Demand for COVID-19 tests has increased in numerous states as the number of active cases across the country continues to climb rapidly.
The newspaper Reforma reported Tuesday that people have flocked to testing centers in Sonora, Nuevo León, Guanajuato, Baja California, Chihuahua, Zacatecas, Tabasco, Coahuila, Yucatán, Aguascalientes, Quintana Roo, Querétaro, Jalisco, Veracruz and Mexico City.
The increased demand for testing came as the Health Ministry reported the highest number of daily cases since September 8 on Tuesday. An additional 15,184 infections were reported, lifting Mexico’s accumulated case tally above 4 million.
There are an estimated 61,477 active cases across Mexico, an increase of 170% compared to a week ago. The official COVID-19 death toll increased by 130 on Tuesday to 299,711.
Several experts warned that case numbers would spike this month due to increased mobility and large gatherings over the Christmas-New Year period. Unsurprisingly, demand for testing services has also risen.
Long lines were reported at testing centers in many cities including Aguascalientes, Monterrey, Guadalajara, Veracruz and Mexico City. Demand for testing has increased not only at government run-vaccination centers but also at pharmacies and private health care facilities.
Patricia Mejía Morales, a Mexico City resident, queued for 1 1/2 hours at a rapid testing station in the capital on Tuesday but didn’t reach the front of the line. She and many other people decided to leave the lineups without finding out whether they had COVID or not, Reforma reported.
Alejandra González, who went to a testing station at the Forum Buenavista shopping center with her two daughters, was unable to access testing after waiting for over an hour. She and her daughters were ill, and one of the girls had an oxygen saturation level below 85%, Reforma said.
González said they had attempted to get tested at other locations in the capital but had no luck. She said she couldn’t afford to pay for tests at a private clinic.
In light of the increased demand for testing, the Mexico City Health Ministry said that additional rapid tests will be sent to testing stations.
Mexico City currently has more than 16,500 active cases, more than any other state. However, on a per capita basis, Baja California Sur remains the country’s coronavirus epicenter with almost 600 current infections per 100,000 people.
Mexico City ranks second with almost 200 active cases per 100,000 people followed by Quintana Roo, where there are about 170.
No other state has more than 100, but the situation could change quickly as the highly contagious omicron strain continues to spread.
Ambassador Sammy Hagar of Montrose and Van Halen fame.
American musician and entrepreneur Sammy Hagar is set to be named a tourism ambassador for Los Cabos, Baja California Sur, on Wednesday.
Known by fans as the Red Rocker, the 74-year-old singer came to prominence in the 1980s with the solo hits I Can’t Drive 55 and Give to Live before he joined the rock group Van Halen.
Hagar owns the nightclub and restaurant Cabo Wabo Cantina in Cabo San Lucas and is part owner of the Cabo Wabo Tequila brand, having sold 80% of the company for US $80 million in 2007.
He will be appointed in a small ceremony in Antonio Mijares square in San José del Cabo on Wednesday at around 12 p.m. Governor Víctor Manuel Castro Cosio and Mayor Óscar Leggs Castro will both be in attendance.
The Red Rocker wrote on Instagram to reveal the news and to say how he planned to celebrate. “What a way to ring in the New Year! Got news that I’m being honored as ambassador of tourism for Los Cabos, something I’ve been waiting for since 1981! Such an honor for my home away from home … we’re gonna throw a concert at the Cabo Wabo, first come first serve, old style!”
People flood Playa del Carmen's streets and night clubs over New Year's Eve weekend.
Despite the continuation of the coronavirus pandemic, visitor numbers to Quintana Roo approached 2019 levels last year.
Quintana Roo Tourism Minister Andrés Aguilar told a press conference that 12.5 million tourists visited the Caribbean coast state in 2021, a figure equivalent to 84% of the 15 million visitors in 2019.
About 57% of the visitors — 7.1 million people — were international tourists.
Last year’s total visitor numbers well and truly exceeded those of 2020, when just 8 million people traveled here.
Aguilar said that the state — home to popular destinations such as Cancún, Playa del Carmen and Tulum — is recovering quickly from the pandemic-induced tourism downturn and predicted that visitor numbers will exceed 15 million in 2022.
