Filmmaker Natalia López Gallardo with her Silver Bear Jury Prize. Alexander Janetzko / Berlinale
A film about the impact of drug trafficking and violence on the residents of a rural Mexican community has won an important prize at the Berlin International Film Festival.
Written and directed by Bolivian-Mexican filmmaker Natalia López Gallardo, Manto de Gemas – Robe of Gems, in English – was awarded the Silver Bear Jury Prize at the festival commonly known as the Berlinale, one of the “big three” European film festivals along with Cannes and Venice. The Silver Bear is second only to the Golden Bear, the prize awarded to the festival winner.
In a glowing review, The Guardian described Robe of Gems as “the film that everyone is talking about this year in Berlin” and a “dazzlingly accomplished and confident debut feature.”
“It is a disturbing and unsettling piece of work, a psycho-pathological moodboard of a film, in which guilt, horror and shame poison the atmosphere,” the review said. “… This is a story of crime, class and corruption in modern Mexico.”
The film follows the story of Isabel, a wealthy woman in the process of getting divorced who moves with her two children to a mansion in the countryside. She soon learns that the sister of her housekeeper, María, is missing and offers to help find her.
Trailer de Manto de gemas — Robe of Gems subtitulado en inglés (HD)
The Robe of Gems trailer, with English subtitles.
Their paths cross with local police chief Roberta, who is leading the search while attempting to rescue her son from his involvement in organized crime.
Only two professional actors, Nailea Norvind and Daniel García Treviño, appear in the film.
A synopsis on the Berlinale website said that Robe of Gems is “perfectly rendered in wide-framed images and unobtrusively fluid camerawork,” and describes the violence depicted as “muted and more social and psychological than physical.”
“Her ensemble film mixes realism, dreams and metaphors in which all the characters experience varying degrees of loss and abandonment. Every day, family members are disappearing through the cracks in society. But those who are most damaged are the ones who have lost a sense of what it means to have a home,” it said.
In an interview with the newspaper Milenio, López, who has previously worked as a film editor, said the excitement of receiving the Silver Bear prize hasn’t passed.
“I’m still very nervous but also grateful. … You have to be aware that in life there aren’t always rewards for the work you do, but this time there was,” she said.
Robe of Gems film promotional poster.
“Getting a reward is important because [making] a film is work that takes many years and dedication to the details,” López said.
Based on a conversation she had with international jury president M. Night Shyamalan, the director said she believed the jury considered her film both “risky and accomplished.”
The idea for Robe of Gems came from conversations López had with residents of Morelos, the central Mexico state where she has lived for the past 13 years.
“People were extremely generous with me in those chats and … I realized that I didn’t want to make a film about ‘the narco’ or violence but rather about the invisible experience and psychology of people [who have been affected by violence]. … Experiences close to violence were in their words,” she said.
“What they told me [in Berlin] is that they hadn’t seen a portrait of Mexico that got so far away from stereotypes and which gave a glimpse of the Mexican reality,” López added.
Robe of Gems will be shown at other film festivals before reaching Mexican cinemas later this year.
Avocados' meteoric rise in popularity has changed Michoacán at huge social and environmental costs, says journalist and author Andy Robinson. government of Mexico
When journalist Andy Robinson visits Lake Pátzcuaro in Michoacán, he marvels at the natural scenery but despairs over a man-made feature: the increasing presence of avocado farms resulting from a skyrocketing demand for guacamole in the United States.
“The avocado orchards just spread like wildfire across a very, very beautiful, environmentally important landscape around Lake Pátzcuaro and beyond,” Robinson said in a Zoom interview. “It all happened so quickly. It creates so much money so quickly. As in previous periods of Latin American history, it’s often extremely damaging.”
“It seemed to me [that the avocado is] driving yet another instance of the sort of boom-bust Latin American commodity economy that has been the case for 500 years literally since the Spaniard Hernan Cortés landed in Veracruz,” Robinson reflected. “That’s been the kind of model for Latin American economic growth.”
