Formal jobs registered with IMSS increased 4.3% in 2021.
The total number of formal sector jobs in Mexico rose by 846,416 in 2021, the biggest increase on record, the Mexican Social Security Institute (IMSS) reported Wednesday.
There were 20.62 million formal jobs at the end of December, a 4.3% annual increase. The figure is slightly higher than the number of formal jobs before the beginning of the pandemic, IMSS said in a statement.
About 1.2 million formal jobs were lost between March and July 2020 due to the pandemic and associated restrictions, but there was a net gain of about 270,000 positions in the final five months of that year.
The institute said the sectors with the biggest increases in terms of the number of people they employ were transport and communications, up 11%; mining, up 8.1%; and construction, up 7%.
The number of people in formal positions increased by more than 12% in each of Tabasco, Quintana Roo and Baja California Sur, making those states the national leaders for job creation.
IMSS also reported that the average base salary in the formal sector rose 7.5% annually to 438.6 pesos (US $21) per day at the end of last year. It was the second highest end-of-year increase in the past decade, it said.
The number of employers registered with IMSS increased 5.3% last year to 1.05 million, meaning that they employ about 20 people each on average. Tens of millions of Mexicans work in the country’s vast informal economy, which was also hit hard by the pandemic.
While it doesn’t give a complete picture of the employment situation in Mexico, the IMSS data does provide additional evidence that the economy recovered strongly last year after recording its biggest contraction in 90 years in 2020.
"Some of them are real," said young spectator Marlen Popoca Fernández of the punches thrown in the ring. Photos by Joseph Sorrentino
As the sun set in the late afternoon, people started filing into the churchyard in San Pedro Yancuitlalpan, Puebla, sitting on folding chairs that had been placed around a small platform. But they weren’t there to attend a Mass. They were there to attend one of Mexico’s more spectacular sporting events: lucha libre.
Lucha libre literally means “free fight” but is typically translated as “freestyle wrestling” and has been around since 1863. Enrique Ugartechea is credited with inventing it in that year, basing it on Greco-Roman wrestling.
Although popular from its very beginning, it was mainly a regional event until 1933 when the Empresa Mexicana de Lucha Libre (The Mexican Lucha Libre Enterprise) was formed and the sport began gaining national attention. Then, in 1942, a luchador (wrestler) known only as El Santo (The Saint) donned what has become the most recognizable symbol of lucha libre: a mask, giving the participants an air of mystery that continues to this day.
In his wake, almost all luchadores now wear masks, and some never appear in public without theirs.
“Lucha libre is about tradition and family,” explained Rob Sheen, the event’s announcer. “It is an amazing show.” Sheen has worked as an announcer for eight years. “I am the third generation in my family dedicated to lucha libre,” he continued.
Even in the ring, fighters mug for photos and take moments to engage with the audience.
His father and grandfather were both luchadores. “I like it first for tradition, second for conviction and third for its passion,” he said. “It is a contact sport — totally.”
Although passionate about the sport, he’s never been a luchador. “I am dedicated to announcing,” he said. “It is safer.”
But his 14-year-old daughter, Estefanía Nobali Meléndez Rojos, who was sitting nearby, plans on following in her grandfather’s footsteps.
“I love lucha libre,” she said. “My grandfather taught me the moves.” She said she’ll start training when she’s 15.
Her grandfather also influenced Sheen’s older daughter, who has been training for seven years to become a luchadora. When Meléndez was told that this seemed like a long time, she replied, “You never stop training when you are in the life of the lucha.”
Shortly before the match began, eight luchadores arrived with small bags and backpacks, changing into their costumes and masks inside a small trailer. Then, as Sheen announced the beginning of the first match, four luchadores filed out.
One of lucha libre’s signature wrestling moves: the helicóptero.
The matches featured teams with two luchadores each, one team serving as the técnicos, the other as the rudos. The individual fighters or teams of fighters generally play one of the two roles: the técnicos are the good guys, the rudos, the bad guys.
A match is won when a luchador is pinned to the mat and the referee counts to three or when a competitor is knocked out of the ring for a count of 20, although the referee’s counting speed varied considerably at this event. Until the very end of a match, the luchador always got back into the fight just before the count ended.
As Sheen said, lucha libre is a contact sport — totally.