There are 116 air routes into Quintana Roo, the tourism minister said, adding that there are direct flights to Cancún from 48 cities in the United States, 13 in South America, 13 in Europe, eight in Canada and 20 in other Mexican states.
Other domestic and international flights arrive in Chetumal, the state capital, and Cozumel, an island off the coast of Playa del Carmen.
Aguilar also said there were 116,820 hotel rooms in Quintana Roo at the end of October, an increase of over 1,800 compared to the start of 2021. Some 200 hotels with approximately 17,000 rooms have been built in the state over the past three years.
A proposal to incorporate the National Institute of Indigenous Languages (INALI) into the National Institute of Indigenous Peoples (INPI) shows that protecting native tongues is not a priority for the federal government, according to Mexico’s representative to the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues (UNPFII).
The office of President López Obrador is proposing that the INALI, which was established in 2005, become part of the INPI, which was created by the current government in 2018 but continues the work of the now-defunct National Commission for the Development of Indigenous Peoples.
Irma Pineda, a Zapotec poet from Oaxaca who began her term as a representative to the UNPFII at the start of 2020, told the newspaper Milenio that the proposal would have an adverse effect on the former institute and goes against Mexico’s support for indigenous languages via the United Nations, which declared the period between 2022 and 2032 as the International Decade of Indigenous Languages.
“[INALI] would have less ability to design and establish linguistic policies at the national level,” she said.
“All this is regrettable, … [the proposal sends] a very bad message to indigenous people because it says that indigenous languages don’t matter much or they’re not a priority or that languages will be allowed to disappear,” Pineda said.
INALI and INPI’s heads signed a 2020 agreement to cooperate on projects, but current INALI director Fernando Nava opposes the agency losing its autonomy. INPI
She noted that López Obrador participated in an indigenous cleansing ceremony on the day of his inauguration as president but his administration is now sending “very contradictory” messages with regard to its support for the nation’s indigenous people.
Pineda asserted that the INALI would face additional budget cuts as well as staffing cuts if it is absorbed into the INPI. She also claimed that the policy areas over which it has influence will be reduced.
Fernando Nava, the director and founder of the INALI, also opposes the plan to make the institute part of the INPI.
“In Mexico, we took a long time to give a special place to indigenous languages, and in less than 20 years, the institute is losing its autonomy,” he said.
The government’s proposal is indicative of a “sociopolitical disinterest” in indigenous languages, Nava said.
“At the beginning of the decade, attention to and the budget of the institutional space dedicated to languages was reduced,” he said.
Practices such as Castilianization, which aim to convert speakers of an indigenous language to Spanish speakers, continue to exist in the state of Chiapas and exacerbate the risk of native languages disappearing, researchers from Western Kentucky University said last year after commissioning a survey in Mexico that included questions related to indigenous issues.
The former leader of the Los Zetas cartel in Oaxaca has been sentenced to 91 years in prison for the 2011 kidnapping and murder of the wife of a soldier.
Marco Carmona Hernández, also known by the moniker “El Cabrito,” ordered the assasination of Yahaira Guadalupe Bahena López, who was married to a member of the army’s special forces. Carmona was also sanctioned for wider activities in organized crime.
On April 13, 2011 a commando broke into Bahena’s home in Tlacolula, Oaxaca, 32 kilometers southeast of Oaxaca city, after confusing her for a member of a rival cartel. She was kidnapped and decapitated.
The case came to national prominence after Bahena’s mother, Margarita López, decided to investigate the crime herself. The investigation led her to Perote prison in Veracruz where Carmona was an inmate.
Carmona admitted to López that he’d ordered the murder in the belief that Bahena and her husband were members of the La Familia Michoacana cartel.
The victim’s mother launched her own investigation of the crime.
Another Zetas member, Encarnación Martínez Colorado, was sentenced to 20 years in prison in late December for the murder.
Martínez was also interviewed at Perote prison at the time of the investigation, and admitted that he and another cartel member sexually abused and decapitated Bahena, despite already knowing that she wasn’t part of the rival cartel.
