An image of a Xoloitzcuintle dog from the upcoming immersive virtual reality special-effects show "Inframundo The Experience."
The doors to the Mexica underworld will open this October thanks to a new virtual reality experience in Mexico City. The show, “Inframundo The Experience,” will take place in a geodesic dome set up in the esplanade of the Benito Juárez borough of the city and will run from October 22 to November 7.
The Mexica world of the dead, known as Mictlán, will be recreated with video mapping, sound, lights and virtual reality headsets, immersing the audience in Mexica mythology for the show’s 45-minute duration.
Viewers will descend through the nine levels of the underworld, starting with Itzcuintlan, “the place of dogs,” where a Xoloitzcuintle dog helps the traveler cross the river of death. Next comes Tepectli Monamictlan, “the place of colliding mountains,” where the traveler must cross through a narrow pass between two rocky peaks that open and close, crashing into each other.
To traverse the remaining levels, the audience must walk for miles on sharp rocks, climb icy peaks, withstand the attacks of invisible archers and watch helplessly as their hearts are ripped out by a jaguar, among other challenges.
Finally, on the ninth level of Chicunamictlan, the god of death and the goddess of the Earth await to help the traveler move on and leave worldly suffering behind.
The event is open to children four and up, and tickets cost 295 pesos per person. The show will run Monday through Thursday from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. and Friday through Sunday, 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. Tickets are available on the Inframundo website.
Both President López Obrador and Deputy Health Minister Hugo López-Gatell played down the gravity of the coronavirus.
A leading medical journal has published a damning indictment of Mexico’s response to the coronavirus pandemic, claiming there was a breakdown in the effective functioning of the health system due to the federal government’s deflection of responsibility for “essential decisions that require centralized stewardship.”
Researchers presented a new concept – “punt politics” – in a paper published by The Lancet about what they described as the failure of health system stewardship in Mexico and Brazil during the pandemic.
“Punt politics refers to national leaders in federal systems deferring or deflecting responsibility for health systems decision-making to sub-national entities without evidence or coordination,” the paper said.
“The fragmentation of authority and overlapping functions in federal, decentralized political systems make them more susceptible to coordination problems than centralized, unitary systems. … Punt politics has been the operating principle for COVID-19 in several countries around the world, particularly where federalism coincides with populism.”
The paper notes that the Mexican government declared a national health emergency on March 30, 2020 – a month after the first case was detected – “but punted responsibility to the states to determine what constituted timely action.”
That deflection of responsibility is perhaps best demonstrated by the federal government’s introduction in June 2020 of a stoplight risk alert system, which provides advice about when restrictions should be tightened and eased but ultimately gives states the freedom to decide how to go about combating the spread of the coronavirus.
Before that, on April 21, 2020, the Ministry of Health gave state governments the responsibility to implement the necessary public policies to promote physical distancing and prevent transmission of the virus, the researchers said.
In both Mexico and Brazil, “the absence of national stewardship fostered a fragmented NPI [non-pharmaceutical intervention] response across state and municipal governments, lacking an evidence base,” the paper said.
It acknowledges that some states and municipalities implemented COVID mitigation policies ahead of national governments but others limited themselves to following federal guidelines, “thus reacting slowly and incompletely.”
In Mexico, the federal government never ordered a strict lockdown and didn’t advocate forcefully for the use of face masks, especially early in the pandemic.
Instead, “President López Obrador promoted the benefits of a lucky four-leaf clover that ‘protected’ him from the virus,” The Lancet paper said.
Both President López Obrador and Deputy Health Minister Hugo López-Gatell played down the gravity of the coronavirus.
“He also downplayed the COVID-19 threat in the initial stages of the emergency, encouraging the population to continue their daily activities and interactions, such as going out to eat in restaurants, traveling, and attending rallies into late March of 2020,” it added.
