Though volcanic activity has remained light so far, Civil Protection has asked that the local population take precautions.
At least one México state municipality has set up shelters to receive potential evacuees as heightened activity continues at the Popocatépetl volcano.
There were 2,062 exhalations, 30 explosions, 13 volcano tectonic earthquakes and more than 6,000 minutes of tremors at El Popo during the first 21 days of September.
Activity at Don Goyo, as the stratovolcano is colloquially known, has increased in recent days, although the National Disaster Prevention Center (Cenapred) has not raised its alert from yellow Phase 2.
The yellow Phase 3 alert is the highest warning level before the red phase, in which people living near the volcano are advised to be ready to evacuate.
Even though the alert level is two notches below the red phase, authorities in Chalco, a municipality to the northwest of El Popo, have prepared seven shelters to receive residents who could be required to evacuate their homes.
Other municipalities in the southeast of México state, such as Amecameca, Ecatzingo and Ozumba, are on alert. A large eruption at Popocatépetl would also likely affect residents of Puebla and Morelos as the volcano straddles those two states and México state.
Cenapred has warned people not to go near the volcano, especially its crater due to the risk of further exhalations, explosions and other volcanic activity. A safety radius of 12 kilometers remains in effect around what is Mexico’s most active volcano.
Just over 100 exhalations of water vapor, gases and ash were recorded in the 24-hour period to late Tuesday. There were six explosions at the volcano last Friday, the highest number of any day this month, and small quantities of ash have reached several México state municipalities as well as some boroughs of Mexico City.
Authorities recommend that people in the vicinity of the volcano cover their nose and mouth with a face mask or handkerchief to avoid inhaling ash. They also advise residents to close the windows of their homes and stay inside as much as possible.
The Popocatépetl volcano, whose name comes from Náhuatl and means “smoking mountain,” woke up in December 1994 after 56 years of inactivity to blow ash over Puebla.
Searchers remove a body from the rubble of the slide.
A search team recovered the bodies of two missing people buried under a 200-tonne rock Tuesday on Cerro de Chiquihuite (Chiquihuite Hill). The populous hill on the boundary of Tlalnepantla and the Mexico City borough of Gustavo A. Madero suffered a landslide on September 10, dislodging enormous boulders and killing four people.
Rescuers found the remains of Paola Campos Robledo, 22, and her son Dilan Armando, 5, in the same area where the body of Campos’ daughter, Mía Mayrín, 3, was recovered on September 14. The bodies were transported to the state Attorney General’s Office for their identities to be confirmed. The three victims are survived by the victims’ husband and father, Jorge Armando, 25, a construction worker who was not in the area during the landslide.
México state Governor Alfredo del Mazo previously pointed to heavy rains and the 7.1-magnitude earthquake on September 7 as probable causes of the slide, which buried at least 10 houses and left hundreds of families affected.
Tlalnepantla Mayor Raciel Pérez described the Cerro del Chiquihuite as a high risk area, and that Civil Protection officers were in the area to prevent further incidents.
Local authorities urged people to evacuate their homes in the days following the disaster due to the high probability of another landslide, but residents were slow to respond to the request. It is not clear how many people are still living on Cerro del Chiquihuite.
The federal government has declared a state of emergency in the municipality on the request of local officials. The declaration will facilitate the provision of resources to meet food, shelter and sanitary needs of those affected.
The other confirmed fatality was Mariana Martínez Rodríguez, a young student at the National Autonomous University.
The third wave of the coronavirus pandemic has been receding for eight weeks, Deputy Health Minister Hugo López-Gatell said Tuesday.
But data from the Reuters COVID-19 tracker paints a slightly different picture, although it also shows that the delta-driven wave is on the wane.
The Reuters data shows that the average number of new infections reported each day has fallen by more than 7,500 over the past three weeks to 8,143. The latter figure represents just 43% of the rolling seven-day peak recorded on August 17, but that was just five weeks ago, suggesting that the pandemic might not have been declining for as long as López-Gatell claims.
However, the government has long stressed that the case numbers reported on a daily basis are not necessarily indicative of infections detected that day. Some may have been detected weeks or even months earlier, health officials have said.
Speaking at President López Obrador’s regular news conference, the government’s pandemic chief also said that the number of hospitalized COVID-19 patients is declining.
Migrants are vaccinated by health officials in Tapachula, Chiapas.
“We’re continuing to see this trend of the vacation of [beds in] COVID hospitals,” López-Gatell said. “… This is a maintained trend in the entire national territory.”