As a roving Latin American correspondent for the Spanish newspaper La Vanguardia, Robinson is noticing 21st-century variations on the conquistadors’ theme.
“[The] avocado as being the superfood, a superfood that has all these medical properties, it’s a food that doesn’t cause heart failure, it actually helps combat depression – there may be quite a lot of truth to it,” he said. “It becomes hyped. Then the Super Bowl advertising, the use of American football stars … it’s turned into an absolutely essential dish for watching the Super Bowl.”
Yet, Robinson noted, this popularity comes at a cost.
“Meanwhile, it’s a serious problem, the overconsumption of water by the avocado farms. They consume a lot of water. I spoke to people working on it, like scientists … recognizing water was scarce despite the fact that there are huge lakes. The lakes are becoming polluted.”
Robinson’s book is also a meditation on the rise and fall of the “pink tide” of progressive Latin American leaders in the first decade of this century – and an homage to a 1971 classic book on the region’s economic history: Open Veins of Latin America by the late Uruguayan author Eduardo Galeano.
The British-born Robinson first read Galeano’s book at university, where he studied economics and sociology. “I remember reading it and saying, ‘Wow, it’s so well-written,’” he recalled, “such a damning critique of colonial exploitation — I suppose, imperialist exploitation.”
Galeano’s book “focused a lot on the sort of boom-bust dynamic, a terrible dynamic … for Latin American commodity production,” he explained. “It had a chapter on sugar, a chapter on coffee.”
Similarly, each chapter in Robinson’s book focuses on a specific commodity that he connects to a particular country or countries. Three chapters pertain directly to Mexico: one on avocados in Michoacán, another on silver in San Luis Potosí and a trinational study of oil in Brazil, Venezuela and Mexico.
San Luis Potosí also figured prominently in Galeano’s book, along with Zacatecas — “the two states in the high desert of central Mexico most closely identified with colonial mining,” Robinson writes, adding that in San Luis Potosí today, “the simultaneous defense of the environment, indigenous rights, fair wages, oil-driven growth and mining seemed a tall order.”
In the chapter on oil, Robinson visits President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s home state of Tabasco and birthplace of Tepetitán. The author interviews residents with long memories of AMLO, including the president’s friend, Luis Guillermo “Luigi” Pérez, a local Morena party power broker.
Robinson also discusses López Obrador’s oil policy with a Villahermosa taquero named René Méndez Arjona, who improbably promises over 100% support for the president should he fulfill his promises for a truly domestic oil supply.
The abandoned silver mines in the ghost town of Real de Catorce, San Luis Potosi. Gerardo Daniel Paez
The section’s prose reflects the author’s aim “to write a book on economic history like a novel on pirates or lovers,” with allusions to Graham Greene’s novel The Power and the Glory and to Cortés’ burning of his ships. Robinson also writes of “the irrefutable logic of the taquero” (taco seller) in describing a man-on-the-street perspective on AMLO’s oil policy.
“That chapter in the book tries to sort of highlight what seems to be [what] all of the analysts, rating agencies, some of the economic advisers of AMLO, [are asking]: why build a new refinery in Tabasco if you can refine in Texas, in Houston?
Other chapters mention Mexico as well. Although mainly focused on Peru, the chapter on potatoes includes a visit to a Frito-Lay supplier in Nuevo León and AMLO’s concerns over the obesity crisis in Mexico. The chapter on lithium in Bolivia notes that after a controversy over this commodity toppled Evo Morales, the ex-president received a welcome from President López Obrador.
Much of the book makes for grim reading, especially the chapter on iron and Brazil, which addresses such topics as the Carajás mine – “the biggest open-cast iron mine in the world,” Robinson writes, describing it as “[an] enormous wound in the tropical forest” – and the 2016 Samarco dam collapse, which devastated the Doce River in southeastern Brazil.
The book also argues that commodities sought for the new green economy are adversely impacting local environments – including in Chile, the world leader in the production of copper, which Robinson said is even more vital for electric cars than for gasoline cars.