There are moves with names like plancha (where a luchador jumps from the top rope onto an opponent who’s lying on his back), the centón (a plancha variant in which the luchador lands on his back atop his opponent) and the helicóptero (which involves, as its name suggests, spinning an opponent).
Although the piledriver, where a luchador is slammed head-first onto the ground, is supposed to be illegal because of the risk of serious injury, it’s still used in matches and was used in this event.
Whatever the move, almost all of them ended with a luchador landing — forcefully — on the thin mats that covered wooden slats, something that had to hurt. There were also punches and kicks and heads being slammed into poles or stepped on. But, in fact, virtually all of those attacks were fake.
A luchador takes a seat on an available lap.
No one in the audience seemed to mind.
The crowd, which was somewhat sparse and quiet at first, grew in size and rowdiness as the matches wore on. There were derisive shouts of “¡Cuidado! ¡Cuidado!” (be careful!) when someone was tossed out of the ring; ¡Otra! ¡Otra!” they shouted when an opponent was hit.
There was also lots of (mostly) good-natured trash-talking between luchadores and spectators.
But, as the bottles of tequila being passed around the crowd emptied, the taunting grew in volume. One seriously inebriated man ill-advisedly grabbed a luchador for a moment or two. Fortunately, the luchador reacted calmly — at first.
When the man continued to yell and curse, though, the luchador crooked his finger and said, “Ven” (come).
The challenger wisely beat a hasty retreat.
The agony of defeat.
Luchadores are incredibly dedicated to their sport. Tiger Boy, a member of Fabuloso Técnicos, who has been a luchador for seven years, trained for 10 years before his first match.
“It is a passion for me. It is to be with people,” he said. “I train every day for two to three hours. It is very hard, but I like it.”
Although Tiger Boy is the first member of his family to participate in lucha libre, Cometa Boy Junior, another member of the Fabuloso Técnicos, is one of five family members who are luchadores. “It is the ultimate thing I wanted to be,” he said.
People clearly enjoyed the match and, along with the trash talk, there was lots of laughter. Should you go to a match, don’t sit in the front row. Luchadores tossed out of the ring sometimes land on people sitting there. Other times, they’ll just walk over and sit on an available lap.
Because of the pandemic, precautions have been taken at lucha libre events. “Some luchadores have masks that have been fitted with cubrebocas (medical masks),” Sheen said. “They all use sanitizing gel and all have to be vaccinated. It is a rule.”
The sport is extremely popular in Mexico, and some of the kids at this event said they dreamed of being a luchador. But not everyone thought that was such a great idea.
A child gets an up-close look at a fighter who was tossed out of the ring and landed on a chair.
“It is fun to see how they hit,” admitted Marlen Popoca Fernández, “but I do not want to be a luchadora because there are many punches, and some of them are real. I do not want to be punched.”
A group of Canadian social media influencers and reality TV personalities had their return flight canceled after videos of their party flight from Montreal to Cancún went viral.
In the videos, the influencers can be seen drinking, smoking, dancing and even crowd-surfing, all without face masks, in their December 30 charter flight.
The videos were originally posted by the plane party’s participants, then later deleted. In the posts, the party-goers could be seen passing bottles of alcohol and dancing in the aisles. In response, the charter company, Sunwing, canceled the group’s return flight. Other Canadian airlines have followed suit, refusing to accommodate the group on a return flight.
Sunwing has reported the revelers to Canadian officials, who have opened an investigation. Passengers found to have violated COVID-19 safety regulations could be fined up to CA $5,000 (US $3,900).
Even Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has weighed in on the scandal, saying he was “very frustrated” with the influencers’ behavior, as Canada faces a fifth wave of the deadly virus.
MONTREAL'S WILD FLIGHT PARTY TO CANCUN FULL LENGTH VIDEO WITH AUDIO 2022
“It’s a slap in the face to see people putting themselves, putting their fellow citizens, putting airline workers at risk by being completely irresponsible,” Trudeau told reporters on Wednesday.
But the owner of 111 Private Club, the business that chartered the flight, said the group “respected all instructions given by Sunwing” and seemed surprised by the controversy.
“A simple party on a plane did all this buzz … Give me a moment to understand the situation better,” owner James William Awad wrote on Twitter.
He also released a statement on Thursday saying that all passengers were tested for COVID before flying and thus “the whole group was safe.”
