap-C platform – which is used to burn off excess natural gas and limit the damaging impact of methane – remained unlit for 17 days last December, whereas Pemex said in its statement it was unlit for just a few hours.
“This is a matter of simple visual confirmation,” the scientists said. “Data from two other satellites confirm that the unlit flare was emitting large volumes of methane during that same period.”
Daniel Zavala, an oil and gas industry emissions expert with the Environmental Defense Fund, described the level of methane leaking from Mexican gas and oil operations “alarming and worrying.”
The same scientists who reported last December’s “ultra-emission event” say a comparable methane leak occurred at the same location last month. Reuters said it received data from the scientists earlier this month “that showed there was another leak of a similar magnitude from the same location during six days in August.”
Daniel Zavala, a senior scientist at the United States-based nonprofit Environmental Defense Fund whose work specializes in the measurement and characterization of emissions from the global oil and gas system, said in July 2021 that methane was leaking from Mexican gas and oil operations at “alarming and worrying” levels.
President López Obrador has pledged to reduce Mexico’s methane emissions, but an analysis conducted for Reuters found that flaring – which releases carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere – increased 50% in Mexico between 2018, the year the president took office, and 2020. Many flare sites are facilities operated by Pemex.
López Obrador, whose energy strategy depends heavily on the continued use of fossil fuels, faces international pressure to reduce methane emissions and promote clean, renewable energy. U.S. Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry has raised both issues with the president during recent visits to Mexico.
The skeleton was found in pieces by a diver in a cave in the Tulum area. Based on its location, it's likely to be between 8,000 and nearly 14,000 years old. Screen capture/social media
A human skeleton that is believed to be over 8,000 years old has been found in an underwater cave, or cenote, near the proposed Playa del Carmen-Tulum section of the Maya Train railroad.
Speleologist and archaeologist Octavio del Río said that he and diver Peter Broger saw the skeleton under sediment in a cave system that was flooded at the end of the last ice age 8,000 years ago. The skeleton, including the skull, is broken into small pieces, del Río said.
Broger led the archaeologist to the skeleton last weekend after discovering it during a prior diving expedition.
Del Río – who has collaborated with the underwater archeology division of the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) for almost three decades – told the Associated Press that the remains are at a depth of about eight meters some 500 meters from the entrance to the cave system.
“Because of where it was found [and] the depth, it could only have arrived there when the cave was dry. This was at least 8,000 years ago,” del Río said.
He said it was unclear whether the body was deposited in the cave after death or whether the person died where the skeleton was found. In an interview with the Reforma newspaper, del Río said that the gender of the person is also unknown.
“We don’t yet know the sex or the size [of the person], how much he or she weighed, whether the person had a disease. We don’t know how he or she died,” he said.
Del Río said that laboratory analysis would determine such details after the remains have been removed from the cave. “A long study that could last months or years starts now,” he said.
The archaeologist hasn’t revealed the exact location of the cave where the skeleton was found but said in a post to his personal Facebook account that it’s in the Tulum area. He noted that it was the 11th discovery of ancient human remains in the area.
“They date from the origin of man in America, with a chronology that ranges from 13,700 years ago to 8,000 years ago,” del Río wrote. “The caves were their homes in life and their tombs in death.”
The archaeologist was involved in the discovery and cataloguing of the skeleton of Eve of Naharon, which was found in an underwater cave near Tulum about 20 years ago and has been carbon-dated to 13,600 years ago.
Del Río told AP that he notified INAH of the most recent discovery and was told by INAH archaeologist Carmen Rojas that the site was registered and would be investigated by the institute’s Quintana Roo division.
Del Río warned that construction of the Maya Train could collapse, contaminate or close off the cave system where the skeleton is located.
The #SelvameDelTren (Save me from the Train/Save the Jungle from the Train) collective, an outspoken critic of construction of the controversial Playa del Carmen-Tulum section (Tramo 5 Sur) of the Maya Train, said that the discovery emphasized the importance of protecting caves in the area.
The cave where the ancient skeleton was found and other archaeological and paleontological relics “could be affected by the train work,” the collective said in a statement. It called for Tramo 5 Sur to be built parallel to Federal Highway 307, as was originally planned, in order to “protect the history of our country.”
The federal government decided to move the route inland earlier this year after the Playa del Carmen business community complained that the construction of the railroad parallel to the highway would effectively divide the city in two. Large swaths of the Mayan Jungle have been cut down to create a passage for the rerouted section.
Del Río said that “the train will go through a 60-kilometer area that is a unique archaeological site” if construction of Tramo 5 Sur continues as planned.
“What we want is for them to change to route at this spot, because of the archaeological finds that have been made there, and their importance,” he told AP.
“They should take the train away from there and put it where they said they were going to build before, on the highway, … an area that has already been affected.”
Mexican immigration authorities took the 35 undocumented migrants found in Galeana, Nuevo León. The alleged smugglers were turned over to federal authorities. INM
Federal authorities detained 35 migrants and seven presumed people smugglers in Nuevo León on Monday, the second such incident in less than a week.