“Chile crystallizes that problem because the copper industry in Chile, copper mining in Chile, is a huge environmental problem,” he said. “I think that’s something that will be expected throughout the region, and Africa as well. There’s going to be a huge temptation to mine … there’s going to be demand for a lot of metals essential for electric cars and renewable energy products.”
He predicted history repeating itself: “Prices will go up, there will be another supply cycle of commodity prices — metals and minerals; it will create an irresistible temptation to go back to that dependence on the exportation of metals without industry.”
But despite the grim topics, Robinson hopes that his book doesn’t appear too “pessimistic.”
“Some people say it is. A lot of people tell me it’s kind of depressing. I try to include, make sure, that the people who are fighting against the big mining companies or big agribusiness companies were the protagonists of the story.”
He cited possible heroes of the future:
“I think Latin America has a lot of potential for being a leader of the fight against mining [and] commodity food production and a leader in showing another model is possible,” Robinson said, noting that “small farmers … continue to live in communities that are functional and protect the environment. The Amazon is one of them … even southern Mexico, the campesino (farmer) economy.”
Journalist and author Andy Robinson is a correspondent for the Spanish newspaper La Vanguardia. Courtesy of the author
Rich Tenorio is a frequent contributor to Mexico News Daily.
Vehicle insurance is required in about half of the country's states, and on all federal highways.
The average cost of auto insurance premiums was 8% higher in January compared to the same month a year earlier, the biggest annual increase in over 14 years.
Data from the national statistics agency INEGI shows that the last time there was a larger year-over-year increase was in November 2007, when premiums were up 8.4%.
Premium increases have been above the level of inflation every month since August. The inflation rate last month was 7.1%.
The higher insurance costs cannot be explained by an increase in vehicle theft as the incidence of that crime has declined during three consecutive years. According to the Mexican Association of Insurance Institutions, 62,000 insured cars were stolen last year, the lowest figure since 2015. Half of all theft incidents occurred in just three federal entities – Mexico City, México state and Jalisco.
Ernesto O’Farrill, president of the financial conglomerate Grupo Bursamétrica, told the newspaper El Universal that higher costs for auto parts due to global shortages and the depreciation of the peso against the U.S. dollar are behind the price hikes.
According to the federal government’s National Commission of Insurance and Finance, the total value of auto insurance policies sold last year was 108 billion pesos (US $5.3 billion), a slight decrease compared to 2020. Weaker sales of new cars was behind the decrease.
All motorists using federal highways have been required to have insurance since 2019, while coverage is obligatory in about half of all states regardless of the roads on which the vehicle is used.
An October 2019 protest against the approval of the Law of Republican Austerity. The 10-year private sector ban is part of that same law.
A federal judge has ruled against a law that prevents former high-ranking civil servants from working in private companies they regulated for a period of 10 years.
Judge Abel Méndez determined that the provision in the Law of Republican Austerity that restricts ex-government workers’ employment options is unconstitutional as well as “unfair and excessive.”
Méndez ruled that the 10-year ban violates the constitutionally-enshrined right to freedom to work as well as the right to earn a living wage. The federal government announced it will challenge the decision.
The judge’s ruling, the first against the federal austerity law, came in response to an injunction request filed by a former federal official. He initiated the legal action after being rejected for a financial sector position because he left the public service less than a decade ago.
President López Obrador criticized an ex-president for taking a private sector job during a January 19 press conference. Presidencia de la República
Méndez acknowledged that high-ranking civil servants’ experience and skills make them attractive employees for the private sector, but the 10-year prohibition adversely affects their chances of finding work.
José Ramón Cossío, a lawyer and former Supreme Court justice, told the newspaper El País that the constitutional right to freedom to work can only be restricted for “grave, serious reasons.”
“The judge took into account that this temporary restriction cannot be established because it’s not authorized in the constitution,” he said.
“It’s an unreasonable restriction, … it’s not understood what legal value is being protected,” Cossio said.