Awad added that Sunwing had offered to fly the group back if they had agreed to a number of rules, including providing negative PCR tests, staying in their seats, and not being sold alcohol or food during the five-hour flight. But he objected to the lack of in-flight meals, and the parties were thus unable to reach an agreement.
Montreal, where the influencers hope to return home, is currently an epicenter of the pandemic in Canada. Canadian authorities announced more than 39,000 new cases in the country on Wednesday, but said the number is an undercount because testing centers have been overwhelmed by demand. Officials have asked people with symptoms not to line up to get tested and Montreal implemented a number of restrictions, including a city-wide curfew.
National Guard members are accused of kidnapping two men from Michoacán in early December.
Two young men remain missing almost a month after they were allegedly abducted by the National Guard (GN) in Michoacán, but the federal government denies that the security force committed a crime.
Footage filmed by a resident of Los Reyes, a municipality that borders Jalisco, shows guardsmen searching three young men whose pickup truck they allegedly stopped on December 8.
The video shows that the young men were subsequently taken away in their vehicle, with one guardsman driving and another traveling in the back of the pickup. One of the men was released hours later, but only after he was tortured, the newspaper El Universal reported.
The whereabouts of the other two men is unknown. The federal government on Wednesday denied that the men had been abducted by the GN, describing reports that asserted otherwise as fake news.
“According to the disseminated version [of events], the National Guard was implicated in a supposed case of the disappearance of two young men in Michoacán. That information turned out to be false,” fake news debunker Ana García Vilchis told President López Obrador’s regular news conference.
She said guardsmen found an abandoned pickup in Los Reyes with weapons, ammunition and tactical equipment in it. The vehicle and its contents were turned over to the federal Attorney General’s Office, García said, adding that no arrests were made.
Eunice Ceja Escalera, sister of one of the missing men, told El Universal in an interview that García’s remarks amount to “a complete lie.”
“You can clearly see in the videos that it was GN members who took them. … What is happening is that they don’t want to take responsibility,” she said.
Ceja confirmed that neither her brother, Gabriel Escalera, nor the other missing man have been found.
“It’s now going on a month [since they disappeared]. The GN first released a statement saying they were going to investigate, that they wouldn’t allow [such conduct] but now they’re saying that they didn’t take them,” she said.
Ceja accused the National Guard and federal government of “playing” with the families of the missing men, adding that their denial that a crime occurred amounted to “a lack of respect toward us.”
Protesters with a sign demanding justice and the return of Gabriel Escalera, who was recorded being taken away by a National Guard vehicle.
Ceja told El Universal that her family had struggled to cope with the disappearance of Gabriel. “We don’t know where he is, we don’t know if he’s still alive. Not knowing is infuriating… and then the government does nothing,” she said.
“They should tell us where my brother is, they should return him to us. … [We want] the government to take responsibility for its actions,” Ceja said. “… It’s not fair that they kidnap people and now they act as if nothing happened,” she said.
Ceja said that she and her family are prepared to do whatever is required to ensure that the National Guard members who abducted her brother are held to account and Gabriel is returned to them.
Two members of the National Guard were taken into custody on kidnapping charges in Oaxaca last year, while a third guardsmen implicated in the crime was shot by state investigative police and subsequently died in hospital.
Vandalized fiber optic cables caused internet service interruptions for Telmex customers throughout the country on Wednesday.
Internet users had problems accessing foreign-hosted websites due to breaks in two fiber optic cables, one in the United States and one in Mexico. The company said that service was re-established within two hours.
The first break occurred in Texas, 18 kilometers from the Mexico-U.S. border. The second was in Sinaloa, between Mazatlán and Culiacán.
The line in Sinaloa was repaired within two hours after the company received numerous complaints. Telmex plans to report the vandalism as an attack on telecommunication channels.
“Telmex activated its contigency plan to immediately attend to the fiber optic cut in Mexico, directing traffic through alternative routes to give users additional options, which re-opened access to international content,” the company said.
The vandalism affected users in Zacatecas, Aguascalientes, Nayarit, Jalisco, Guanajuato, Colima, Michoacán, Querétaro, México state, Puebla, Oaxaca, Veracruz, Tabasco, Chiapas and Mexico City.
