More robberies are expected during the coming months due to increased economic activity.
Highway robberies of transport trucks hit their highest level for the year in August when 778 incidents were reported, almost half of which were in México state, according to data from the National Public Security System (SNSP).
The state is by far the worst state for the crime: 377 robberies were recorded in August, bringing the total for the year to 3,029. The second worst state, Michoacán, saw a comparatively modest 91 incidents in August, taking its annual total to 695.
Six of every seven robberies involved violence, the SNSP said.
This year’s numbers are slightly better than last year, when 815 incidents were recorded during the month.
Summer appears to be a profitable season for highway thieves: August usurped June, when 746 such robberies were recorded; May, which saw 719 incidents, and July when there were 711 robberies.
Luis Rangel of logistics company WebFleet Solutions said robberies were likely to continue in the coming months due to an increase in trade for the holiday season. “This is not going to go down, on the contrary, an increase is coming because we are approaching December, where there is much more movement of motor transport. Logically there are more goods, and unfortunately and statistically speaking, there is more crime,” he said.
The Bank of México has released a new 20-peso bill (about US $1) to honor the 200th anniversary of independence, recalling the moment exactly two centuries ago when the rebel army entered Mexico City. On the following day, September 28 1821, Mexico was declared independent.
The reverse side of the note pays tribute to the country’s natural wealth with an image of the Sian Ka’an Biosphere Reserve in Quintana Roo, a UNESCO Natural World Heritage Site. It features a crocodile and a garza chocolatera, a type of crane also known as roseate spoonbill.
The celebrated former president Benito Juárez has dropped off the 20-peso note, which went into circulation on Friday.
The primarily green and red bill depicts a painting which hangs in Chapultepec Castle called “The Solemn and peaceful entry of the Army of the Three Guarantees into Mexico City on September 27 from the memorable year of 1821” by an anonymous artist. It glorifies the moment the army arrived at Mexico City’s central square, led by Agustín de Iturbide.
The image displays the flag of the army and the Mexican flag side-by-side, and local people celebrating the military arrival.
Reverse side of the new bill.
Another of the Bank of México’s eye-catching designs was internationally applauded earlier this year: a 100-peso bill (about $5) depicting the self-educated nun and intellectual Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz was named banknote of the year 2020 by the International Bank Note Society (IBNS).
In addition to the Sian Ka’an Biosphere Reserve, there are five UNESCO Natural World Heritage Sites in Mexico. Those are: the El Vizcaino Whale Sanctuary in Baja California and Baja California Sur; the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve, Michoacán; the Revillagigedo Archipelago in the Pacific Ocean; The El Pinacate and Gran Desierto de Altar Biosphere Reserve, Sonora; and the Islands and Protected Areas of the Gulf of California spanning Baja California, Baja California Sur, Sonora, Sinaloa, and Nayarit.
About 3,500 people attended Sunday's march in Mexico City.
Seven years after 43 students were abducted and presumably killed in Guerrero, the students’ families, anti-violence activists and everyday citizens are still clamoring for justice.
At a protest march and rally in Mexico City on Sunday to mark the seventh anniversary of the students’ disappearance, parents expressed frustration with the government’s investigation.
“With this government it seemed that the path to the truth was clearer but with the passage of time it has become steeper and full of thorns and stones that prevent us from reaching our objective, which is to know the whereabouts of our sons,” said Hilda Hernández at a rally at the zócalo, Mexico City’s central square.
The mother of César Manuel González Hernández said parents will keep up their fight amid adversity due to the COVID-19 pandemic and despite “the maze of a lethargic justice system.”
The government rejected its predecessor’s “historical truth” about what happened to the students after their disappearance in Iguala on September 26, 2014 and launched a new probe. But almost three years later it has not divulged its own definitive version of events.
The 43 students who disappeared September 14, 2014 in Guerrero.
A key aspect of the previous government’s version of events was that the students’ bodies were burned in a dump near Iguala after they were killed by members of a local crime gang in cahoots with municipal police. But experts concluded there wasn’t a blaze of significant intensity at the dump to incinerate 43 corpses.
“We’re asking President López Obrador to investigate the army thoroughly,” said Cristina Bautista, another mother of one of the missing students. “… They had knowledge [of what happened].”
The current government has shown political will to get to the bottom of what happened but it hasn’t delivered results, she said.
‘7 years without justice,’ reads a giant banner in the zócalo on Sunday.
“We’ve been waiting for three years but we don’t know the whereabouts of our sons,” Legideño said.
Another mother who was cited by the newspaper Milenio but not identified by name rebuked the federal government for failing to secure the extradition of Tomás Zerón from Israel. The head of the now-defunct Criminal Investigation Agency is accused of torture and tampering with evidence.
Along with former attorney general Jesús Murillo Karam, Zerón is considered a key architect of the so-called historical truth.