President López Obrador has repeatedly criticized former officials, including ex-presidents Felipe Calderón and Ernesto Zedillo, for taking up lucrative private sector positions after they left public life.
Cossío said it was likely that the dispute over the legality of the 10-year ban will end up in the Supreme Court given that its validity depends on an interpretation of the constitution.
Prior to the approval of the austerity law, former high-ranking public officials were barred from working in companies they regulated or in which they could use privileged information to which they were privy in their government roles for five years.
The updated “cooling-off” period, one of the longest in the world, was criticized by opposition lawmakers when it passed Congress in late 2019.
Mexico City borough mayors pose with axolotls before releasing them into the canals. Twitter @Alc_Iztapalapa
A project designed to ensure the long-term survival of the axolotl was launched in Mexico City on Wednesday.
Called Ajolotón, a name derived from the Spanish word for axolotl (ajolote), the initiative will foster the reproduction of the amphibians in seven Mexico City boroughs currently ruled by the Morena party: Xochimilco, Iztapalapa, Iztacalco, Tláhuac, Venustiano Carranza, Milpa Alta and Gustavo A. Madero.
A launch event attended by the mayors of the boroughs was held next to a canal in Xochimilco, where most of the capital’s axolotls live.
Xochimilco Mayor José Carlos Acosta said that one of the main ways the conservation of axolotls – an endangered species – will be promoted is through the creation of ajolotarios, or axolotl habitats, where the amphibians can reproduce and grow in a clean and safe environment.
Two-thousand specimens were released into existing Xochimilco habitats on Wednesday.
One of the axolotls that were released on Wednesday. Twitter @Alc_Iztapalapa
Acosta also spoke about axolotl conservation efforts led by the Institute of Biology at the National Autonomous University (UNAM) in recent years.
He said that researchers from UNAM, the Metropolitan Autonomous University, the University of Kent in England and experts from Cuba and Japan have contributed to efforts to protect the species and encourage reproduction in 70 ajolotarios in Xochimilco.
“More canals than streets are cleaned on a daily basis, … the maintenance is more costly in the [Xochimilco] lake [area] than … the collection of household trash,” Acosta said.
Graffiti protesting the mine project planned by Almaden Minerals in Puebla. The message says, 'No to open-pit mining.'
In an unprecedented ruling, the Supreme Court (SCJN) on Wednesday revoked two mining concessions in Puebla because the federal government failed to consult with the local indigenous community before granting them.
The concessions allowed the company to mine for gold and silver in Tecoltemi, a community in the Sierra Norte municipality of Ixtacamaxtitlán, although actual mining has not started.
In 2015, a group of Nahua residents concerned about contamination and overexploitation of local water sources filed a challenge against the concessions. Their lawsuit passed through lower-level courts before reaching the Supreme Court.
It is the first time that the nation’s highest court has invalidated mining permits for neglecting to consult with indigenous residents, according to lawyers and legal experts who spoke with the newspaper El País.
The court found in favor of the Tecoltemi, Puebla, residents but didn’t rule four articles of Mexico’s mining law unconstitutional as plaintiffs had hoped.
However, the SCJN didn’t rule that four articles of the federal mining law are unconstitutional, as the plaintiffs had hoped it would. One article the Tecoltemi residents wanted the court to rule against says that mining takes precedence over all other kinds of land use.
However, the SCJN did declare that, in accordance with the constitution and Convention 169 of the International Labour Organization’s Indigenous and Tribal Peoples Convention, which Mexico ratified on September 5, 1990, the government should have consulted with indigenous residents of Tecoltemi before granting the concessions.
The court rejected the defense put forward by the federal government and Almaden that consultation should take place after rather than before the granting of concessions. However, its ruling, which could aid other communities in their fight against mining interests, may not definitively shut down mining in Tecoltemi because the concessions are likely to be reissued.
Almaden acknowledged that likelihood in a statement released Thursday.