Margarita López, the founder of Buscando Cuerpos, in front of a banner commemorating people who have disappeared.
A woman whose daughter was kidnapped and murdered in Oaxaca decided to take on the search for the victim herself. She met the killers in the process, and brought them to justice.
Yahaira Guadalupe Bahena López disappeared on April 13, 2011 in Tlacolula, Oaxaca. Her mother, Margarita López abandoned her business in Michoacán to dedicate herself to finding her daughter and founded Buscando Cuerpos (Searching for Bodies) in the process.
Fear was no obstruction for López. “What are we going to be afraid of if our children have already been taken from us?” she said in an interview in March 2021.
Bahena married a soldier in the army’s special forces when she was 17, and moved from Michoacán to Tlacolula.
Yahaira Guadalupe Bahena disappeared in 2011. Her mother found her remains after a two-year search.
Once there, a state police commander started harassing her. The commander had an argument with Bahena’s husband and then told members of Los Zetas that the young bride was connected to a cartel in Michoacán, and that she planned to bring their recruits to Oaxaca.
Shortly after, Bahenawas kidnapped. Her mother requested help from soldiers but they suggested she should investigate the case alone.
In her new life as an investigator, López paid people for information, disguised herself as an official, wore a concealed camera while visiting brothels with child prostitutes and paid to enter a forensic laboratory to search for her daughter’s remains.
After a long search, she tracked the 30 men who kidnapped Bahena, including Oaxaca officials who provided protection to the Zetas.
She found the former head of the Zetas in Oaxaca, Marco Carmona Hernández, also known by the moniker “El Cabrito,” in Perote prison in Veracruz. He admitted to torturing Bahena and said he was sent the order to kill her, despite knowing that she was innocent.
Bahena was held captive for 10 days without food and was raped daily.
On the day of her murder, Carmona said she would be released. Shortly after, two gang members — one named Encarnación Martínez Colorado — decapitated her.
But López said that wasn’t enough to satisfy the murderers. “They started playing with the head, they gave it kisses on the mouth and they threw it between one another …. I wanted to cry, I wanted to do a thousand things, to take out the eyes of the man who had confessed everything to me, but I had to stay calm,” she said.
Both Carmona and Martínez will spend years in jail but López said there has been no victory.
“Wherever you turn, wherever you go, there are local, state and federal authorities involved with organized crime and the disappearance of people,” she said. “Just in my daughter’s case there is an anti-kidnapping commander and a commander of the ministerial police among those arrested and there are still arrest orders to be completed against federal officials. They supported us with absolutely nothing.”
López found her daughter’s remains after two years, four months and 19 days, but continues to help others search for their disappeared loved ones by looking for clandestine graves.
The Sonoyta, Sonora, campus of the Benito Juárez García Universities for Well-Being opened in July of last year. Presidencia de la República
The 140 “well-being” universities opened by the current federal government have struggled to attract students, but despite their low enrollments their funding will be nearly 1.1 billion pesos — close to US $54 million — in 2022.
President López Obrador signed a decree in 2019 to create new public higher learning institutes across the country.
The institutes, most of which are located in towns where there are no other tertiary education options, are collectively called the Benito Juárez García Universities for Well-Being (UBBJ).
Official UBBJ data cited by the newspaper El Universal shows that 28,087 students were enrolled at the universities in the first quarter of 2021 for an average of just 200 students per school. However, 50 of the universities have fewer than 100 students and some have fewer than 20.
In the latter category are the well-being university in Yuahualica, Hidalgo, which had just 13 students early last year, and that in Las Margaritas, Chiapas, which had 20.
President López Obrador announced the creation of the UBBJ university system in 2019.
The government hoped that student numbers would grow over time, but they have in fact declined. The total enrollment in the first quarter of 2021 was 28.3% lower than that in late 2019. In terms of student numbers, the reduction in just over a year was more than 11,000, although the government’s claim that more than 39,000 students were enrolled in 2019 has been called into doubt.
The government set a goal of reaching an enrollment of 256,000 students by the end of its six-year term in 2024, but appears to have no chance of achieving it.
Despite the decline in student numbers, funding for the schools is trending upwards. They received 987.4 million pesos last year and have a combined budget of almost 1.1 billion pesos this year, an increase of about 10%.