“Officials who endorsed the historical truth continue to hold high-ranking positions in the Attorney General’s Office,” the unnamed mother told Milenio.
According to the Mexico City government, approximately 3,500 people participated in Sunday’s march, which departed the Angel of Independence monument on Reforma Avenue at 4:00 p.m. and reached the zócalo in the late afternoon. The facades of some buildings along the route were graffitied with messages such as “We’re missing 43” and “We’ll neither forgive nor forget” but there were no reports of violence.
There was also a protest march on Sunday in Chilpancingo, the capital of Guerrero, where some 300 students and activists took to the streets to demand justice in the seven-year-old case.
When I think of Canadians traveling seasonally to Mexico, I think of well-off people looking for comfortable temperatures year-round, but Jessica Collins turns this stereotype on its head.
And the nomadic side of my personality is envious.
Collins spends about half a year in Mulegé, Baja California Sur, tending an unusual Airbnb business and the other half working waaaaay up north as a cook for miners and ice truckers.
Essentially, she admits, she is an “overgrown adventurous college student,” one who has led this kind of life for about 20 years.
I initially interviewed Collins because I was interested in her business of creating and renting reworked old trailers as hotel space.
One of the trailers that the Collins family rents via Airbnb.
About three years or so ago she, a sister and her Mexican brother-in-law realized that they could buy broken-down trailers and RVs for only a few hundred dollars, as their owners don’t want to haul them back north. They are fixed up and rented through AirBnB under the name Trailercito Caracol.
The Collins sisters’ connection with Baja came from traveling the area for many years in their teens and 20s. Her sister met and married a Mexican man from Mulegé, and his family’s land became the Collins family’s base in Mexico.
The trailer idea has only been active for a few years, but they have two that are rentable with a third in progress. Making them habitable usually includes replacing floors, painting and thorough cleaning and fumigation to make sure to be rid of the area’s infamous scorpions and other critters.
Although an important part of their lifestyle and a unique way to experience Baja, the hotel income doesn’t yet support the family. For economic and personal reasons, Jessica still travels north each year to work, but not necessarily in the summer when the weather is better in Canada.
Instead, her migrations depend on gigs she gets during the year, which include cooking in mining camps and for ice truckers. The latter, in particular, means working near the Arctic Circle during the coldest months of the year.
At the time of the interview, Collins was working at a mining exploration camp near the Alaskan border. Like a good Canadian, she was dressed in a flannel shirt and heavy boots. Even though it is summer, it was only 4 C and rainy there.
Getting ready to board a plane to a camp in the middle of nowhere in Canada.
The money she makes, and that her sister makes working in Canadian summer resorts, goes toward developing the land in Mulegé and their general living expenses in Mexico. For Collins, that can mean that her Baja months are not when normal snowbirds are “in season” but rather the hot summer months. Her yearly migrations can put her in temperatures anywhere between -40 C and 40C, but she wouldn’t have it any other way.
COVID-19 has put a strain on their trailer rental business, although not in the sense of people wanting to rent. In fact, the isolation of the trailers and natural beauty are a draw for those looking to get away from the insanity.
But providing proper shower and bathroom facilities means a separate outdoor structure that is shared among the trailers, and that sharing is currently disallowed by municipal authorities. Currently, they can rent only one trailer, but they hope this will change soon. Collins says “… there is nothing like showering at night under a million stars.”
Outdoor bathrooms and cooking areas are common in Mulegé. It is very often too hot to cook indoors and never too cold to bathe outdoors. Also, sewer systems in the area have a tendency to back up, and this setup keeps the smell out of the house.
The use of old trailers, including one they’ve refurbished from the 1960s, is a brilliant idea not only because it appeals to the same adventure-minded people that come to off-the-beaten-track Mulegé but because it reuses something that would otherwise sit in a junkyard.
The time that the two sisters spend up north is more than just money to supplement their life in Baja. They take advantage of that time to promote Baja and understand exactly what their target market is and wants. One aspect is understanding how important the internet is even to such a small operation, even though access for them there can be sketchy.
View of Collins’ life in Baja and in Canada.
Although tourism in Mulegé began to grow starting with the 1976 construction of Mexican Highway 1, making it 12 hours from the nearest border with the United States, it has not developed like Los Cabos or even Loreto has.
Nevertheless, Collins is very optimistic about the trailer idea going forward. She believes that in the post-COVID world, “people are going to want the experience over the flash of resorts.”
And when they are ready, so will the Collins family be.
Leigh Thelmadatter arrived in Mexico 18 years ago and fell in love with the land and the culture in particular its handcrafts and art. She is the author of Mexican Cartonería: Paper, Paste and Fiesta (Schiffer 2019). Her culture column appears regularly on Mexico News Daily.
Kind of like a mushroom, huitlacoche is a naturally occurring parasitic fungus that grows on untreated organic corn.
We all have our food fears.
