A baby stolen Wednesday evening from a hospital in Zapopan, Jalisco, has been found in good health, police announced on Thursday.
Neighbors found the infant abandoned in the parking area of a building in the Arcos de Zapopan neighborhood. She was taken to hospital for medical evaluation where Jalisco Governor Enrique Alfaro reported that the baby was in good health and that her father had identified her. The governor added that further forensic confirmation of her identity was in progress. Several hours later, the baby was shown back in her mother’s arms.
“The baby who was stolen yesterday from the Hospital General de Occidente is back in her mother’s arms today … but this is not over, we are still looking for the perpetrators,” Alfaro said on Twitter.
The Jalisco Attorney General’s Office is also investigating a related incident in which a woman tried to take a baby from another nearby hospital on August 20. At the time, staff stopped her and rescued the baby, but did not report the incident to authorities.
Attorney General Gerardo Octavio Solís Gómez said agents are investigating whether it could have been the same person who successfully kidnapped the newborn on Wednesday.
Solís also noted that the woman who stole the infant on Wednesday had knowledge of the staff shift schedule, suggesting that she may have been assisted by someone who worked for the hospital.
Healthcare workers at a hospital in Tamaulipas, which set a record Wednesday for new cases.
More than 20,000 new coronavirus cases were added to Mexico’s accumulated tally for a second consecutive day on Thursday, while the official COVID-19 death toll rose by 835.
The Health Ministry reported 20,633 new infections, raising the country’s pandemic total to just over 3.29 million.
The additional fatalities lifted the death toll to 256,287, a figure that is almost certainly a vast undercount given that there were almost half a million excess deaths between January 2020 and March 2021.
There are 132,418 active cases across Mexico, a 2.5% increase compared to Wednesday. On a per capita basis, Colima has the highest number of active cases with almost 400 per 100,000 people, the Health Ministry reported. Mexico City ranks second followed by Tabasco, San Luis Potosí and Nayarit.
Four states have fewer than 50 active cases per 100,000 people. They are Chihuahua, Chiapas, Baja California and Morelos.
In other COVID-19 news:
• Almost 82.7 million vaccine doses have been administered in Mexico, according to the most recent Health Ministry data, after just over 755,000 were given Wednesday. About 63% of the eligible population – people aged 18 and over – has received at least one shot.
• Tamaulipas recorded its worst day of the pandemic in terms of new case numbers on Wednesday. Authorities in the northern border state reported 740 new infections, 23 more than the previous record set a week ago.
Reynosa recorded the highest number of new cases with 145 followed by Matamoros (114); Tampico (96); Ciudad Madero (89); and Ciudad Victoria (65).
Tamaulipas also recorded 10 additional COVID-19 deaths on Wednesday. The state’s official death toll is currently 5,824, according to state data, while the accumulated case tally is 75,509.
• A Pan American Health Organization Official said Thursday that Mexican authorities should seek to identify members of the community with worrying symptoms of COVID-19 and get them to hospital before it’s too late.
Coronavirus cases and deaths in Mexico as reported by day. milenio
“… Identifying those who present symptoms of alert and taking them to a COVID unit can save lives, more so than just waiting in hospitals for them to arrive in very deteriorated conditions,” Cristian Morales said.
He noted that the third wave of the pandemic is hitting Mexico hard and that almost 1,000 people have died per day recently. The high death toll has occurred, Morales said, even though the federal government significantly increased the capacity of public hospitals to treat COVID patients.
• The Colima Health Ministry reported Wednesday that it had detected the state’s first confirmed case of the lambda strain of the coronavirus. The variant was first identified in Peru, which easily has the highest per capita COVID-19 death rate in the world with 609 fatalities per 100,000 people. Scientists have warned that the strain could be even more contagious than delta but that hasn’t been confirmed.
The World Health Organization lists lamda as a “variant of interest” whereas the alpha, beta, gamma and delta strains are “variants of concern.”
• The Uruapan General Hospital reported Tuesday that its COVID ward was full.
There are more than 1,000 active cases in the Michoacán municipality, where the risk of infection is maximum risk red, according to local authorities.
According to federal data, the occupancy rate for general care beds in COVID wards is 100% at 120 hospitals across the country.
Among the hospitals at capacity are facilities located in Mexico City; Pátzcuaro, Michoacán; La Paz, Baja California Sur; Mazatlán, Sinaloa; Toluca, México state; and Tehuacán, Puebla.
Oscar Ponzanelli was commissioned to create the statue of the president by the group Realidades Mi Mundo Mágico (My Magical World Realities).
President López Obrador will soon be able to adorn his home with a statue in his likeness.
A citizens’ group commissioned a statue of the president to celebrate his successes in office since he assumed the country’s top job in late 2018.