“… Lockdowns were late and partial, and testing, contact tracing, quarantines, and isolation programs have been minimal, while vaccine rollout has been slow,” it said, referring to both Mexico and Brazil, which respectively rank fourth and second in the world for COVID-19 deaths.
The researchers argued that the punt politics approach didn’t work because it wasn’t supported by adequate “real-time testing data that trace the spread of the infection and viral genomic sequencing for identifying the spread of new variants.”
“… Sub-national policymaking must then rely on mortality data which lag by weeks at best. During a pandemic, policymaking that is guided by mortality data is necessarily slow, reactive, and ineffective, compared to policymaking based on wide scale, equitably distributed testing accompanied by accurate diagnosis,” the paper said, noting that in late August Mexico ranked 168th out of 209 countries for its per-capita testing rate.
With regard to the different ways in which states in both Mexico and Brazil responded to the pandemic, the researchers said the political leanings of state governors might explain some of the variation observed, providing evidence of a partisan pandemic.
“In Brazil, allegiance with, or opposition to President Bolsonaro is strongly correlated with state policy decisions, especially at the beginning of the pandemic. Governors on the rhetorical left and center initially implemented more stringent NPIs,” the paper said.
(Ten non-pharmaceutical interventions were considered: information campaigns, international travel limits, travel limits within states, meeting/gathering size limits, public event restrictions, workplace closures, school closures, suspension of local public transport, stay-at-home orders and mask-use mandates.)
“Political alignment with the president explains less of the variation across Mexican states relative to Brazil, suggesting a policy vacuum,” the paper said.
“More stringent responses did not come exclusively from opposition governors. Yet, opposition governors were among the first to act and contrast themselves with the national government, and none of the best performing states’ governors are aligned with López Obrador. For example, centrist and right governors (opposition) were particularly stringent in mask mandates relative to those on the left.”
The paper says that Chiapas – under Morena party Governor Rutilio Escandón, an ally of López Obrador – “stands out as having several low NPI scores throughout the pandemic” – although paradoxically it has the lowest case tally and second lowest death toll among Mexico’s 32 states.
“In Mexico, [information] campaigns were strong and consistent across most states, with a few notable exceptions, such as Chiapas,” the paper said.
“Mask use mandates are consistent and relatively rigorous in many Mexican states, but several states implemented them late. Chiapas never went beyond recommending mask use.”
The federal government introduced its coronavirus stoplight system in June 2020, but left the responsibility for implementing COVID strategies with the states.
The researchers also noted that national responsibility for managing the pandemic in Mexico was not concentrated with the president but rather the office of Deputy Health Minister Hugo López-Gatell.
The paper noted that along with the president, [López-Gatell also downplayed the gravity of the threat and made “not overreacting a guiding principle, creating obstacles for a strong and coordinated national response,” the paper said.
In their conclusion, the researchers – among whom are former Mexican health minister Julio Frenk and his wife Felicia Knaul – asserted that “populist regimes are attracted to punt politics because their objective is political gain, not maximizing health outcomes.”
“A defining characteristic of populist regimes is valuing and prioritizing power as an end goal rather than a means and, in the case of a pandemic, this implies that policy adoption (or lack thereof) will not be based on prioritizing health needs, promoting trust, or eliciting population compliance,” it said.
“… Instead of harnessing and applying evidence and science in a coordinated manner, Mexico and Brazil’s leaders employed punt politics to achieve political gain or avoid the political cost of implementing unpopular policies such as lockdowns. The result is a health system where some components are functioning, while others, like disease surveillance, are not; the lack of coordination leads to a whole that is far less than the sum of its parts.”
Remittances from Mexicans working abroad continued their steady upward trend in August and set a new monthly record, according to the Bank of México.
Total for the month was US $4.74 billion, up 32.7% over August 2020. It lifted the total for the year to $32.9 billion, an increase of 24.8% over the same period last year.
Remittances sent during the 12 months ending August 31 came to $47.1 billion, up from $45.9 billion in the previous 12-month period.