I’ve shared some of mine in this column: mussels, liver, lengua (tongue), sesos (brains). Here’s another one: huitlacoche (whee-tla-KO-cheh). Corn “smut.” Mexican truffles. Kind of like a mushroom, it’s a naturally occurring parasitic fungus that grows randomly on untreated organic corn.
Why hadn’t I eaten it? To begin with, huitlacoche is quite ugly and looks just like what it is: a grey, blobby parasite, an invader of pearly-yellow corn kernels. Gray is not a color food should be, and it just doesn’t look appetizing to me.
That’s why the package of fresh huitlacoche I bought sits abandoned on a shelf in my fridge. But my column deadline was upon me and I could procrastinate no longer. Well-meaning friends had suggested I try it at a restaurant the first time, so I set out this morning, determined to (ulp) overcome my aversion and fear of this ugly but harmless foodstuff.
“You won’t even know it’s in there,” said a friend — and she was right. The deep-fried quesadillas I ordered, with shrimp, huitlacoche and Oaxaca cheese, were delicious, the huitlacoche a smoky, earthy, soft complement to the other ingredients. Cooked, the unpalatable grey turns to a deep-black brown which, while unusual, doesn’t have the same repellant effect as elephant-skin grey. Consider me a new fan!
Huitlacoche is used as a filling or topping in many classic Mexican dishes, including this gordito.
Huitlacoche can be used anywhere you’d use mushrooms and is most commonly sautéed with onions, chiles and garlic and used in quesadillas, tortas, tamales, stews and soups. It pairs well with eggs and is a flavorful addition to scrambled eggs, frittata or omelets. When cooked, huitlacoche releases an inky black liquid, almost like a gravy. Cooking it longer will cause some of this to evaporate, depending on the texture you’re looking for.
While you can find huitlacoche year-round in most parts of Mexico, now — the end of summer — is when it’s most abundant, as it develops on corn after the rainy season. It’s most commonly sold already removed from the corn, wrapped and packaged on a little Styrofoam plate.
If you’re lucky, you might find a farmer or vendor selling whole ears of corn with huitlacoche “attached.” If you do, remove the husks and any hair. Use a sharp knife to carefully cut off the huitlacoche, rinse gently, pat dry and proceed with your recipe.
It’s also available canned, but, of course, fresh is best.
And that package of huitlacoche in my fridge? Eating it is one thing — cooking it another. We shall see!
Classic Huitlacoche Quesadillas
Epazote is a common Mexican herb that adds a rich, aromatic flavor to certain dishes. Find it fresh or dried at your local mercado or in some grocery stores.
2 Tbsp. butter
½ onion, chopped
1 garlic clove, minced
1 jalapeño, seeded and chopped
5 fresh epazote leaves
1 lb. fresh huitlacoche
Salt to taste
10 (6-inch) corn tortillas
1 lb. Oaxaca cheese, separated into strings
Vegetable oil as needed
Melt butter in skillet over medium heat; add onion, garlic, jalapeño and epazote. Cook until soft, about 5 minutes. Add huitlacoche and cook, stirring, until liquid evaporates, about 10 minutes. Season with salt; cover and keep warm.
Heat a comal or skillet over medium heat until hot. Moisten both sides of two tortillas with water and place them, stacked together, onto the hot griddle; cook until the bottom tortilla is crisp, about 2 minutes.
Flip the stacked tortillas and cook the other tortilla until crisp. Separate the two cooked tortillas; place them separately, uncooked side down, onto the hot griddle. (You may need to add a spray or drizzle of oil or butter to the comal or skillet at this point.) Cover the crisp side of one tortilla with one-fifth of the Oaxaca cheese; place one-fifth of the huitlacoche mixture over the cheese, then lay the crisp side of the second tortilla on top to cover.
Cook, turning once, until both tortillas are crisp and cheese is melted. Repeat with remaining ingredients. Cut each quesadilla into four wedges to serve.
Huitlacoche can be substituted just about anywhere you’d use mushrooms and is typically sauteed with onions, chiles and garlic.
Huitlacoche Soup
1 Tbsp. olive oil
1 onion, finely chopped
1 garlic clove, minced
1 cup fresh corn kernels
2 cups huitlacoche
1 large epazote leaf
3 large plum tomatoes
1½ liters chicken or vegetable broth
2 poblano peppers, roasted, cut into thin strips
8 squash flowers, cleaned and minced
Salt to taste
1 small round of queso fresco
Heat oil in a large saucepan over medium heat. Add onion and garlic; sauté until transparent. Add corn kernels, huitlacoche and epazote leaf. Sauté for 10 minutes, stirring.
In a blender, process tomatoes with 1 cup of broth. Strain into the pan with the huitlacoche mixture. Add remaining broth and season with salt. Bring soup to a boil, reduce heat to low and simmer for 10 minutes.
Add poblano strips and squash flowers; cook 5 minutes. Serve garnished with crumbled queso fresco.