Federal data shows that there are just under 9,000 hospitalized COVID patients across the country. Durango has the highest occupancy rate for general care hospital beds – currently just under 58% – while 51% of beds with ventilators are taken in Tabasco, more than in any other state.
Meanwhile, Mexico’s accumulated case tally rose to 3.58 million on Tuesday with 12,521 new infections reported.
The official COVID-19 death toll increased by 815 to 272,580, and there are 64,175 estimated active cases across the country, a 6% increase compared to Monday.
Almost 96.1 million vaccine doses have been administered in Mexico, according to the latest official data, after just over 442,000 were given Monday.
“The epidemic is declining and vaccination is not stopping,” López-Gatell wrote on Twitter.
About 70% of Mexican adults have received at least one shot, while the population wide vaccination rate is 49%, according to The New York Times vaccinations tracker. About one-third of Mexico’s 126 million citizens are fully vaccinated.
Angélica Maturano, left, with her sister Cristina Maturano opened their events hall as a public shelter after floods in Tula left neighbors without a place to sleep.
A Hidalgo businesswoman has become a community hero after opening a shelter for victims of flooding in the central state.
When severe flooding affected the municipality of Tula earlier this month, Angélica Maturano was approached by a neighbor looking for a dry and safe place where he and his family could sleep because their own home had been inundated with water.
Despite some initial reluctance, she decided to let them stay at a warehouse-cum-events hall she owns. Other flood victims soon arrived at the makeshift shelter, and Maturano let them in too, seeing the number of occupants swell quickly to a peak of 90 before declining over the past two weeks to the current level of 54.
“This [shelter] was opened by chance; on Monday [September 6] ‘Fili,’ a neighbor, arrived … to ask me for help,” Maturano told the newspaper Milenio.
“The truth is I didn’t want to [open the warehouse] but seeing the anguish on his face won my heart over in the end – I put myself in his shoes and opened the doors,” she said.
Maturano expected to open her hall up to neighbors for a few days, but cleanup from the floods has been slow.
“There were about 90 people here the first day [and] those 90 people were given food. My sister Cristina and I took the decision to help … because we saw they didn’t have anywhere to sleep. … I thought that … the water would go down, we’d clean up like on other occasions and we’d all return to our normal lives [but] that hasn’t happened. We’ve been here 15 days,” said Maturano, who has provided mattresses and blankets to the shelter occupants.
She and her sister have also passed on donated food and medications to Tula residents whose homes weren’t as badly affected by the floods but nevertheless lacked the essential items they needed to survive.
Maturano said the homes of some of those taking refuge in the shelter sustained flooding damage that is so severe that they will never be habitable again. She also said that residents are living in fear due to the risk of more flooding.
“We’re living in fear, in desperation because a lot of people were left without a home and without work, and because there’s been four flooding alerts in 15 days,” Maturano said.
“I’ve gone to the [flooded] homes and schools and I come back crying because … I see the devastation and I say ‘that’s not the Tula where I grew up,’” she said.
“I call on the federal government to support those people who have lost everything. … their homes, their businesses.”
Supplies the sisters have collected to distribute to Tula’s flood victims.
A dole of 109 turtles was born Sunday in Los Cabos, Baja California Sur, but two of the newborns particularly stood out.
They were albinos, and will be easy to recognize among their 108 siblings. “They are a rarity among their sisters,” wrote Carlos Villalobos, the head of the Network to Protect Sea Turtles in Los Cabos.
Graciela Tiburcio, from the same animal conservation group, said the two albinos were healthy and were released into the ocean together with the other baby turtles.
Tiburcio said the two albinos are not as miraculous as they might appear. “Albinism is not uncommon in the animal kingdom. In the case of sea turtles, some cases of albinism can be observed during the season during nest cleanings. What makes this case unique and exceptional is that the turtles appear to be in perfect health,” she added.
In recent years, work has increased among conservationists to protect sea turtles, by protecting their nests from human disturbance. Once born, the turtles are released into the sea with the purpose of promoting their reproduction since some species are in danger of extinction.
Los Cabos is one area where conservationists work to protect turtles. One of their methods sees locals and tourists invited to release the newborn turtles into the sea.
From left to right, Conagua's listing of states that could be seeing some rain. Some areas could also experience thunderstorms or hail.
Mexico’s national weather service (Conagua) announced that Mexico’s first cold front of the year has arrived, bringing forecasts of falling temperatures as well as heavy rains, strong winds and even hail in some states, mainly in the north and northeast.
The fronts usually have a duration of between five and seven days.
Cold front season runs from September 15–May 15, generally affecting northern, eastern and southeastern states, and later reaching the center and west of the country. It is most intense in mid-winter from December to February.