The August figure, up 4.5% over July’s total, was well above the $4.4-billion median estimate by economists in a Bloomberg survey.
The Cerritos-Tula section of Highway 101 in San Luis Potosí. A woman driving on the bridge at the time of the collapse was killed.
The collapse of a bridge in San Luis Potosí left one person dead and at least four injured on Thursday near the state border with Tamaulipas. The accident occurred at kilometer 2 of the Cerritos-Tula section of the super highway 101 around 2 p.m., causing the section of road to be closed.
The same section of highway was closed to traffic on July 9 when cracks appeared in the asphalt after a period of heavy rain, triggering fears that the bridge would collapse. The construction company Constructora Quid repaired the cracks, and the bridge was reopened four days later.
The newspaper La Jornada reported that the repairs continued long after the bridge reopened in July and that the four people who were injured were construction workers assigned to the project. The woman who died was crossing the bridge in her vehicle at the time of its collapse.
State Civil Protection announced the closure of the road on social media, asking that citizens obey signage and take alternative routes, and the State Roads Committee (JEC) promised an in-depth review of the request for bids and the contract with the construction company Quid.
“Now the only thing we can do is investigate what happened so that there are penalties if we detect that ex-officials were responsible,” JEC director Mowgli Gutiérrez said.
🔴Caída de puente dé paso superior vehicular(tramo Estatal)
Tramo cerrado por caída de Puente Elevado, Kilómetro 002+000 aprox. en la Supercarretera Cerritos-Tula, Tamps. *(Tramo Estatal)* Municipio de Cerritos,S.L.P pic.twitter.com/tnfOKlNPXn
Mazatlan's malecón boardwalk has gorgeous seawall views and is a popular tourist attraction.
Several years ago, the city of Mazatlán launched a beautification project to make the city more attractive to tourists. One of the first big steps was to plant 115 coconut palms along a 4.5-kilometer stretch of the malecón, the concrete boardwalk between the Gold Zone and Olas Altas at the edge of the historic center.
When I first heard of this project, I remembered a statistic about falling coconuts killing 10 times more people than sharks — that’s sharks in the ocean, not falling sharks.
Ornamentation with a potential body count — I liked it already.
Since I ride my bicycle along this stretch of waterfront several times a week, I watched this construction parody, from the chalk marks on the concrete to the towering palms with their stainless-steel accent lighting. It was an excellent lesson in the economics of Mexican public works.
I have, in one form or another, been in the construction industry for about 40 years, mostly on the commercial side; so let’s say I have a basic understanding. Thus I know that laying out a simple square on a flat concrete surface is a skill that should be possessed by most apprentice masons, all journey-level masons and, you would think, all architects and engineers.
Note the tree in the foreground in a hole surrounded by a grate. This will be important as you read on.
But are perfect squares all that important in the overall scheme of things? If the squares vary an inch here or there, does it really matter? I mean, these things were just holes to put palm trees into, right? How hard could it be to plant a bunch of palm trees along flat surfaces with great access?
Anybody could do it — right?
One of the primary rules when doing repetitious work is maintaining a common geometry so that the finished product is pleasant to the eye. Laying out something symmetrically allows the use of pre-made patterns and simple math, which can be repeated at every hole the same way, simple in its consistency — dare I say it: idiot-proof.
The squares would need a common point of alignment so that they will all be visually in sync when complete. Using the straight edge of the malecón/sea wall on the ocean side or the straight edge of the curb on the street side would be quick and simple. It would allow the square holes to share two parallel sides with either the curb or the seawall, thereby assuring close-to-perfect symmetry.
However, the city had its own cunning plan for creating holes and planting palm trees.
The first to appear were a pair of two-man crews, each with 16-inch, walk-behind concrete saws.