The National Guard and the National Immigration Institute (INM) said in a joint statement that its personnel “rescued” – a euphemism for detained – the migrants and arrested seven Mexican nationals on the Linares-Entronque San Roberto highway in the municipality of Galeana.
They also said that five vehicles in which the migrants were traveling were seized. The joint statement said that the migrants “presumably came from Cuba, Ecuador and Nicaragua” and were unable to show that they were in Mexico legally.
They were taken to a detention center where they were to receive consular assistance and have their legal situation assessed. The National Guard and INM indicated that the migrants would be deported if unable to prove that they entered the country legally.
The seven suspected smugglers were turned over to the federal Attorney General’s Office, which was to conduct an investigation.
The detention of the migrants and presumed smugglers came six days after 266 mainly Central American migrants were detected in three trucks traveling on the same highway in Galeana. Twenty unaccompanied minors – 19 boys and one girl – were among the migrants found traveling in crowded conditions.
In that incident, the INM said that the Guatemalan, Nicaraguan, Salvadoran, Cuban, Honduran, Ecuadorian and Dominican nationals were taken to the Galeana municipal auditorium for assessment. The drivers of the trucks transporting them were arrested.
Some migrants attempting to reach the United States who enter southern Mexico illegally use the services of people smugglers, who often use trucks to transport them to the northern border. The consequences of that choice can be deadly for undocumented foreigners.
Fifty-six migrants were killed last December when a tractor-trailer transporting more than 150 mainly Central Americans overturned on the Chiapa de Corzo-Tuxtla Gutiérrez highway in Chiapas, while more than 53 migrants, including 27 Mexicans, died in June after being trapped in stifling conditions in a tractor-trailer found abandoned in San Antonio, Texas.
Migration was one of the issues discussed at Monday’s U.S-Mexico High-Level Economic Dialogue in Mexico City. In a joint statement issued after the talks, the two countries noted that their development agencies last December “launched a new collaborative framework called “Sowing Opportunities” (Sembrando Oportunidades) to increase technical cooperation and address the root causes of irregular migration in northern Central America.”
Still, United States Customs and Border Protection agents have completed over 1.8 million “enforcement actions” – apprehensions and expulsions – against migrants since the commencement of U.S. fiscal year (FY) 2022 last October. The figure, which doesn’t include data for August or September, is already about 10% higher than that for all of FY 2021 and 350% higher than that for FY 2020.
In Mexico, the refugee agency COMAR received a record high of over 131,000 asylum requests last year, more than 50,000 of which were filed by Haitians. However, the overburdened agency only resolved 38,054 applications last year, 72% of which were approved, the newspaper Milenio reported in July.
The program, which extended the hours kids stayed in school each day, was eliminated earlier this year. Education Ministry
The Ministry of Public Education (SEP) announced Monday that it would challenge a court ruling ordering it to restore a program that extended school hours for students at more than 25,000 schools and thus gave their parents – especially mothers – more time to work to support their families.
The federal government abolished the Full-Time Schools Program (PETC) – which also provided meals to students – earlier this year. Delfina Gómez, who was education minister until the end of last month, said in March that the government wanted to prioritize education sector resources the the improvement of basic school infrastructure such as classrooms and washrooms.
Mexicanos Primero, an education-focused nongovernmental organization, filed a legal challenge against the elimination of the PETC, and a Mexico City administrative court judge ruled last Wednesday that the government must restore it.
However, Judge Yadira Medina Alcántara added a qualification to her ruling, saying that if the PETC can’t be restored, SEP must modify the La Escuela es Nuestra (The School is Ours) program so that if offers the same benefits. In abolishing the PETC, she said, the government ignored the situations of working mothers, who were previously able to leave their kids at school for longer, giving them more time to work.
In April, PRI federal Deputy Cinthya López Castro led a protest by mothers who said it was impossible to work without the canceled program.
Former president Felipe Calderón, whose government created the PETC, said on Twitter after SEP announced the program’s termination in March that “when creating #FullTimeSchools we sought to improve the education of children, provide comprehensive nutrition to them and allow the incorporation of more women into the labor market.”
“Mom could work full time while her child learned, ate better and was safe,” he added in a post that included a tweet from a person who asserted that President López Obrador decided to do away with the PETC partially because it was created during the government led by Calderón, an arch adversary of the president.
Testing showed that students benefited academically from spending more time at school, and the national social development agency Coneval concluded in 2018 that the PETC was one of the country’s most important education programs.
In a statement, SEP asserted that the La Escuela es Nuestra (LEEN) program is similar to the PETC, given that it also allows students to stay at school outside regular hours and provides meals to them.
As La Escuela es Nuestra already provides those “services,” SEP will appeal the judge’s ruling with a view to it being revoked, the statement said.
The Ministry of Public Education also said that it announced in April that the extended school hours and meals offered by the PETC would be incorporated into La Escuela es Nuestra. In addition, it said that a study it conducted found that “almost 20,000 schools, … 73% of those attended to [by the PETC] in the 2021–21 school year, are not located in places with high levels of marginalization.”