Snow recently fell for the first time this year last week on the continent’s northernmost city, Utqiagvik (previously known as Barrow), Alaska, and the spread of arctic ice is in a greater amount than it has been for more than a decade, both signs that wintry conditions have arrived and are heading south.
The cold front, which is interacting with a low-pressure system, according to Conagua, arrived in Chihuahua and Coahuila Tuesday morning and will reach Nuevo León and Tamaulipas Wednesday and northern Veracruz Wednesday night. It is likely to reach the south of the state Thursday.
The front’s movement will bring heavy rains, some hailstorms and winds of 50 kilometers per hour to affected areas. In the north and east, Sonora, Coahuila, Nuevo León and Tamaulipas could see as much as 75 millimeters of rain, according to Conagua, as could Nayarit and Jalisco in the west.
Temperatures are predicted to be lower in the afternoon in the north, northeast, east and center of the country at 20–30 C. Sunrise is likely to record temperatures of 10–19 C, while higher areas of the Altiplano might not exceed 10 C. The first norte, a local wind phenomenon, will arrive for a prolonged spell on the coasts of Tamaulipas, Veracruz and the Isthmus of Tehuantepec with gusts of 60–85 kph.
An Olympic medalist was grateful for the 50,000 peso check (about US $2,500) she received for her performance at the Tokyo Games — until she tried to cash it at the bank.
Aremi Fuentes won bronze in women’s weightlifting at the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games. She said she was later given a check by the Baja California Governor Jaime Bonilla but the bank said there were no funds to cover it.
“We were given a prize of 50,000 pesos in recognition of what we did in the Olympic Games. We even had an official photo taken … it’s not just that the check doesn’t have funds, I’ve been told that the check doesn’t exist,” she said.
“Other Olympic medalists who went to Tokyo 2020 were given 150,000 pesos for winning medals, plus a salary of 20,000 per month, while I earn 3,000 monthly plus 3,500 for food. I have been representing the state since 2014; it seems like a mockery what they have done, to give me a check in front of the media and it doesn’t exist; it doesn’t have funds,” she added.
The weightlifter posted on social media to explain that she feared she wouldn’t receive the money. “I don’t know if they will retaliate, it is possible that they will delay with speeches and promises until November when the government changes and for that reason it is now or never.”
Fuentes is also waiting for a prize that will be delivered by the federal government from money raised through the presidential raffle on September 15.
The weightlifter won her medal by lifting 245 kilos. Ecuador’s Neisi Patricia Dajomes Barrera won gold after lifting 263 kilos.
The Salamanca restaurant where a bomb was delivered Sunday.
Two men were killed and five other people were injured Sunday when a bomb disguised as a birthday present exploded in Salamanca, Guanajuato.
A courier on a motorcycle delivered a package with balloons attached to it to a restaurant/bar in the El Deportivo neighborhood on Sunday evening.
Owner Mauricio Salvador Romero and manager Mario Alberto Hernández took delivery of the package and were killed when it exploded seconds later.
Authorities are investigating what kind of explosive device was used in the attack.
Guanajuato Governor Diego Sinhué described the incident as “a terrorist attack unprecedented in the state.”
According to a report by the newspaper Milenio, Romero’s business – Barra – had been subjected to extortion demands for seven months prior to Sunday’s bomb attack. People who identified themselves as members of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG) were demanding payments of 50,000 pesos (about US $2,500) per week.
Family members of Romero also told Milenio that complaints about the extortion were filed with the Guanajuato Attorney General’s Office but it took no action.
Romero’s brother claimed that the attack was designed to intimidate residents of Salamanca, a city of almost 300,000 people where violence and extortion are common.
“My brother and Mario were the victims but the message wasn’t just for them,” Eddie Romero said.
“… This was a message to say that they [the CJNG] are here, … that they’re not leaving. It’s a message to cause terror, to force us to lock ourselves away in our homes,” he said.
However, the head of the Guanajuato public security system said in an interview that “this event doesn’t coincide with the intimidatory characteristics” traditionally used by criminal groups in Guanajuato, where the CJNG and the Santa Rosa de Lima Cartel are engaged in a violent turf war.
Sophía Huett told Radio Fórmula that one line of investigation is that the explosive device was sent to Barra to settle a personal matter – the non-payment of the weekly 50,000 peso derecho de piso fee.
But she stressed that non-compliance with extortion demands was not the only possible motive under investigation.
In a separate interview, Eddie Romero urged authorities to not just deliver justice in the case but also guarantee peace in Salamanca, located in Mexico’s most violent state.