Each crew was responsible for drawing its own version of a square on the concrete prior to making the cuts. I watched as the cutting went on for a week before someone realized that the holes were too small to accommodate a full-grown palm tree.
Plan B: instead of enlarging the holes with the concrete saws, they brought in a backhoe with a hydraulic jackhammer on the articulating arm. So the backhoe hammered out the holes well past the saw-cut lines, thereby rendering the saw-cut process wasted time and money.
As the backhoe worked its way down the malecón, the intense vibrations from the jackhammer attachment were transferred through the machine to the tires on the ground. The vibrations from this operation were so intense, they settled the sand that supports the concrete slabs that comprise the boardwalk.
This caused portions of the concrete pathway to collapse several inches into the shallow voids created by the settling.
Plan C: the backhoe was then placed into the closest traffic lane to do the work while traffic was shunted around the working equipment. This must have caused complaints because the backhoe was back on the malecón a week later.
By now, the concrete cutting crew had returned and were cutting straight lines just outside the jagged destruction created by the backhoe’s jackhammer attachment. This time, the problem was that they did not cut completely through the concrete, so the backhoe with the hammer had to come and finish off the holes.
It appears that not all the palm trees on the malecón were lucky enough to get an aesthetically pleasing stainless-steel grate.
This caused divots or even chunks to be knocked out of the concrete walkway beyond the saw cut, thereby rendering this saw-cut process more wasted time and money.
As all this was taking place, there was another concrete-saw crew cutting a trench between the tree well holes to accommodate an electrical conduit.
The conduit-laying crew must have been kept in the dark as to where to place the conduit stub-outs at the tree well because there was no consistency whatsoever. The black pipe stubs were mostly in the general area of the soon-to-be-formed tree wells.
After the palm trees were inserted into their holes, the masons were sent in to give each tree well four straight sides, in an attempt to make them appear to be squares, which should have happened with the first round of saw cuts.
After watching the masons for a few days, I realized no one had informed them that the black pieces of pipe that were sticking up needed to be inside the tree well, not on the sidewalk.
During the next several days, there was another two-man saw crew out cutting the sidewalk so that the electrical conduit that had been cast into it could be moved to inside the tree wells.
At this point — two months into this poorly managed circus — the vast majority of the holes had become parallelograms and trapezoids with very few palms actually centered in the geometric blunders.
This probably would not have mattered much if the final plan had not called for a two-piece, stainless-steel grate with a hole in the center to be installed perfectly flush with the surface of the malecón. I am sure there was a set of plans somewhere that contained drawings of just how impeccably perfect the finished project would look.
The first stainless-steel grill was fitted at the north end of the project and looked to be custom-made for that particular tree well. I am sure that whoever submitted the bid to supply 115 stainless-steel grates, all exactly the same size, was recoiling vigorously. Needless to say, there were no more stainless-steel grates filling the remaining 114 quadrangles.
The accent lights and associated conduit started going up about a week after the single grate appeared. Both the lights and the conduit are held by stainless-steel straps that encircle the trunk of the palm and are quite tight.
I am not sure just what will occur when the palms grow, but these are trifling details to be dealt with by the next city administration.
If from the beginning this project had had just one competent person involved for even a couple of hours per day, significant time and money would have been saved. But this is Mexico, where it is more important to keep people working and where competence can give way to a bit of cronyism and a complete lack of circumspection.
The writer admits that most people visiting the boardwalk probably won’t notice a bunch of imperfectly planted trees. But he’ll know.
The end result is a malecón with palm trees fluttering in the balmy tropical breezes. And the growing coconuts will provide a whole new opportunity for fun in the sun.
And only obsessive-compulsive gringos like myself will ever notice any of the discrepancies.
The writer describes himself as a very middle-aged man who lives full-time in Mazatlán with a captured tourist woman and the ghost of a half-wild dog. He can be reached at [email protected].
Tijuana cemetery staff prepare to bury a COVID victim whose body went unclaimed in 2020.