Migrants cross the Rio Grande from Texas back into Mexico to get food and other supplies. Cuartoscuro
What do people want? Opportunity.
To thrive, not just survive. It’s what all of us want.
And if you are guaranteed, or at least very likely, not to thrive where you are — if, even more painfully, your children are guaranteed not to thrive where you are — then chances are you will try to do something about it.
The other day I read an article in the New York Times (I know, I mention it a lot. I have a subscription!) about Haitian would-be immigrants in the United States being deported back to Haiti, some who hadn’t been back to their country for many years. The people profiled in the article had been living in other Latin American countries and had made lives for themselves there before entering the U.S.
But they still wanted to give things a try in the United States, which I think may always be seen as “the land of opportunity,” no matter what the reality may be for most.
Many people in the comments section were confused about why they had gone to the U.S. if they already had good, stable lives in their current host countries. The people quoted in the article talked of owning homes and cars, having jobs, having their children in school.
I was also confused. More than anything, I’m confused by the enduring belief that “anyone can make it” in the U.S. with enough gumption. With so many people suffering there — from homelessness, from perpetual and impossible mountains of debt, from the absence of a significant social safety net, not to mention all the people who can carry loaded weapons around with them — why is arriving there still the dream of so many?
If I were desperate for a better life, I’d try to move some place like Denmark or New Zealand, or even Canada. Granted, those places are quite a bit farther away, but I think the United States doesn’t hold a candle to them when it comes to taking care of its people in a way that affords them a relatively peaceful and secure life.
The mostly Haitian immigrants that were the focus of the story claimed that they’d been told that the U.S. was accepting Haitians as refugees and that they would be processed by immigration and then released.
It’s frustrating for everyone that they would have thought so, and I have my suspicions about how they might have received that message — most of them political.
After all, in the U.S., Republicans benefit from absolute immigration chaos when Democrats are in power, since they can point to their political opponents as the very definition of ineptitude. From their behavior of late, it’s obvious to me that sabotaging an entire institution is obviously not considered a price too high to pay.
Whatever the means through which these migrants felt assured of their safe passage to the U.S., the point is, they thought they’d count as “the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”
Instead, a great number of them have been deported, after having been rounded up cowboy-style, straight back to Haiti, a country where many have not lived for years and which is probably the country least able to accommodate an influx of people in the wake of the pandemic, political turmoil, and a recent earthquake that seemed to want to finish the job of the nation’s total destruction.
What a bitterly disappointing despair-filled experience that must be for those being returned.
This paper is called Mexico News Daily, and so far, I have not mentioned Mexico at all. Do not fret! I promise it’s coming.
Ever since President Trump essentially bullied Mexico into becoming the wall, this country has taken on an outsized role in trying to control the flow of would-be immigrants to the southern U.S. border. It hasn’t been easy.
And though the U.S. administration has changed, the general panic about what to do about such large swaths of people showing up every day has meant that those mitigating measures will remain indefinitely in place.
My adopted home is trying to make progress. After flowery talk about what a great country Mexico would be as a final stop for those on their way to the U.S., the sheer number of people trying to make their way across seems to have overwhelmed and exhausted the government’s goodwill. The same is true for the communities suddenly seeing thousands of desperate people showing up who don’t plan to hang around and eventually contribute to those communities.
It’s now become a perfect storm: the Mexican Commission for Refugee Assistance (Comar), the immigration branch responsible for processing them, has seen their budget cut as the influx of migrants has increased to numbers never before seen in this country’s modern era.
The migrants themselves are losing patience as well, stranded in places like Tapachula, Chiapas, without the ability to work or to keep pressing ahead as their immigration applications take a year to be processed even though they’re required to be processed within three months. They’re tired and want to keep going.
Some have given up on a system that’s essentially broken under its own weight, and there have been violent clashes as they’ve tried to defy the rules since the rule makers haven’t been able to keep their end of the deal. Human patience has its limits, after all, especially when the ones in power, for whatever reason, keep moving the finish line farther and farther away.
I do think Mexico — and the U.S., for that matter — are trying their best to find solutions. But the sheer number of people has put immediate deportation of immigrants back on the table. Mexico has said it will start deporting Haitians as well, and I fear that exhausted officials and bitterly disappointed and despairing people will wind up being an explosive combination.
The United States and Mexico have agreed to cooperate on extending Mexico’s Sembrando Vida tree-planting scheme and paid apprenticeship programs for young people to other countries of Central America (but not Haiti) as a way to create opportunity in would-be immigrants’ home countries. While I truly want to be optimistic about these, if they’ve been mired in corruption here in Mexico, it’s hard to see how they might avoid the same fate in even less-stable countries.
The U.S. government has not responded positively to this suggestion, and how could it, I suppose, in the current political climate? President Biden can likely already hear the “and what will get them to go back once they’re here, eh?” shouts from those who like to frame immigrants as undeserving invaders. So even though the U.S. could no doubt use the influx of workers for all those jobs they say they’re unable to fill, my guess is that it will not happen.