Women in Ocotequila who say they were denied a vote in a municipal election on Sunday.
Mexican women were given the right to vote in 1953, but one town in Guerrero appears stuck in 1952.
Women in Ocotequila, a community in the municipality of Copanatoyac, were not permitted to cast a ballot in a municipal election last Sunday.
A vote to elect a new comisario (commissioner) — a municipal official with a range of legal and other responsibilities — was held, but at least nine women were told they couldn’t participate, the newspaper Reforma reported.
Municipal officials informed them they couldn’t vote because the indigenous governing code known as usos y costumbres precluded the participation of women. Copanatoyac is part of Guerrero’s Montaña region, where most residents are indigenous.
“They told us that only men can vote,” said Antonia Ramírez Marcelino, an Ocotequila resident and councilor with a local committee of the National Electoral Institute who has spoken up previously for the right of women to vote in her community.
A video Ramírez recorded on Facebook on March 8 about the problem of women being denied the vote in Ocotequila, Guerrero.
She said women were wrongfully denied their right to cast a ballot, noting that the municipal government had not explicitly specified that they were not allowed to vote. Ramírez also said that Ocotequila women have not been allowed to vote in previous comisario elections.
On International Women’s Day last March she recorded a video decrying the fact that women in Ocotequila are not allowed to vote nor stand for local positions like comisario.
“They rejected us because we’re women,” said another would-be voter. “I think the men should respect us because they come from a woman, not some animal,” she said.
The women denied the opportunity to vote submitted a document complaining about their disenfranchisement. They also told officials that women have a constitutional right to participate in elections, but their protest was to no avail.
Migrants continue to support relatives back home. David A Litman / Shutterstock.com
Remittance payments topped US $4.6 billion in November, representing annual growth of 37.7%, down slightly on the October total of more than $4.8 billion, reported the Bank of México.
The value of remittances for January through November was $46.83 billion, up from $36.954 billion over the same period in 2020: an annual increase of 26.7%.
The 12-month total, from December 2020 through November, topped the $50 billion mark.
The average remittance payment was up in November compared to October, rising from $384 to $401. Fewer payments were made in November.
President López Obrador said at his morning news conference on Monday that the total for 2021 would be above $50 billion when the figures are added for December. “There’s another record that is going to be announced soon. We are going to reach $50 billion of remittances in 2021, like never before. That’s why our economy is in recovery and is growing,” he said.
Remittance experts Jesús Cervantes, Denisse Jiménez and Cindy Sánchez said in a report that higher salaries and the recovery in employment in the United States had contributed to the high levels of remittances in 2021.
Manure from poultry farms is attracting hordes of flies.
A composting plant in San Luis Potosí has created a plague of flies for villages within its 30-kilometer radius.
To create organic compost, chicken manure is left outside for exposure to the air and sun, but the process has attracted flies in the semi-arid San Luis Potosí desert, where egg producer Proan installed three poultry farms in the towns of Vanegas and Catorce, about 250 kilometers north of San Luis Potosí city.
Proan sells the manure of millions of hens to the company Nuevas Tecnologías Agropecuarias (NTA), which gathers some 200 tonnes from the farms every day, and spreads the manure on a 20-hectare surface a few kilometers away to transform it into compost for sustainable farming. Local people said that one farm alone has some 6 million hens and 25,000 pigs.
NTA produces 80 tonnes of compost a day, which goes to farmers in Michoacán, México state, Querétaro, Hidalgo and San Luis Potosí. The compost is significantly cheaper than its competing alternatives.
Rancher Agustín Villanueva said the flies were making life miserable. “Instead of eating food, you are eating flies … you go out and you are batting away so many insects. Not to mention the smell,” he said.
Villanueva’s daughter, Elpidia, said the affliction was affecting humans and animals alike. “It has been very ugly, very sad because there are many insects and it has been like three years that we have had the flies, battling and fighting them. It affects the animals … they are bitten, and they bleed where they are bitten,” she said.
Local people are using a diluted toxic powder as a spray to deter the flies, but that is causing nausea, vomiting and headaches.