The government will transfer hundreds of millions of additional pesos to UBBJ students, each of whom receives a monthly scholarship of 2,600 pesos (about US $125). A total of 36 programs are taught across the 140 universities, including degrees in law, engineering, medicine and community health, tourism, social studies, forestry, food processes, sustainable development and accounting. However, each university only offers one degree program.
The quality of the education on offer was called into question in a 2020 report published by Mexicans Against Corruption and Impunity (MCCI), a civil society organization. In its report Universities in Limbo, MCCI said that none of the 30 UBBJ it visited in 14 states was able to award degrees to students because they were not certified by the Ministry of Public Education to do so.
Carlos Ornelas, an academic at Mexico City’s Metropolitan Autonomous University who has a doctorate in education from Stanford University, said the 140 universities constitute “a project that emerged from the imagination of the president with the intention of accommodating” poor students who were rejected by other higher learning institutes.
He predicted that enrollments won’t grow because the programs on offer at many of the universities are not attractive to potential students. In an interview with El Universal, Ornelas was also critical of the government’s spending given their low student numbers.
López Obrador’s “eagerness” to provide university places for everyone entails “too high a cost, especially considering there are campuses with 13 or 20 students,” he said.
The academic also said the government hasn’t been fully transparent with regard to enrollments.
“When this opacity ends and we start to see the data we’ll find out how many of those who enroll in these schools [actually] finish a degree,” Ornelas said.
In comparison with other public education institutions, the UBBJ are receiving preferential treatment from the government, he claimed.
“The president doesn’t like people who think,” he asserted. “That’s why there are these attacks against UNAM [the National Autonomous University] and CIDE [the Center for Research and Teaching in Economics]. This is a symptom of wanting to have everyone aligned to a single way of thinking, which is feasible with the well-being universities,” Ornelas said.
Ángel Díaz Barriga, an education expert with a doctorate in pedagogy from UNAM, said that the idea of taking higher education to isolated, marginalized parts of the country is not bad in itself but he, like MCCI, questioned the quality of instruction on offer.
The government’s mistake is focusing on increasing student numbers rather than improving the quality of the education, he said. Díaz asserted that the universities need a “complete overhaul,” as occurred with the nation’s indigenous and intercultural universities, which were given “a solid structure that allows them to function.”
Mario Lagunes, an academic at UNAM’s Social Research Institute, was also critical of the quality of education on offer at the well-being universities. He charged that the government failed to plan properly for their establishment and that the institutes don’t deserve the title of university.
“You can’t build more than 100 universities out of nothing. … You can’t talk about universities when we know that the students occupy spaces in sports centers, commercial premises, houses, vacant lots and community centers,” Lagunes said.
Just across the border from Bagdad on the American side of the Río Grande during the 1800s.
As the American Civil War began in 1861, Mexico was beginning its own battles, as President Benito Juárez began a fight against the French intervention in Mexico. A little-known fact is that the conflicts coalesced on a single spot that doesn’t exist anymore today: the Mexican port of Bagdad, Tamaulipas, located on the Rio Grande, on the United States-Mexico border.
Now vanished as a result of hurricanes, the memorably named port became a boomtown for a brief moment during the Civil War, making it a prize target for both Mexico’s French-backed imperialistas, who wished to restore a monarchy in Mexico, and the forces of the Mexican Republic.
Bagdad achieved prominence because of a loophole in Union policy at the outset of the Civil War. Although President Abraham Lincoln had declared a blockade of southern Confederate ports in order to block the seceded Confederacy’s access to resources, it did not apply to the international waters of the Rio Grande, leaving Bagdad open to trade with the Confederate states. It helped that Juárez’s government had declared neutrality in the Civil War, allowing Confederate states to get their prize cotton crops to international markets.
“Suddenly, there was great interest in the one little square point that would get you around the Union blockade,” said Richard B. McCaslin, the TSHA Professor of Texas History at the University of North Texas.
“It was the only port [where] Lincoln could not block cotton,” said Teresa Van Hoy, a professor of history at St. Mary’s University. “The lifeline of the Confederacy went through the Port of Bagdad.”
Bagdad ceased to exist in the 1880s after several hurricanes. All that remains is Playa Bagdad beach, part of the Matamoros municipality.
Located tantalizingly close to south Texas, Bagdad saw its population increase dramatically. A wide variety of establishments sprang up, including gambling houses and brothels.