When I expressed to another foreign friend my confusion about why the idea that the United States was the promised land is so persistent, he immediately said: “Things work in the U.S. They work the way they’re supposed to, and that’s not true in most of the world.”
Well, he’s got a point.
However, things work in lots of other places too. But if emigrating on foot is your only option and you want safety, opportunity and the chance to earn the kind of money that would make the difference between poverty and prosperity back home, then a dangerous and unguaranteed journey is a sacrifice that many are willing to make.
The president dressed casually for Monday's conference in Oaxaca city.
President López Obrador had spent the weekend in Oaxaca, a state for which he holds particular admiration. The 570 municipalities are more than double the number of any other state, meaning governance is more localized and land has been historically better shared. A third of the population is indigenous, around half of whom don’t speak Spanish.
The first and only indigenous president, Benito Juárez, was a Oaxaca native. Images of revolutionary hero Emiliano Zapata are common on the streets of the state, which was central to the struggle (1910-1920) against the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz. However, the mustached Mexican rebel icon was actually from Morelos. Meanwhile, the infamous Díaz was Oaxacan born and bred.
Projects in the state include highways from Oaxaca city to the Isthmus of Tehuantepec and the coast and a trade route to connect the Atlantic to the Pacific across the isthmus.
Monday
Oaxaca city was the venue for the week’s first conference, a state with “one of the most cultured peoples in the world,” AMLO said. Governor Alejandro Murat confirmed it was the president’s 10th visit, “not to make any other states jealous.”
A journalist diverted attention toward Friday’s CELAC conference, when Latin American leaders convened in Mexico City. AMLO highlighted successful agreements on vaccine distribution and disaster relief before revealing a letter he’d sent to U.S. President Joe Biden. “The migratory phenomenon requires a completely new treatment … we mustn’t limit ourselves to the application of contention measures, especially ones of a coercive nature,” it read, and suggested replicating Mexico’s tree-planting employment program in Central America, creating apprenticeships and offering temporary work visas as a fix.
Later in the conference, AMLO spoke about welfare, and offered potential ammunition to his detractors. “In Oaxaca they are almost spoiled … there are families in Oaxaca that receive up to three or four welfare checks,” he said.
Breakfast time couldn’t arrive soon enough for the man from Tepetitán, Tabasco: “A hot chocolate with a tlayuda, yep, and some bread. And long live Oaxaca. And long live Mexico.”
Tuesday
Health headliner Hugo López-Gatell took his Tuesday place on the podium. Case numbers had been going down for eight weeks, he said.
Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard stepped forward. The Haiti immigration wave, he said, was based on a false premise: a migration program for Haitians already in the U.S. had attracted many to try to reach the country, even though they’d be ineligible. Individuals in Brazil and Chile, he said, were encouraging migrants northward in “a massive hoax.”
Russian astronauts send a happy birthday to Mexico from space.
On the debate over abortion and the Supreme Court’s legalization, AMLO once again showed neat footwork. “I can’t express an opinion. I’m not washing my hands of it, I’m not Pontius Pilate [the Roman official who ordered Jesus’ crucifixion] … it’s better for all Mexicans that a president doesn’t take sides on an issue of this nature,” he said.
Later, a statement by President Biden was played to back up AMLO’s calls for a just tax system: “How can the richest in the country avoid paying taxes, how can the richest pay less tax than a teacher, a firefighter or a policeman? The truth is that this has worked very well for those at the top. The workers, those who have built this country, have been left out,” Biden said.
The country’s corrupt felt AMLO’s ire shortly after. During the construction of the now canceled Texcoco airport, he said, coyotes, meaning corrupt people, had abounded: “Who bought the land? Coyotes. Who was transporting the material? Coyotes. Who defined the price? Coyotes. Who sold the fuel to the carriers? Coyotes.”
On Friday, the president announced, he would meet with the families of the Ayotzinapa victims, in which 43 students disappeared in 2014.
Wednesday
The monthly security report topped the bill. Security Minister Rosa Icela Rodríguez said federal crimes were down 23.5% on 2019; homicides were down 3.9% on 2020. Fifty municipalities had registered 42% of homicides, she added.
Lie detector Ana Elizabeth García Vilchis took her spot to defend truth. The control tower at the new Felipe Ángeles airport, she said, was not dangerously tilted, but was victim of the “visual effect” of some photos. Her second topic didn’t address a supposed lie, but took a social justice angle: young adults who neither work nor study should no longer be termed ninis, she insisted. García branched into academia next: the conquest was not a “diffusion of cultures,” without attributing the claim, but an “ethnocide.”
On vaccinations for under-18s, a topic often raised at the morning news conferences, AMLO had an announcement: “More than a million children in the country are going to be vaccinated. Children with disabilities, with some difficulties or diseases.”