“Almaden has reviewed a draft of yesterday’s SCJN decision. As it stands, the draft decision determines that the Mexican mineral title law is constitutional but that before issuing Almaden’s mineral titles, the Ministry of the Economy should have provided for a consultation procedure with relevant indigenous communities,” it said.
“The draft orders the Ministry of the Economy to declare Almaden’s mineral titles ineffective and to reissue them following the ministry’s compliance with its obligation to carry out the necessary procedures to consult with indigenous communities,” the Vancouver-based company said.
‘Get out, Almaden Minerals, no to the mine,’ reads the message. ‘No to gold, yes to life.’
Almaden, which has invested millions of dollars in its Puebla project, acknowledged that the court’s final decision could be different from the draft version it saw.
“The decision will take effect at the time of official notification of the decision to the company, which is expected within the next two months,” it said.
“Almaden intends to review the final decision when it is available and interact with Mexican government officials and local community officials in order to fully understand the impact of this decision on the company’s mineral claims prior to determining its next step.”
Itzel Silva, a lawyer with the Fundar Center for Analysis and Research who represented the Tecoltemi residents, said that the SCJN had missed a historic opportunity to deem the mining law unconstitutional.
“What the law does … is make the delivery of land to [mining] companies possible. It’s the origin of the violations,” she said.
Nevertheless, its revocation of the concessions sets a “precedent that consolidates … the right to consultation … and it has constitutional standing,” said National Autonomous University legal academic Rodrigo Gutiérrez.
“Fifteen years ago, courts didn’t even recognize the rights of indigenous people nor that Convention 169 was part of the constitution,” he said.
Security footage and cell phone videos showed masked assailants with high caliber weapons entering Caborca. Screenshots
Four people have been reported murdered and at least five others were abducted during a criminal group’s incursion into Caborca, Sonora, on Tuesday night.
An armed wing of the Sinaloa Cartel is believed responsible for the violence, reported the news website Infobae, although authorities have not publicly identified the perpetrators.
Citing local media, the newspaper El Universal reported that four people were killed and at least nine people were kidnapped in the city of Caborca, located 150 kilometers south of the border crossing between Sonoyta and Lukeville, Arizona.
However, the Sonora Attorney General’s Office (FGJE) said on Twitter Thursday morning that only five abductions were reported and two of the victims had been released.
“Sebastián Manríquez Verdugo, son of the announcer and journalist of the same name, was found safe and sound in Caborca. The 23-year-old man was reported as a victim of kidnapping after violent events in this city,” the FGJE said.
“Five reports of kidnapping were received in total; two have been released, the search for three people, all men, is continuing,” it said.
In a statement posted to the Caborca municipal government website on Wednesday, Mayor Abraham Mier Nogales acknowledged that lives had been lost and young men had been abducted in the early hours of Wednesday morning but didn't reveal the number of victims.
“We know that among these [victims] are good people who have nothing to do with organized crime,” he said.
“I acknowledge that the events ... in the early hours of the morning exceeded the level of response of police authorities, given that we weren't capable of preventing these regrettable events,” Mier said. “... I'm in direct contact with state and federal authorities to implement mechanisms that will allow us to recover peace in our municipality.”
The army, the National Guard, state police and municipal police collaborated on an operation Wednesday and made three arrests. Weapons and vehicles were also seized, El Universal reported.
The mayor said in an interview that the violence began at approximately 11:00 p.m. Tuesday when an “outside group” entered the municipality, home to about 90,000 people.
“We had five or six months of peace and now this group has come in,” Mier said, explaining that he didn't know who they were targeting.
The violence came after a spate of armed confrontations in Caborca and the neighboring municipalities of Pitiquito and Altar in early September.
According to Infobae, alleged Sinaloa Cartel gunmen entered Caborca in 19 pickup trucks on Tuesday night and proceeded to break into and shoot up homes. The attacks lasted more than six hours, affecting at least 40 neighborhoods and sowing terror among residents.