“My family and I are completely devastated, it’s difficult,” he said. “… Beyond justice we want peace for those of us who are still here, for those who live in Salamanca.”
Sunday’s bomb attack wasn’t the first time explosives have been deployed in the city. Explosive devices were found in vehicles near the Pemex refinery in 2019 and 2020. The Santa Rosa de Lima Cartel, which is reportedly backed by the Sinaloa Cartel, allegedly planted the bombs but none exploded.
“In the state of Guanajuato, more than in other places, for some time now they have begun using explosives to commit crimes, and to try to spread fear and terror,” President López Obrador said Monday. “This is a delicate situation.”
The writer and his daughter walking on Hualahuises' Hanging Bridge. Visiting here is about enjoying natural areas and the town's unhurried pace of life.
Whenever we tire of the dusty bustle of Linares, Nuevo León, my adopted city, my family packs some towels in a bag, slips into flip-flops and escapes to the neighboring town of Hualahuises.
To get there, you take the Old Road to Hualahuises (el viejo camino a Hualahuises). It is a glorious 13-kilometer drive through ejidos (communally owned land), farms and large ranches and past cornfields and acres of orange and grapefruit groves laden with fruit, the blue intensity of the Sierra Madre mountains shimmering before you like a mirage.
I am averse to religion, but as you enter the town, you become aware of an almost transcendental sense of peace and tranquility. With its long, straight, nearly traffic-less streets, Huala (as the locals call it) brings to mind Comala, the ghost town in the classic Mexican novel Pedro Páramo.
Half the population of Hualahuises either lives in the United States or works there seasonally as fruit pickers, mainly in Washington state — hence its nickname “HualaWashington.” Remittances provide a vital stimulus for the local construction industry, and returning families on vacation inject much-needed dollars into the economy.
Lying 118 kilometers southwest of Monterrey, the state capital, this rural town of 7,000 straddling the Hualahuises river was founded by the Spanish colonist Martín de Zavala in 1646 and first populated by small bands of indigenous Borrados and Gualagüises) as well as transplanted Tlaxcalans.
Enormous gnarled tree roots on the Hualahuises River.
Napoleón Nevarez Pequeño, the town’s official historian, or cronista (chronicler), dubbed the town “the Vatican of Nuevo León” not only because of its particular Catholic character but also because it’s the only municipality in the state surrounded on all sides by another municipality, i.e. Linares.
At the settlement’s founding, the Franciscans brought with them a carved wooden image of St. Christopher, one of three of its kind in Mexico. The locals adopted him as their patron saint.
Believed to be miraculous, the statue is housed in the Temple of St. Christopher downtown and is only removed from the church during religious feast days and processions.
Once, the story goes, when strangers attempted to make off with the statue, it grew so heavy that the astonished interlopers were forced to abandon it in the road. But when some passing farmers came upon it, they lifted it with ease and returned it to its rightful place.
I first visited Huala in December 2001. I was 28 and had just begun dating a young teacher from the school where we both worked.
On weekends, Verónica would drive us there in her big old red Chrysler junker, a cassette tape of Huapango music or the Beatles wafting through the open windows. I felt an immediate sense of inner calm and well-being and a reduction in stress and anxiety. I also loved how green everything was, with sabino, oak and fruit trees growing freely.
The Temple of St. Christopher, where an image of the town’s patron saint still sits since Franciscan monks brought it with the settlement of Hualahuises in 1646.
Twilight here is a rare delight. As evening’s shadows slowly lengthen, people sit outside their homes and sip a furtive Tecate while they talk over the day’s events and gossip with friends and neighbors.
Driving slowly along the silent, dimly illuminated streets, the sizzle of frying chicken or carne asada in back yards mixes with the sounds of conversation and light laughter.
A day-tripper might be tempted to dismiss the place as a sleepy backwater — “a hotbed of rest,” as the late Irish poet and travel writer Kildare Dobbs once sardonically described 1950s Ottawa — but this palpable peace cannot be put down solely to the absence of people. The inhabitants themselves exude an air of inner reserve and calm.
In almost 20 years of visiting Huala, I have never seen anyone here angry or aggressive — or even raising their voice. The people comport themselves with quiet dignity, and when they observe you, it is in a discreet manner, never in a way that causes visitors discomfort.
With my red hair, freckles and pasty white skin, the dogs in the street know I’m an outsider, but no one has once directed at me that coldest of Spanish words: extranjero.
The only commotion I ever witnessed there was when I, my brother and a mutual friend were chased by a red bull while exploring a secluded part of the river. A local woman was shocked to see three gringos, one of them a 6-foot-4 Newfoundlander, running toward her house in a state of barely suppressed panic.