However, one resident, who remained anonymous, said local people were not enemies of the companies involved. “We are not against the production, what we ask for is that they properly handle all the excrement,” he said.
NTA’s legal representative, René López Ruelas, said the company took responsibility. “It is clear to us that the people come first. That’s why we are here to offer an apology, and if it is necessary to leave, we will leave, but we have the municipal license that was granted to us, we have the lease,” he said.
He added that the lower price of its product was good for the market. “We are receiving about 200 tonnes of manure a day. We need the organic fertilizer … because chemical fertilizers, in addition to degrading the soils, … are too expensive.”
Proan promised to fumigate the affected communities and to improve its composting process. If they do not reach an agreement with those affected, they will abandon the project, the newspaper Milenio reported.
The equinox effect of the sun on Dzibilchaltún's Temple of the Seven Dolls. Government of Yucatán
Conveniently located around 15 kilometers north of Mérida, the ruins of Dzibilchaltún are thought to be one of the earliest Maya settlements and a popular destination during the spring and autumn equinoxes, when visitors can observe the sunrise’s beautiful effects on one of its temples.
Dzibilchaltún is Mayan for “place where there is writing on the flat stones.” It is thought to be related to the many stelae — stone slabs with inscriptions or reliefs — found on the site.
The first occupation of Dzibilchaltún probably dates as far back as 600–300 B.C., and it was occupied for around 2,000 years until the Spanish arrived in the 16th century. Dzibilchaltún had extended to around 19 square kilometers, and its peak population is speculated to have reached as high as 40,000 people.
According to the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH), the city took regional control of the northwestern Yucatán Peninsula toward the conclusion of the Classic period (around A.D. 200–900) from the previously dominant city, Komchén, which is located to the northwest of Dzibilchaltún. Situated close to the coast, the city’s economic activities, in addition to agriculture, had included salt production and manufacturing products using objects derived from the sea.
You can explore the ruins within a few hours at most, but prepare for some walking.
The Temple of the Seven Dolls is named after an offering of seven ceramic dolls discovered there.
The entrance to the site is from the north. Onsite, near the entrance, is the Museum of the Mayan People, whose mission is to share a general idea of Mayan culture throughout history. Unfortunately, the indoor area of the museum was closed during our recent visit. However, visitors can still enjoy the beautiful outdoor display area of stone sculptures from the Yucatán Peninsula, including zoo-anthropomorphic figures — a mix of animal and human shapes such as animal heads over human bodies.
Twelve white raised roads built by the ancient Maya are identified on the site. East of the site, at the end of a notable white road, is the famous Temple of the Seven Dolls, named after an offering of seven ceramic dolls, identified as human figures, that were discovered there. It is also called the Temple of the Sun.
According to INAH, this temple is almost aligned with the four cardinal points. It is thought to have had an astronomical function. At one time, a larger building existed over this temple, and you can see its remains.
Built on a quadrangular base with stairways and doorways on all four sides, the Temple of the Seven Dolls has two windows each on the east and west facades. There is an interesting structure on the temple’s roof that looks like a small tower. The temple’s frieze has masks believed to be of the Maya rain god Chaac, and it had also been decorated with stucco elements, including animal figures. Unfortunately, accessing this temple is not allowed.
During the solar equinox days in March and September, visitors can observe the effects of the sunrise on the west facade of the Temple of the Seven Dolls. The rising sun is seen through the temple’s eastern and western doors, and the sun centers itself in the doors briefly while producing a spectacular display of sunlight and shadows. On the equinox days, the archaeological site usually opens well ahead of sunrise.
In ancient times, the spring equinox marked the start of planting, while the autumn equinox marked the start of harvesting.
The Xlacah cenote, west of Dzibilchaltún’s central plaza. INAH
West of the temple along the white road that goes to the central plaza is a stela built on a quadrangular platform with stairs on each side. It is speculated that this stela once had stucco decorations.
En route to the plaza on the white road, remember to look for an interesting section to the south with three stelae, each built on a platform.