Reported coronavirus case numbers declined 38% in September compared to August, while COVID-19 deaths decreased by just 1.3%, official data shows.
The federal Health Ministry reported 311,813 confirmed cases this month, a reduction of 192,345 compared to August, the worst month of the pandemic for new infections.
An average of 10,394 cases was reported during September whereas the daily average in August was 16,263.
Reported COVID-19 deaths in September totaled 18,179, the sixth highest monthly total of the pandemic, a reduction of 241 compared to August.
However, the average daily death toll in September was higher than that in August, which has one extra day. An average of 606 deaths was reported each day this month, a figure 2% higher than the daily average of 594 in August.
Coronavirus cases and deaths in Mexico as reported by day. MILENIO
Case numbers on Thursday were below this month’s average with 8,828 new infections added to Mexico’s accumulated tally, which currently stands at 3.66 million. The death toll rose to 277,505 with 532 additional fatalities reported.
There are 63,660 estimated active cases, a 2.5% increase compared to Wednesday.
Meanwhile, the federal government’s vaccination program continues to deliver hundreds of thousands of shots per day.
Almost 101.2 million doses have now been administered after more than 670,000 were given Wednesday, the Health Ministry reported. The government expects to have offered at least one shot to all adults by the end of October and is gearing up to inoculate some 1 million adolescents with health conditions that make them vulnerable to serious illness.
Federal data shows there are currently 7,276 hospitalized COVID patients, but none of the 32 states has an average occupancy rate above 50% in their hospitals’ COVID wards.
What would you do if you could not go home? That was the question many foreigners in Mexico faced during the pandemic, as some borders closed and others imposed expensive quarantine restrictions.
For incoming Americans and Canadians, getting a visitor’s permit to enter Mexico can be as easy as buying a flight or making a quick stop at the border. But when it comes to extending their stay, the same Americans, Canadians and others foreigners ordinarily have to leave the country, which can be difficult during a pandemic.
Luckily, in light of COVID-19, the Mexican government opened up a special status regularization program for foreigners. Under the standard process of applying for residency, the first of several steps occurs at a Mexican consulate in the applicant’s home country.
Under the special regularization program, travelers with expired visitor’s permits could obtain four-year temporary residency without leaving the country — a lifeline for many stranded expats. That together with a national-level effort at the National Immigration Institute (INM) to streamline and digitize the immigration process appears to have led to a vastly improved experience for many seeking to regularize their status.
One such stranded expat was Jen, a Canadian art dealer who fell in love with Mexico and now sells Mexican folk art online. She asked that her last name be withheld to speak openly about being in Mexico without proper documentation. Jen arrived in October of 2019, but had trouble leaving the country before her visitor’s permit expired.
“My visa originally expired in April but my flight was canceled and so my lawyer got me a one month visa extension and then because my flight was still canceled, she got me another extension till January. At that point in time they said not to really worry about it, just pay the fine when you leave the country,” she said.
Then she heard about a visa program available in Querétaro, which allowed certain foreigners to replace their expired Forma Migratoria Múltiple, the visitor’s permit also known as an FMM, with a four-year temporary residency card.
“When this whole program started, I was actually really sketched out … it sounded too good to be true,” Jen said.
She was particularly worried by rumors of deportations and increased immigration enforcement, since she had all her belongings with her in Mexico and hoped to stay in the country. To be safe, she waited three months, until April of this year, without hearing any reports of negative experiences with the visa program.
“So at that point I felt a little more safe going and doing this, but it was a risk,” she said. “I went to the bank that morning and paid [the National Immigration Institute] over 13,000 pesos, not knowing whether I actually going to get approved or not.”
Luckily for Jen, her application went smoothly. With limited travel options for returning to Canada, she was granted four-year temporary residency and later successfully applied for permission to work. She said her application was easy; she only had to wait half a day at the immigration office to get her residency card.
A temporary resident’s card with permission to work.