Half the population of Hualahuises either lives in the United States or works in Washington state seasonally as fruit pickers, making for quiet streets much of the year.
In 2014, the dean of a local university, Ángel Alameda Pedraza, asked me to organize an international literary event with an emphasis on education. El Congreso de Lengua y Literatura (The Congress of Language and Literature) attracted writers from Mexico and around the world. Whenever I could, I would load up the car with authors and sneak them away to Hualahuises for a few hours.
I can still see Canadian poet Bruce Meyer sitting on a rock in his white Stetson safari hat, writing in his journal with a ballpoint pen while a white horse cropped grass on the opposite bank of the river. Bruce would write 29 poems about his experiences in Mexico, which I published in a bilingual edition called “A Linares” (To Linares).
Despite the book’s title, a number of the poems were set in Hualahuises. The white horse — which put Bruce in mind of the one running through the center of the city in Costa-Gavras’ political thriller film Z — features in his poem “Nadar at Río Hualahuises:” (Swimming at the Hualahuises River).
It is common for people from Linares, and even Monterrey, to drive here to sample the town’s excellent cuisine. Tacos Ibarra is famous throughout the region, while Restaurant El Puente is known for its traditional local specialties, including menudo (a thick broth), asado de puerco (pork stew) and guisado de res (beef stew).
My personal favorite is La Parrilla de Gil, a family-run eatery serving delicious tacos (carne asada, trompo, mixtos), hamburgers, tacos piratas and gorditas.
Over the years, our trips to Huala have become more frequent. From the moment I showed Kathleen and Emma how to swim in the clear, cold, shallow waters of the Hualahuises River, they always plead to come back.
A tranquil park in Hualahuises.
That river is part of us now; it runs through our veins.
Upriver from the famous Hanging Bridge (El Puente Colgante), there is a pool (charco, or “puddle,” in the local idiom) beneath the shade of an old sabino festooned with streamers of grey-green moss, where we like to bathe with frogs, darting sprats, and squirrels while entranced by the intermittent “hoo” of a hidden owl or the long ratcheting whine of cicadas on reverb.
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Having been raised in Lanesboro, a small rural Irish town on the banks of the majestic River Shannon, I am at home here among these big shady trees, the hearty fare, the charming country people and the laid-back pace of life.
Maybe that’s part of the spell of Hualahuises — maybe I have found my emotional correlative to Lanesboro here? Certainly, watching my daughters splash around and hearing their shrieks of laughter calls to mind my own early days, as to have children is to relive one’s own childhood.
Colin Carberry is a Canadian-born and Irish-raised writer who lives in Los Linares, Nuevo León, with his wife and two daughters. He has published four poetry collections and his work has appeared in publications in North America, Europe and Asia.
Deputy Arturo Lemus, right, with his son Mario, who was killed Sunday in Zapopan, Jalisco. File photo
The murdered son of a state lawmaker in Jalisco was a singer and composer of narcocorridos, a genre that glorifies and pays tribute to narcos.
Some of the songs by Mario Alberto Lemus Romero, which were uploaded to YouTube, were dedicated to the alleged leader of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG), Nemesio “El Mencho” Oseguera Cervantes.
Lemus, 18, son of Morena Deputy Arturo Lemus Herrera, was killed Sunday by four men in a cemetery in Zapopan, Jalisco, 15 kilometers from the center of Guadalajara. He was declared dead at the scene by emergency personnel.
His brother, who witnessed the attack, suffered a nervous breakdown.
The song El Imperio del Árabe 7-7, or The Arab’s Empire 7-7, on which Lemus is a featured vocalist with the band Banda Puro Grullo, was uploaded to YouTube on September 5 and has had more than 16,000 views. A photo of Oseguera appears as a backdrop to the video, and references are made to him within the song.
The song title and the name of Lemus’ former band, Mario Lemus y Su Código 7, also make oblique references to José Luis Gutiérrez Valencia, a CJNG operative who was known by the alias 7-7.
In the song El Grande or The Great, Lemus pays tribute to Gutiérrez, who died in a shootout in 2017, singing, “With respect … there will never be another one like you.”
In the wake of the murder, Jalisco Governor Enrique Alfaro Ramírez extended his condolences to the Morena deputy.
“I want to express my condolences to Deputy Arturo Lemus Herrera for the cowardly murder of his son Mario. I know there are no words for these moments of pain. I have instructed the prosecutor’s office not to pause the investigations until the facts are clarified and those responsible are found,” he said in a tweet.