Next to the stelae section is the central plaza’s large square. Make time to explore this plaza, whose floor had been previously covered with stucco. Visitors can imagine how magnificent this square once was. Northeast of the plaza is a pyramid structure believed to have had a ceremonial purpose. It has a wide stairway in front; a temple that no longer exists was once on top of the pyramid.
Parts of broken stelae were discovered at the pyramid’s base, including the impressive Stela 19 that is displayed at the site museum. According to INAH, Stela 19 depicts the ruler K’alom ‘Uk’Uw Chan Chak, and its glyphs include the name of the site — Ch’iy Chan Ti’Ho’ — which is considered the site’s original name.
East of the plaza is a building identified as an elite residence. It has a long platform with room structures on top. The important tomb of K’alom ‘Uk’Uw Chan Chak depicted on Stela 19 was discovered here.
But a must-see in the central plaza is the magnificent Structure 44, located to the south. Measuring around 130 meters in length, it has a stairway that appears to run the length of the building. A purpose of Structure 44 is thought to be administrative.
The top of Structure 44, which features a stairway that appears to run the length of the building.
Toward the center of the plaza is the Open Chapel, built by the Spanish in the 16th century. Its features include a semicircular arch and an altar. The building also includes a room-like structure to the north, identified as the house of the friars, who taught the Christian religion to the Mayans of Dzibilchaltún, who were considered pagans.
West of the plaza is a beautiful cenote with clear water, which was a water source for the site. Despite a shallow area, it also has a point reaching around 44 meters in depth. Its name, Xlacah, is Mayan for “old town.”
Many objects were discovered from this cenote, including pieces of vessels and human bones. According to INAH, ancient Mayas believed cenotes were entrances to the underworld, and therefore objects used in self-sacrifice rituals were discovered here.
Swimming in this cenote was permitted during our previous visit, but it has since unfortunately been cordoned off to visitors after the pandemic.
A white road goes west from the central plaza to an interesting temple called the Standing Temple. Unfortunately, this section was overgrown and not accessible. The site also has a ball court toward the south, but the path to that area was cordoned off.
North of the plaza is another square with a few buildings that are worth seeing. The most notable structure here is a beautiful single-room temple.
This pyramid, to the northeast of the central plaza, is thought to have had a ceremonial purpose.
There are other structures to explore on the site, and many buildings of Dzibilchaltún are yet to be excavated. If you have spare time after exploring this site, visit the Maya site of Xcambó, around an hour’s drive away.
Thilini Wijesinhe, a financial professional turned writer and entrepreneur, moved to Mexico in 2019 from Australia. She writes from Mérida, Yucatán. Her website can be found at https://momentsing.com/
Mexico is one of 26 countries where English proficiency was found to be very low. Among the others are Afghanistan, Cambodia, Sudan, Haiti and Yemen, which ranked last.
Mexico’s ranking dropped 10 places compared to its position on the 2020 EPI, which included 100 countries and regions.
The rankings are based on the results of Education First English language tests taken by more than 2 million adults across the 112 territories.
Although it neighbors two countries where English is the dominant and/or official language – the United States and Belize –Mexico has the second lowest ranking in Latin America after Haiti.
The states where English proficiency is highest are Jalisco, Querétaro, Baja California Sur and Nuevo León. Residents of Guadalajara, Mexico’s second largest city, generally have a better knowledge of English than people who live in Mexico City, Education First found.
The Netherlands ranked first on the EPI followed by Austria, Denmark, Singapore, Norway, Belgium, Portugal, Sweden, Finland and Croatia. In 30th place, the highest ranking Latin American country is Argentina, where English proficiency is described as high.
Education First, an international company that specializes in language training, said in its EPI report that almost all countries in Latin America have improved their adult English proficiency over the past decade, but in Mexico it has consistently declined.
According to The World Factbook, a reference resource produced by the CIA, over 90% of Mexicans only speak Spanish competently.
A Mexico-based Education First marketing director told the news website Expansión that Mexican students need “true immersion” in English in order to improve their proficiency.
Students cannot become bilingual through dedicated English classes alone, said Tannia Domenzain, who advocated curriculum-wide learning in English.
She also said that participating in conversation clubs, reading in English, watching movies in English and studying can help people improve their English language skills.