John, a Mazatlán-based Canadian, has been in Mexico for several years, and also struggled to return home as his FMM expired during the pandemic. Like Jen, John asked that his full name be withheld to openly discuss being in Mexico with an expired permit.
“It is definitely hard to get back to Canada right now. There are no direct flights. There is a lot of travel time to get back to my city,” he said, adding that Canada’s hotel quarantine policy for returning citizens could cost up to CAD $2,000, prohibitively expensive for many. The quarantine policy has been amended since John received residency, and travelers who have been fully vaccinated with an approved vaccine are now exempt.
John heard about the immigration regularization program on Facebook.
“I love living here so I decided to check it out,” he said. “My experience with the immigration institute was great. The whole process took only 3.5 hours so I feel very lucky.”
Guy Courchesne, the director of Teachers Latin America, works on immigration issues as part of his business recruiting foreign teachers. He said he first heard about the pandemic regularization program in February, but that it was not the first time the Mexican government had instituted such a policy.
“This is something they do every five years …”Courchesne said. “It’s a way to put amnesty out for all the people who are here illegally. [It’s] usually aimed at Central Americans more than anything else, but this year was the COVID twist. We were seeing, for example, Americans, Canadians, a lot of Australians because they are stuck, Europeans coming in to make use of it. That’s what’s a little bit different about it.”
Availability of the program seems to vary between locations, with some immigration offices not offering the program to people whose home countries have open borders and flights available. In other places, applicants report being quickly approved.
Courchesne said the most common program applicants were Canadians and Australians. Canadians faced a required two-week hotel quarantine, on their own dollar, and Australia had implemented caps on the number of flights into the country, making it difficult for some of their citizens to return.
Courchesne and other immigration consultants said the greatest challenges for visitors seeking to access the pandemic regularization program were the language barrier and bureaucracy. Though the INM has begun to digitize many of its processes, leading to faster processing times, Mexican bureaucracy still functions differently than what many foreigners are used to in their home countries. And navigating such a system in a foreign language complicates an already byzantine process.
At the same time, Courchesne said that Mexico appears to have stepped up immigration enforcement, particularly on highways, and he has knowledge of several cases of deportation. For instance, one Canadian man shared the story of his deportation on social media after he was apprehended, along with other migrants, as he traveled through the country by bus.
“You see a lot of people talking about it, some social media, or they’re getting picked up on buses when they’re traveling between cities. And if they haven’t had their tourist card with them, they have been detained until they could have their status confirmed or in some cases actually just removed from the country,” he said. “There’s a lot of people that all they do is they go back and forth across the border every six months to renew their tourist visas. It looks like immigration has been cracking down on that.”
Despite a possible increase in enforcement, María Morales Vázquez, a Oaxaca-based immigration consultant, said that restrictions remain minimal for Americans and Canadians in Mexico, though both groups may struggle with the language barrier and Mexico’s unique approach to bureaucratic processes.
Foreigners from Haiti, Central America and South America, on the other hand, have seen a more marked increase in enforcement, as record numbers of migrants arrive seeking asylum. Recently, group after group of migrants have been detained by INM personnel and the National Guard, and according to an INM press release, more than 90,000 migrants, mostly Central Americans, were “rescued” by the institute in the first six months of this year. Migrants can face many months in detention while their asylum requests are processed, and many are eventually deported.
While passing through or staying in Mexico can be difficult for Central Americans and other migrants, the regularization program remains a convenient option for many with expired visitor’s permits. And despite an increase in enforcement, many gringo visitors to Mexico with expired documents have successfully applied for temporary residency.
María Elena Álvarez-Buylla, director of Mexico’s National Council for Science and Technology (Conacyt).
“It is nonsense and inconceivable, the accusation of criminal association against members of the scientific community.” Those were the words of Enrique Graue, rector of Mexico’s National Autonomous University (UNAM), referring last week to the federal Attorney General’s Office wish that 31 scientific researchers be locked up in a maximum-security federal prison.