In a video posted online that showed a lifeless man lying on the ground, a clearly distressed woman said she witnessed a shootout at close quarters and was physically assaulted.
“They kicked down the doors, they broke into my cousin's car, they shoved us, they broke all the windows of the apartments,” she said.
Another woman made a plea for the return of her husband. “To the people who took my husband last night, please, I ask you, I beg you, to hand him over to me. He's innocent, he's a working person, a construction worker and I work in the hospital,” she said, adding that their daughter is sick.
In light of the violence and fearing further attacks, Mier ordered businesses to shut by 10:00 p.m. Wednesday and suspended all sporting events. However, there were no reports of additional violence on Wednesday night.
On a per capita basis, Caborca was the 21st most violent municipality in Mexico last year with a total of 102 homicides, according to data compiled by crime monitoring website elcri.men. Sonora was the country's seventh most violent state for total murders with over 1,900.
The Kol restaurant team celebrates the Michelin win.
Years of hard work paid off for Mexican chef Santiago Lastra after his new restaurant in London, England, received its first Michelin star on Wednesday.
The restaurant, called Kol, is located in the heart of London and markets itself with the tagline, “Mexican soul, British ingredients,” which, according to the Michelin guide review, “proves a unique and exhilarating combination.” The guide also lauds the talent and creativity of the kitchen team, which uses high-quality British ingredients and Mexican techniques for dishes such as stream trout tostadas and family-style octopus.
Lastra started his career in a Cuernavaca Italian restaurant before moving to Europe at age 18 to work in high-end restaurants, including the Denmark restaurant Noma, which has been named best restaurant in the world multiple times.
Kol was originally scheduled to open in early 2020, but the start of the pandemic threw a wrench in the plan. The restaurant eventually opened at the end of 2020, but had to temporarily close several times due to Britain’s strict pandemic health protocols.
After Kol received the prestigious Michelin star, Lastra shared the news on Instagram, crediting his team and homeland for the recognition.
“I cannot express with words how proud I am of our team! This is for you,” he said. “This is also for my country, Mexico, that deserves to be a bit more recognized, and I hope this can help to shine a light on the indigenous people, traditional cooks, and family that are my constant inspiration.”
Pich, Campeche, Mayor Manuel Jesús Castillo Tec on his inauguration day in October with Campeche city Mayor Biby Rabelo. Biby Rabelo Facebook
When the Black Pox hit the Yucatán Peninsula at the dawn of the 20th century, entire communities were all but obliterated. One exception was Pich, a small Mayan town in the heart of Campeche where the inhabitants found themselves bereft of neighboring communities but with almost all of its population still intact.
This is a story that they tell their children here today: how they come from a lineage of survivors and how they are survivors too.
On a brisk winter morning (by southern Mexican standards), Manuel Jesús Castillo Tec pulls up on an Italika FT125 scooter in an undone olive guayabera shirt over a white vest. He is the mayor of Pich’s community of stalwarts, and his open shirt speaks to his affable and easygoing demeanor, though his thick-rimmed glasses suggest an underlying reflectiveness that must surely have aided him in his time as the town’s commissioner before he took office as Pich’s mayor in October.
“I know everybody here,” he says of the town’s 3,000 inhabitants, “and I know their parents, their grandparents. We have always existed as a unit of people who survive together, so we hand down our tales and our traditions. I’ve been lucky enough that all of this has added up to trust in me as mayor.”
Indeed, as he rides at low speed around the town, pointing out various landmarks and curiosities, he frequently stops to speak to other residents and his hat seems to bob incessantly as he acknowledges the people he passes. The vibe emanating from Castillo Tec is all over Pich: there is something ineffable in the colors of the buildings that seems to inspire good feeling, and when he pulls up outside the gates to the town’s aguada, it seems like a scene from a tranquil postcard.
The town’s aguada waterway is a remnant of the town’s old pre-Hispanic water management techniques.
The aguada, he explains, is a remnant of the old Mayan pre-Hispanic water management techniques that run underneath the town. Today, schoolchildren with clipboards buzz around a large tree.