SEP stressed that children and adolescents who benefited from the PETC have not been left without financial support, noting that they receive educational scholarships worth 840 pesos (US $42) per month, whereas they previously got just 300 pesos. It also said it intends to offer LEN in 113,000 schools next year, which it said would benefit almost 9 million students.
The LEEN program currently benefits 3.6 million students in 27,000 schools.
As part of LEEN’s extended hours program, teachers will “plan and organize activities with pedagogic intentions and use the extracurricular time in a more efficient way,” SEP said.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and U.S. Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimindo met with President López Obrador Monday at the High-Level Economic Dialogue in Mexico City. (Presidencia)
The United States has invited Mexico to take advantage of massive U.S. investment in the semiconductor industry, Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard said Monday after talks between high-ranking officials from the two countries.
United States Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo met with Mexican officials including President López Obrador, Ebrard and Economy Minister Tatiana Clouthier in Mexico City for the U.S-Mexico High-Level Economic Dialogue (HLED).
The foreign minister told reporters that the U.S. officials “came to invite us to boost [the production of] semiconductors,” electrical components also known as chips.
“They already authorized an approximately US$50 billion [semiconductors] program and they’re inviting us to participate,” Ebrard said.
“Major elements of the semiconductor supply chains are already well-established in Mexico, with U.S.-based companies like Intel and Skyworks,” Blinken said. “The CHIPS Act will incentivize more of this type of work.” Marcelo Ebrard/Twitter
“… What we have is an invitation that is received perhaps once in a lifetime, so we’re going to accept it, and thank you very much for thinking of Mexico,” he told the U.S. officials at a press conference.
The U.S. Department of Commerce released its strategy last week, outlining how it would implement US $50 billion from the CHIPS and Science Act of 2022, an executive order that U.S. President Joe Biden signed in August.
A statement from the department said that the four primary goals of the act were to establish and expand domestic production of leading-edge semiconductors in the U.S.; build a sufficient and stable supply of mature node semiconductors; invest in research and development to ensure that next-generation semiconductor technology is developed and produced in the U.S.; and create tens of thousands of well-paying manufacturing jobs and more than 100,000 construction jobs.
While those objectives are for the United States, the Mexican and U.S. governments said in a joint statement following Monday’s HLED that “the passage of the CHIPS and Science Act … provides unprecedented opportunities to enhance our already dynamic supply chains.”
Secretary Raimondo told a press conference in Mexico City that “while the law’s funding will supercharge the U.S. semiconductor industry, it will also create significant opportunities for Mexico.”
“It’s a chance for our two countries to work together to build a robust semiconductor ecosystem on both sides of the border,” she said.
For his part, Blinken said that the CHIPS and Science Act will “provide funds to develop resilient semiconductor supply chains in North America.”
“Major elements of the semiconductor supply chains are already well-established in Mexico, with U.S.-based companies like Intel and Skyworks conducting research and development, design, assembly and test manufacturing in parts of Mexico,” he added. “The CHIPS Act will incentivize more of this type of work. It will ensure that we can build these and other components that we need for the 21st century right here in North America.”
Intel’s semiconductor research and development facility, the Intel Guadalajara Design Center. Intel Latin America
Blinken also said that the United States and Mexico are collaborating to “boost competitiveness, to create good-paying jobs [and] to accelerate North America’s transition to clean energy.”
Ebrard said that López Obrador told the U.S. secretary of state and secretary of commerce about his plan to make Sonora a leader in the production of lithium, solar energy and electric vehicles. There are large potential reserves of lithium – a key component of electric vehicle batteries – in the northern border state.
Congress has already nationalized lithium, passing a reform to the federal Mining Law that declares that the metal “is an asset of the nation and its exploration, exploitation, extraction and use is reserved in favor of the people of Mexico.”
Blinken noted that the U.S. Inflation Reduction Act “provides among other things tax incentives for electric vehicles and battery components manufactured in North America.”
“It’s a smart investment in a shared future – a way to create more jobs for our people, combat the global climate crisis, strengthen our energy security. And this is something we discussed with President López Obrador today,” he said.
Ebrard said that the opportunities stemming from the relationship with the United States could allow the Mexican economy to grow at double the current rate, enabling authorities to “reduce poverty much more quickly” and build more infrastructure.
“What is being built today from these initiatives of President Biden and López is … certainty,” he added.
Asia currently makes far more semiconductors and lithium batteries than North America, but the U.S. investment and Mexico’s efforts to exploit lithium deposits could help this region catch up.
According to a New York Times report, the CHIPS act specifies that companies that accept funding cannot make new, high-tech investments in China or other “countries of concern” for at least a decade unless they are producing lower-tech “legacy chips” destined to serve only the local market.
The joint Mexico-U.S. statement said that the CHIPS and Science Act and the Inflation Reduction Act “will increase investment into the North American manufacturing sector, lower energy costs for families and businesses, bolster our supply chains and shore up our collective energy security.”
“It will also create jobs in both countries and position North America as a leader in clean energy,” it added.