Talk of the COVID-19 pandemic led the president to the times of the conquest, when disease had devastated the local population: “… when the conquistadors arrived, what is Mexico today had 16 million inhabitants and three centuries later Mexico barely had eight million … the textbooks still say they came to civilize us,” he said.
But, as the conference concluded, AMLO sought peace: “Long live Spain, and long live Mexico,” he said.
Thursday
The year 2021 has been one of ceremony: 200 years since independence, 500 years since the fall of Tenochtitlán, and controversially — doubtfully — 700 years since the ancient city’s foundation. AMLO lined up a couple more. On September 27 the Army of the Three Guarantees’ entrance into Mexico City would be remembered for when Vicente Guerrero and Agustín de Iturbide’s troops joined forces in the independence struggle.
Irish President Michael Higgins joined the conference via video link.
Unconfirmed heads of state would be in attendance, and an exhibition about “the greatness of Mexico” would be inaugurated the same day. On September 28 the president would make an announcement to recognize the rights of the Yaqui people, an indigenous group mainly in Sonora.
Two Russian astronauts appeared by video from the International Space Station to wish Mexico a happy 200th birthday: “The Mexican Aztecs were famous for their deep knowledge of the starry sky. They built space observatories and observed the stars … Long live Mexico, long live freedom!” offered Pyotr Dubrov in his native tongue.
AMLO once again showed himself to be a veritable panamericano: “We have to try to unify all American peoples … just as the Europeans did … with the European Union … we have to do it in America: an economic, commercial bloc,” he said, but revealed himself to be cooler on the United Kingdom joining the North American trade agreement (USMCA): “I’m in favor of the agreement being maintained,” he said.
Politics, the president confirmed, was thirsty work: “Now it’s time for a coffee with milk, and bread,” he announced, shortly before striding away to attend to the nation.
Friday
More birthday congratulations: Ireland’s charismatic president Michael D. Higgins, 80, appeared by video to pass along some warm words. “Since my first visit to Mexico, some years ago, I was amazed with how much our nations have in common … colonization, migration, poverty and struggle.”
He highlighted Guillén de Lampart, a Wexford-born man celebrated on the Angel of Independence monument in Mexico City, who made “the first declaration of independence in Latin America in Mexico City in 1642, and was later executed for heresy,” in Higgins’ words. He also pointed to Irish-blooded Juan O’Donojú — once O’Donnohue — the last viceroy of New Spain who ratified Mexican independence, and Saint Patrick’s Battalion that fought alongside Mexicans against the United States in its mid-19th century invasion.
Later in the conference, a journalist raised a controversial corruption case in the academic community, in which scientists had allegedly filtered government money to a civil society group and spent it, in part, on “chauffeurs, cellphones … food in luxury restaurants and foreign travel,” the Attorney General’s Office alleged.
“Now they feel persecuted,” the president said. “Is the battle against corruption going to be selective?”
He read a rather vulgar tweet by Aldo Aldrete, whom he (incorrectly) identified as one of the accused: “Start with the pseudo-writer, pseudo-investigator whore … The vulture, that idiot who does not even know how to write a sentence without spelling errors [AMLO’s wife, Beatriz Gutiérrez Müller] … and thanks to the crazy idiot, the imbecile [AMLO] whose shoes are cleaned by [Attorney General] Gertz.”
One noted newspaper columnist later predicted that the president would soon be displaying insults left on the walls of public washrooms.
Hospital staff transfer a COVID-19 patient in Mexico City.
Mexico City’s official COVID-19 death toll passed 50,000 on Thursday, although the real number of fatalities is almost certainly much higher.
An additional 70 deaths were reported in the capital on Thursday, lifting its pandemic total to 50,063. Another 38 fatalities were registered on Friday, increasing Mexico City’s total number of pandemic deaths to to 50,101.
There have been doubts about the accuracy of Mexico City’s COVID-19 death toll since early in the pandemic. Various media outlets, including Sky News and The New York Times, concluded last year that deaths were being underreported and an anti-graft group reached the same conclusion after completing an analysis of death certificates.
Excess mortality data also indicates that the toll the pandemic has taken on the country is much greater than statistics show.
Crowds of masked pedestrians in the streets of Mexico City.
Still, whatever Mexico City’s real death toll is, 50,000 fatalities is a sobering milestone.
México state, which includes many municipalities that are part of the greater Mexico City metropolitan area, ranks second for deaths with 31,549.
Only five other states have recorded more than 10,000 COVID deaths. They are Jalisco (15,788); Puebla (14,381); Veracruz (13,089); Nuevo León (12,273); and Guanajuato (11,921)
In other COVID-19 news:
• Mexico recorded 10,139 new cases on Friday and 564 additional deaths. The accumulated tallies stand at just under 3.62 million and 274,703, respectively. There are 67,092 estimated active cases, a 1% decrease compared to Thursday.