Thirty-one people, many of them prestigious scientific researchers, have been accused of embezzlement, illegal use of attributions and authority, activities involving financial resources of illicit origin and organized crime. Ten women and 21 men for whom their right to be presumed innocent until proven guilty was apparently not granted and whose reputations have been seriously damaged.
The federal Attorney General’s Office has asked a judge to lock them up in the Altiplano maximum-security federal prison in México state — where some of the nation’s most notorious and dangerous criminals are held.
As far as I know, something like this has never happened anywhere in the free world.
Several important public and private Mexican universities — among them Mexico’s UNAM, the Metropolitan Autonomous University, the Ibero-American University and the Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Studies, my alma mater — publicly condemned and rejected what will undoubtedly go into the history books as Mexico’s most shameful episode about politics and science.
Even prominent members of President López Obrador’s political party Morena have sharply criticized these nonsense actions, including Mexico City Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum and Morena’s leader in the Senate, Ricardo Monreal.
I haven’t had the opportunity to personally meet María Elena Álvarez-Buylla, director of the National Council for Science and Technology (Conacyt). I have asked her twice for an interview in writing but unfortunately not gotten a response. The first time was about a year ago, and the second was last week because of recent events.
My interest in interviewing her is to engage in a respectful and transparent dialogue like the ones I have had with senior members of the current administration such as former environment minister Víctor Toledo and Deputy Foreign Affairs Minister Martha Delgado, both of which were published in the newspaper El Universal.
I wanted to ask Álvarez-Buylla about her vision for Conacyt, its accomplishments, opportunities and challenges. And, of course, I now also want to inquire about her involvement in the accusations against those 31 scientists associated with the Science and Technology Advisory Forum, an autonomous consulting body established in 2002 to advise Conacyt’s board of directors.
Conacyt is responsible for establishing national public policy on humanities, science, technology and innovation. Its mission is to develop and strengthen capacities in those spheres through projects linked to research and the capacity-building of academics and researchers.
It has a network of 26 internationally renowned public research centers and each year grants more than 85,000 postgraduate, doctoral and postdoctoral fellowships to study both in Mexico and abroad. Conacyt also encourages (through financial incentives) the scientific work of more than 30,000 researchers and has a community of 2,000 young researchers who work in various public institutions throughout Mexico.
Conacyt is responsible for establishing national public policy on humanities, science, technology and innovation.
Beyond all doubt, Conacyt is the most important governmental institution that supports science, technological development and innovation in Mexico.
But just who was Álvarez-Buylla before being appointed by President López Obrador to lead Conacyt? I offer below a brief summary of the most relevant details of her professional trajectory (taken from the webpage for UNAM’s Institute of Ecology, where she worked before and presumably will return after leaving the government). These aspects of her career contrast sharply with some of the most ill-fated decisions of her tenure at Conacyt.
Álvarez-Buylla has for many years worked in molecular genetics and developmental evolutionary ecology. She has an undergraduate degree in biology, a master’s in sciences from UNAM, a doctorate in botany, and has done postdoctoral research at the University of California’s Berkeley and La Jolla campuses. In 1992, she rejoined UNAM’s Institute of Ecology as a full-time researcher. (She is currently on an unpaid leave of absence.)
Since 2001, she has maintained the highest level (III) within the National Researchers System and the highest level (D) in a program that UNAM offers to its full-time professors and she has given talks at more than 139 national and international scientific meetings and symposia (participating in the organization of many of them).
Álvarez-Buylla has contributed to the training of new researchers by guiding the work of undergraduate, master’s and doctoral students, and she has taught undergraduate and postgraduate courses. Many of her students and collaborators are researchers at prestigious universities abroad.
She has won many awards and scholarships nationally and internationally, including Mexico’s National Science Award in 2017.