Asked about the origins of its name, historians were unsure.
“I don’t know,” Van Hoy said. “It was at the bottom of the river, the mouth of the river. It was not spelled like Baghdad in Iraq, there was no ‘h’.”
“I have no idea,” McCaslin said. “It could be because of the wild nature, the exotic nature, of the place.”
Confederates sent cotton through Texas to Bagdad, where it was loaded onto ships and sent across the world. Meanwhile, supplies arrived in Bagdad for the South, including guns, ammunition, clothing and medicine. Goods were unloaded and brought upriver to Matamoros, then transported across the border to Brownsville, Texas.
“Since Matamoros did not have an outlet to the sea, one was improvised – Bagdad,” said Miguel Ángel González-Quiroga, an affiliated researcher in Mexican history and borderlands studies at the University of Texas at San Antonio. “Many [people] became fabulously rich building their opportunities through Bagdad. It became a really fast boomtown, with maybe 10,000, 15,000, 20,000 people overnight, to take advantage of the Civil War trade.”
The trade there attracted interest not only from the South but also from Mexico and France – and even in the northern U.S., officially at war with the Confederacy.
“Lincoln couldn’t stop New York textile manufacturers from importing cotton,” Van Hoy said. “He dared not upset the flow of cotton supplies … It was a very delicate balancing act. One bale was worth US $10,000.”
“The number one product of the U.S. was cotton from the South,” McCaslin said. “The number one export from Texas was cotton. It was how you made serious money.”
When the French army of Napoleon III invaded Mexico and chased Juárez northward, the Mexican president hung on to Bagdad, where he got crucial financial support.
“[Bagdad] also becomes a lifeline for the Juaristas (partisans of Benito Juárez,” Van Hoy noted. “It’s the only source Juárez has of revenue throughout his resistance [in] Mexico to the French intervention — customs duties. He had no other source of revenue. The French blockaded the major ports — Veracruz and Acapulco.”
Yet, McCaslin said, “I’m not sure [Bagdad] helped Juárez much.”
The infantry of free Black men that fought for the Union forces in the American Civil War. Library of Congress
There was a lot of money for locals, McCaslin said. “How far it got into Mexico, I’m not sure,” he added. “It was so balkanized along the borderlands. To get money to trickle down into central Mexico … I’m not sure. How much Juárez [received], I’m not sure.”
Bagdad found itself in the center of a cross-border controversy, one that made Juárez consider cutting off his Bagdad lifeline.
A Confederate force crossed into Bagdad to capture two Union sympathizers – future Texas governor Edmund Davis and William Montgomery. The pair was brought to Texas, where Montgomery was lynched from a mesquite tree on March 10, 1863.
“This particular atrocity becomes a major international uproar,” Van Hoy said. “Mexico protested the armed invasion, the kidnapping, the lynching. They threatened to close Bagdad to all Confederate exports and imports.”
Although the Confederates mollified Juárez by releasing Edmund Davis, opportunities in Bagdad decreased due to the South’s worsening situation. Union General Ulysses S. Grant’s triumph in the Siege of Vicksburg on July 4, 1863, split the Confederacy in two.
After Vicksburg, supplies from Bagdad could only support Confederate areas west of the Mississippi River. From late 1863 to early 1864, Union forces occupied the Rio Grande and shut off Bagdad entirely to the South before withdrawing for another campaign along Louisiana’s Red River.
In a further complication, the French finally captured Bagdad on Aug. 22, 1864. That spring, France had installed Archduke Maximilian of Austria on the throne of the Second Mexican Empire.
“[The French] established good relations with the Confederates across the river,” Van Hoy said. “Now the imperialistas occupied the south side of the river. The Confederates controlled the north [side].”
McCaslin said that “some of the local [Confederate] commanders … had very good working relationships with [imperialista general] Tomás Mejía and Maximilian’s army.”
In the wider sphere, he said, “The French looked to gain Confederate support. They courted [the South] a little bit … Lincoln made a deal with the French: If you don’t interfere with the Confederacy, if there’s no overt recognition, no negotiating, then I won’t interfere in Mexico.”
After the Civil War, however, Union forces occupied Texas. These forces – including free Black soldiers – ended up pressuring the French to leave Mexico.