• Just under 98.3 million vaccine doses have been administered, according to the latest official data. Almost 760,000 shots were given on Thursday.
About 70% of adults have received at least one shot while the vaccination rate among the entire population is approximately 50%.
• The number of hospitalized COVID patients in Mexico City hospitals continues to decline, city official Eduardo Clark said Friday. There are currently 1,677 hospitalized patients, a reduction of 330 compared to a week ago.
The capital, which has also recorded the most coronavirus cases among Mexico’s 32 states, will remain medium risk yellow on the stoplight map for the next week, Clark said.
• Applying for injunctions in order to access vaccination for people aged under 18 is “extremely individualistic,” Deputy Health Minister Hugo López-Gatell said Friday.
“We follow technical criteria so that everyone gets [a vaccine] when they need it most. That’s why we find this extremely individualistic vision that leads to the use of a [legal] resource unfortunate,” López-Gatell said.
However, he conceded that obtaining injunctions is legal and legitimate.
Hundreds of Mexican children aged 12 and over have been vaccinated after receiving court orders. López-Gatell said that health authorities have even received orders to vaccinate children as young as two.
“We can’t comply with something that would place the life of a minor at risk, … that’s impossible,” he said.
• COVID wards in 11 hospitals in Oaxaca are at capacity, Health Minister Juan Carlos Márquez Heine said Thursday. He also reported 56 additional hospitalizations of COVID patients.
The southern state recorded 360 new confirmed cases on Thursday and 20 additional deaths. Márquez said there is active transmission of the virus in 144 municipalities, including Oaxaca, Ciudad Ixtepec, Juchitán, Tehuantepec and Salina Cruz.
• Case numbers are declining in Los Cabos and and La Paz but the coronavirus risk level in the two Baja California Sur (BCS) municipalities will remain unchanged, authorities said.
“Welcome to my garden!” says Earthbox Mexico’s Bob Patterson, who has helped families all over Mexico grow in challenging soil and climate conditions.
Robert Patterson worked for the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) for over 30 years and eventually became the FAO’s senior liaison officer in North America, managing programs all over the world and searching for projects to make good, healthy food accessible to the world’s ever-increasing population. In 2002, he worked on ways to make it easy for women and children to grow vegetables at home, and launched a program called The Growing Connection.
“Perhaps the best solution we found was the earthbox,” he told me in his garden-enclosed “office” in Guadalajara. “The inventor of this system was Blake Whisenant, a tomato farmer in Florida. He faced the problem of hurricanes, which could easily destroy tomato gardens.
One day, Whisenant was distracted in church and came up with the idea of a containerized system that works exactly the same as a traditional garden in the ground but protects the inputs and saves a lot of water — as much as 80% — as well as fertilizer.
Patterson showed me the anatomy of an earthbox, and I must say, it is wonderfully clever. Each box has a filling tube in a corner into which you pour water. The box has a double bottom, and the water goes down to the lower level, which has a capacity of 10 liters.
The upper section holds the “soil,” which is a mixture of coconut fiber from Colima, perlite and worm castings. You apply an ecofriendly fertilizer, consisting of organic compost and organic fish flour.
Agronomist Adriana García shows off the new EcoHuerto earthbox, made in Mexico.
Along with all that, you also receive a few California red worms. “More fertile than this you can’t get!” Patterson said with a smile.
A plastic film used to be stretched over the top of the box with up to eight holes for the plants to poke through. Today, the film has been replaced by wood chip mulch, which performs the same function. The dynamics of what happens inside the earthbox are most interesting.
At the two bottom corners, the soil is in contact with the water chamber. Capillary action brings the water all the way to the top, where it condenses on the mulch or plastic cover and drips down onto the soil.
“The water is constantly in motion,” Patterson said, “bringing fresh nutrients to the roots. It’s as if you were relaxing in a hammock and somebody was bringing you a beer and a sandwich every two hours.”
What happens inside an earthbox reminds me of the very successful chinampa farming system used before the Spaniards’ arrival in Mexico. Small squares of land were watered by irrigation ditches that crisscrossed the fields. Water reached the plants from below by capillary action, constantly bringing them new nutrients.
In a sense, you could say Bob Patterson is presenting Mexico with a “chinampa in a box.”
With a few earthboxes, you have a vegetable garden. If you move, you can take it with you.
I asked Patterson how he got from the FAO to this project in Guadalajara.
“It all started with a series of concerts called Groundwork, which I organized in 2001 in Seattle, Washington, to combat world hunger,” he said.
One of the bands that played at the concert along with REM, Pearl Jam and Alanis Morissette was Guadalajara’s own Maná. “We liked each other,” he said, “and they liked my work.”
Maná — which supports several very successful conservation projects in Latin America — asked Patterson to bring earthboxes to Mexico. They helped finance the project by donating US $1 for every ticket they sold on their tour of the United States.