“It is wonderful to see the children outside learning about the aguada,” Castillo Tec says, “because as well as teaching them their ancestry, it fosters a sense of stewardship for their local environs, which seems to be [becoming] lost. We watch children flee to bigger cities — Campeche, for example — in search of opportunities, when the reality is that we have them right here; we just need to show people.”
Castillo Tec is positive about the future of the town. He is looking to build on his experience as the previous administration’s commissioner by putting the town back on the map.
Towns all over Mexico are embracing the past in order to look to the future, but under Castillo Tec’s guidance, it is very likely that the obscure Maya community of Pich will rediscover its place in the modern world within a few short years.
He is leaning on the help of a local historian — Pich’s promoter of culture — José María Cabrera Contreras. Cabrera is helping to curate the history of Pich; his encyclopedic knowledge of the monuments in the town begins to spill out the instant he sets foot inside the town’s centerpiece: La Iglesia de Las Tres Cruces, or The Church of the Three Crosses.
Cabrera explains that the church is a former 18th-century Franciscan convent — itself constructed on the site of an old pre-Hispanic building. The National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) restored it in the late 20th century.
The Church of the Three Crosses was one of 27 Franciscan convents in the Yucatán Peninsula.
The church is built in the same style as the majority found in this region: a large, monochrome building in bright red that dominates the central square, boasting lofty ceilings and a larger-than-life-size statue of Christ looking penitently at the floor across from the main entrance.
“This place has fulfilled, at more than one point, the role of integrating a number of different identities into the mesh that we call pichuleño,” Cabrera explains, using the word by which people from Pich refer to themselves.
Beneath the statue of Christ, Cabrera points to three green crosses on the altar: “a symbol of our identity,” he states matter of factly.
The crosses, he explains, represent the Caste War (1847–1901), a rebellion of the indigenous inhabitants of the southern and eastern parts of the Yucatán Peninsula against the wealthy non-indigenous Mexicans. It’s another patch in the quilted fabric of Pich’s history that left thousands dead on the peninsula.
The Maya groups who worked in Campeche’s henequén agave haciendas used the crosses as a banner to protest the imposition of Christian religious beliefs.
“Now,” Cabrera muses, “the crosses represent what gives Pich its character: the population is a mix of Mayan men and women who cohabit with settlers from the central and northern regions of the country and Guatemalan refugees.”
Local historian and promoter of Pich’s culture José María Cabrera.
Castillo Tec and Cabrera are using the spaces and identities that already exist in Pich to showcase what gives the town its incommunicable sense of beguilement. Both men are hoping that the qualities which have historically contributed to the obscuration of the vivid histories of rural Mexican towns such as Pich will be the very things that present unique opportunities for change.
Shannon Collins is an environment correspondent at Ninth Wave Global, an environmental organization and think tank. She writes from Campeche.
The Veracruz carnival will be delayed but will return as an in-person event this year, its chief organizer confirmed on Wednesday.
José Antonio Pérez Fraga said the festival, which normally takes place before Lent at the end of February in Veracruz city, would be rescheduled for July 1-5.
The organizing committee decided to move the dates due to a high incidence of COVID-19 cases in the city.
Pérez said this year’s event would be worth the wait. “The idea is to rescue the ancient traditions of the state which highlight the beauty of our ancient Veracruz. We seek to rescue all our pride and tradition organizing a very traditional carnival … one of the best carnivals in history,” he said.
The carnival was held online in 2021 due to the pandemic, its first cancellation in 96 years. The authorities estimated a loss of 250-300 million pesos (US $12.3-14.8 million) in earnings as a result.
The roots of Veracruz carnival extend back to colonial times and it was first held in 1866, according to the site Carnivaland.
Meanwhile, Mazatlán’s annual carnival is likely to go ahead at the end of February even if Sinaloa remains yellow on the coronavirus stoplight map. A decision is to be made Friday.