“There were a lot of Black troops in Texas,” Van Hoy said. “It was already a tense situation: the Texans are furious with the 33rd Regiment [of Black troops in the Union army]. The last enslaved people to be freed in the U.S. are Texan… It made things very volatile in Bagdad.”
Austrian troops brought in by the imperalist forces fighting for a monarchy in Mexico.
Some of the Black soldiers fought with the Juaristas in their victory over the imperialistas in the Battle of Bagdad on Jan. 4, 1866. However, the imperialistas reoccupied the port 20 days later with the help of 650 Austrian reinforcements. Bagdad fell to the Juaristas for the second and final time in June 1866, when it was surrendered and evacuated by Mejía, who also relinquished Matamoros.
“It was a turning point, the beginning of the end of the empire,” Van Hoy said.
Following the defeats of the Confederacy and the French, Bagdad shrank in importance and was eventually destroyed by hurricanes.
“Bagdad’s history itself is not very long,” Gonzalez-Quiroga said. “It only lasted 30 to 40 years.”
Yet its heyday blazed with intensity.
“Bagdad was a very huge hot spot,” Van Hoy said. “It was probably the hottest spot in all of Mexico, with Matamoros, for a few months.”
Rich Tenorio is a frequent contributor to Mexico News Daily.
Light rail system is under consideration for Campeche city.
The federal government intends to undertake studies to assess the viability of a light rail system in Campeche city.
The Ministry of Infrastructure, Communications and Transportation (SICT) has asked the Finance Ministry (SHCP) for 29.9 million pesos (US $1.45 million) to carry out a range of pre-investment studies as well as a cost-benefit analysis.
A private company with experience in planning and building rail projects would be contracted to provide additional technical advice, the ministry said.
The light rail system would make use of just over 20 kilometers of existing, unused tracks, according to the SICT. The ministry is proposing that the system be established with resources from the National Infrastructure Fund but hasn’t disclosed a projected cost.
In a funding application submitted to the SHCP, the SICT said that vehicular traffic is one of the main problems in the municipality of Campeche, which has a population of about 300,000. The operation of a light rail system would help alleviate that problem, it said.
The SICT is planning to carry out pre-investment studies this year for five other proposed rail projects. Those projects are the Derramadero-Ramos Arizpe suburban train in the metropolitan area of Saltillo, Coahuila; the Colima-Manzanillo regional train; the Monterrey-Saltillo inter-urban train; the Monterrey-Nuevo Laredo inter-urban train; and the Morelia light rail system in Michoacán.
The Nexapa expoforest in Puebla and Hidalgo, one of Mexico's protected areas.
Funding for Mexico’s natural protected areas (ANPs) has declined by more than 50% since 2014, according to a Mexico City think tank.
The Center of Economic and Budget Research (CIEP) said in a report that the National Commission for Natural Protected Areas (Conanp) has suffered budget cuts since 2017, including large double-digit cuts in 2019 and 2020.
Its 2022 allocation of 887 million pesos is 51% lower than what it received in 2014, the think tank said. The amalgamation of Conanp programs is a major reason for the funding decline.
CIEP said that several ecosystem and animal protection programs managed by Conanp in the early years of the 2012-18 government led by former president Enrique Peña Nieto were merged into two larger programs between 2016 and 2018.
The incorporation of the smaller programs into the larger ones resulted in less funding for Conanp, which has responsibility for almost 200 ANPs.
The two large programs – called “Recovery and Repopulation of Species at Risk” and “Management of Natural Protected Areas” – had a combined budget of 664 million pesos (US $32.4 million at today’s exchange rate) in 2018, but they were amalgamated into one program in 2019 and funding was slashed to 183 million pesos, a 72% cut.
Funding for the program – called “Program for the Protection and Restoration of Ecosystems and Priority Species” – was cut again in 2020, when it dipped below 160 million pesos, before recovering to just over 180 million pesos last year.
The program’s 2022 funding is 322 million pesos, a significant increase compared to the past three years, but less than half the amount its two predecessors received in 2018.
CIEP questioned why funding for ANPs has been cut when such areas “provide a variety of ecosystem services that are important for sustainable development.”
Among them: “the supply of raw materials, carbon storage, soil erosion control, pollination and the provision, filtration and regulation of water resources.”