Patterson was happy to exchange his FAO job, which mainly involved office work, for a project that would bring him into direct contact with people who need help.
He teamed up with Margarita Álvarez, a longtime friend of Maná, and together they started Earthbox Mexico with headquarters in Guadalajara under the brand name EcoHuerto, which means something like “Eco Garden” and is a whole lot easier for Spanish speakers to pronounce than the word “earthbox.”
Family garden in an economically depressed zone of El Salto, Jalisco. Alberto Ruiz.
They started out by working in Jalisco’s Sierra Huichol, which has an altitude of 3,000 meters. There, they found, “there’s no water and no green, and all the local people have infected eyes and skin — habitually.”
Not surprisingly, once these people began eating leafy greens grown in earthboxes, the infections disappeared.
“We’ve also worked with indigenous communities in Chiapas, Zacatecas, Nayarit and Chihuahua,” Álvarez told me. “These people live in the most remote places imaginable, and they have unproductive land in most cases. So there they are with terrible land and terrible nutrition, living at the far end of terrible roads.”
“Sometimes our truck would make it all the way, but sometimes we would have to walk several hours more, and, of course, we would have to carry the equipment on our backs,” she added. “Then we would set up earthboxes at the local community center, school or even a private home.”
When they started, all their earthboxes were made in the United States.
“But a few years later, we bought a mold from the owners so we could build the boxes here in Mexico to keep the price down and to be more productive,” Álvarez explained. “We also decided to use recycled plastic [49%], which makes it a greener project.”
Harvest from a cotton plant in the foreground.
Today, Álvarez told me, EcoHuerto especially focuses on educational projects in schools and community centers in urban areas. These were halted by the pandemic but are now about to restart.
“We have a program called Eduhuerto,” she said. “We start a garden in a school and then go every day or once a week to work with the children, to show them the benefits of growing your own food. The kids get their hands dirty and they come to understand the importance of seeds and how they develop.
“Apart from this program for kids in school, we also do workshops for adults, right here at our headquarters. We have a basic workshop for starting your family garden, and we have workshops on producing your own compost, fertilizers and repellents.”
I searched for reviews of EcoHuerto’s earthboxes on the internet and found nothing but statements like:
“Wow, it really works!”
“Outstanding!”
Patterson’s paying customers include anyone interested in using earthboxes to garden in an ecofriendly way with a lot less water.
“Love it.”
“I have been using earth boxes for 10 years, and I still get amazed by the quality and quantity of my veggies every year!”
One reviewer, dietician Jennifer Voss, did a comparative study of the same kind of plants grown in her garden and in two earthboxes.
“For a while,” she said, “the plants in the earthbox grew at about the same rate as the plants in the ground. After about a month, the plants in the earthboxes really took off! They were 5–6 inches taller and definitely fuller than the in-ground plants.”
The best part? “I didn’t have to do any weeding!”
EcoHuerto can send an earthbox, or any of their other products, to any point in Mexico … and they speak English!
Harvest time for an earthbox owner. EcoHuerto
• To find out more about EcoHuerto, visit them at #96 Calle 4 in Guadalajara’s Colonia Seattle or call them at 333 165 5361. They can also be reached via WhatsApp at 332 207 3095. Or visit their website, their Facebook page or their Instagram site. EcoHuerto’s staff is happy to answer customer questions and offer advice on how to get the most out of their product.
The writer has lived near Guadalajara, Jalisco, for 31 years and is the author of A Guide to West Mexico’s Guachimontones and Surrounding Area and co-author of Outdoors in Western Mexico. More of his writing can be found on his website.
Margarita Alvarez with chiles growing in an earthbox where mulch has replaced the plastic film.
“Just look at our tomatoes!” Two happy earthbox customers.
Blake Whisenant, inventor of the earthbox, shows its inner workings.
Margarita Álvarez with seedlings in the EcoHuerto hothouse.
Salamanca bombing suspects were arrested Thursday.
A man and a woman have been arrested in connection with a bomb attack in Salamanca, Guanajuato, that killed two people at a birthday party last Sunday.
The Guanajuato Attorney General’s Office announced the arrest of Eduardo “N.” and Georgina “N.” – the alleged masterminds of the attack – on Thursday.
Attorney General Carlos Zamarripa said they were business partners of the bar’s owner and were owed money.
Their commercial arrangement turned sour due to a large debt, he said. “There was a partnership between them, we can’t say whether it was formal but what’s certain is they had a commercial relationship [that was formed] to open the restaurant, an amount in the millions [of pesos] was provided,” Zamarripa said.
Media reports initially linked the attack to non-compliance with extortion demands made by the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, but the arrest of the two business partners indicates that was not the case.
The homemade bomb was detonated remotely and injured five other people including the person who delivered it.
Zamarripa said authorities were able to track the suspects down after reviewing messages they sent to the courier’s cell phone. “Take [the package] to bar Barra 1604 and ask for the owner,” one message said.