It is, then, in the context of her long and distinguished scientific and academic career and of her tenure at Conacyt, and in view of the appalling events of the last two weeks, that I wanted to respectfully ask her a few questions:
What are Conacyt’s main achievements and challenges after three years under your directorship? What has worked and what hasn’t and why? What kind of legacy would you hope to leave to your successor?
What is your vision of science, and what, exactly, are you referring to when talking about “neoliberal science,” which you blame for much of what hasn’t worked in Mexico?
How do you see yourself going back to your scientific and academic activities the day after you have left a privileged position from where you disqualified scientists and academics who thought differently than you? What would you say to your peers if they accused you of undermining Conacyt and polarizing it against Mexico’s scientific community?
How will you defend yourself to your colleagues and students at UNAM, to other universities and institutions and to the Mexican public for having personally advocated for the elimination of trust funds and programs that supported scientific and technological research, drastically reduced or abolished many of the scholarships and financial support for Mexican students attending international universities and having sharply reduced government funding for researchers across the country to participate in scientific meetings?
And how would you answer your students, past and future ones, when they ask you — and they certainly will — about the role that Conacyt, according to media reports, presumably played in trying to lock up 31 of your scientific and academic peers in a federal maximum-security jail?
Omar Vidal, a scientist, was a university professor in Mexico, is a former senior officer at the UN Environment Program and the former director-general of the World Wildlife Fund-Mexico.
Pursuit of the gunmen was foiled when they threw metal spikes onto the road, puncturing the tires of two police cars.
Armed men in eight vehicles caused panic in Culiacán, Sinaloa, late Monday night and early Tuesday as they drove through the city shooting out security cameras with automatic machine guns.
The gangsters destroyed 80 cameras at 25 different points in the capital of the northern state, home to the notorious Sinaloa Cartel.
The newspaper El Universal reported that the synchronized actions of the gunmen provoked hours of panic in Culiacán, especially in its downtown and surrounding areas.
“Families and workers who get up early had to take cover and throw themselves on the ground,” the newspaper reported.
The volleys of gunfire triggered memories of the mayhem in Culiacán in October 2019 when members of the Sinaloa Cartel took to the streets to carry out a wave of attacks to protest the arrest of one of Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán’s sons.
Witnesses said the armed men began their camera-destroying rampage near the Culiacán airport before moving through several neighborhoods in the northern city.
Diego Castro Blanco, president of the Culiacán Chamber of Commerce and Tourism Services, called for a thorough investigation into the violent vandalism, adding that such incidents mustn’t be allowed to occur again.
Sinaloa Governor Quirino Ordaz said authorities have already initiated an investigation to identify and apprehend the culprits. He also said security would be bolstered in Culiacán and the damaged cameras would be replaced.
State Security Minister Cristobal Castañeda Camarillo said that police pursued the gunmen but the latter threw metal spikes onto the road that punctured the tires of two police cars.
Deputy Health Minister Hugo López-Gatell getting his flu shot last season in October 2020.
As the COVID inoculations pass the 100 million mark, another important vaccination campaign is set to start November 3: that of influenza.
The federal Health Ministry announced that it expects more than 32 million doses will be administered for the 2021–2022 flu season. The doses are intended for the most vulnerable: children aged six months to five years old, seniors, pregnant women, health workers and people at risk for complications. All health institutions have sufficient resources to vaccinate those groups, the ministry promised.
The ministry also reported that this season will probably see fewer influenza cases than the pre-pandemic normal, thanks to the COVID health measures in place, including hand-washing, the use of face masks and social distancing.
In other good news, a new study shows the flu shot might be good for more than just avoiding influenza: University of Miami researchers found that COVID-19 patients who had received a flu shot within the last six months had fewer related complications, emergency room visits and incidents of deep-vein thrombosis, according to infectious disease specialist Alex Guri. And unlike the COVID vaccine, the flu vaccine has been fully approved for use in children.