Artist Oscar Ponzanelli was commissioned by members of the civil society association Realidades Mi Mundo Mágico (My Magical World Realities) to make the life-sized statue of the leader commonly known as AMLO. He completed it in April.
Eduardo Abelardo, the association’s president, said the statue will soon be delivered to the president with the hope that it will be displayed at the National Palace, Mexico’s seat of executive power that doubles as López Obrador’s home.
The gift acknowledges AMLO’s “tireless work” in the fight against political corruption, his efforts to obtain COVID-19 vaccines and his dedication to the social well-being of the people of Mexico, Abelardo said in a video posted to social media.
“Followers of our president from all over the Mexican republic united in a group, and seeing his achievements and successes, we decided … to have a monument made with the slogan ‘no more political corruption, no to organized crime and yes to social well-being,’” he said.
But receiving the statue might not make the president as happy as they would hope. López Obrador said in 2019 that when he leaves the presidency, he doesn’t want any streets to be named after him or statues in his likeness to be erected in public places.
“… I don’t want anything to do with a cult of personality, … none of that,” he said.
However, there are already streets and even entire neighborhoods named after him in several states, the newspaper El Universal reported.
A still from the film Laberinto Yo’eme, a documentary about the Yaqui people that is set to premiere in select theaters across Mexico.
A documentary about the Yaqui people of Sonora and the struggles and injustices they have faced for decades begins screening in cinemas this week.
Laberinto Yo’eme, the debut film of Sergi Pedro Ros, will open Friday in Mexico City cinemas including the Cineteca Nacional and Cine Tonalá. The documentary will also begin screening in the coming days in other cities across Mexico, including Oaxaca, Veracruz, Monterrey and Guadalajara.
“My main interest [in making the film] came from the fact the Yaqui tribe is living through a situation of terrifying injustice,” Ros told the newspaper Milenio.
Members of the community participated in several protests last year to demand the return of expropriated land and the delivery of basic services authorities promised to them. They have also been affected by high levels of violence in Sonora, and two Yaqui activists who collaborated on the documentary, Tomás Rojo and Luis Urbano, were recently murdered.
“As a filmmaker, I was very interested in telling the story of a people who, despite all the extermination attempts they’ve lived through and which they continue suffering, continue to fight for who they are – keeping their culture, language, worldview and universe alive,” he said.
Made in conjunction with the Mexican Institute of Cinematography, the film shows the reality that the Yaqui community of southern Sonora is experiencing today, Ros said.
“Unfortunately, the story we tell in Laberinto Yo’eme is current, it’s what’s happening at the moment,” he said.
Their land rights have been violated for decades despite a 1940 presidential decree that recognized them as the owners of the land on which they live, Ros said.
Although the film explores a range of difficulties and challenges faced by the Yaqui people, it’s not all doom and gloom. It also gives viewers an insight into the traditional customs of the community, a group that is best known to some for inspiring the Carlos Castaneda book The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge.
Ros said that his documentary might eventually find its way to a streaming service but emphasized that he made it specifically to be shown on the big screen.
“After you see this film you will never forget who the Yaquis are and what they’re living through at the moment,” he said.
The president announces the cabinet change in a video Thursday.
The minister responsible for Mexico’s domestic affairs will return to the Senate and her post will be taken by the governor of Tabasco, President López Obrador announced Thursday afternoon.
Olga Sánchez Cordero, 74, has served as minister of the interior since the López Obrador administration took office on December 1, 2018. She returns to the Senate, to which she was elected in September 2018, prior to which she was a Supreme Court justice for 20 years.
Tabasco Governor Adán Augusto López, 57, will take her place subject to obtaining a leave of absence in Tabasco, where he has been governor since January 2019. His terms ends at the end of this year.
López served as a senator between 2012 and 2018 and prior to that as a Tabasco state deputy between 2009 and 2012.
The president said in a video posted Thursday afternoon on social media that he invited Sánchez to head the Ministry of the Interior to set a precedent indicating a women could hold the post.
He praised her for her support and loyalty before introducing the new minister as his “friend, countryman and close friend.”
A petition filed this month by a coalition of environmental groups is asking that Mexico be investigated for not executing fishing and trading laws in the agreement that could protect the vaquita. Paula Olson/NOAA
A new petition has urged the United States to initiate a consultation with Mexico on its failure to protect the world’s most endangered porpoise, the vaquita marina.
Endemic to the Gulf of California, the vaquita is an estimated 10 individuals away from extinction, a number so critically low that it is considered the most threatened marine mammal on the planet. Yet the national government continues to fail in its regulation and penalization of illegal fishing in the area, leading to mounting international pressure for Mexico to be held to account.
Conservation groups, including the Center for Biological Diversity, submitted the petition to the Commission of the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (UMSCA) Secretariat requesting enforcement against Mexico for its failure to execute fishing and trading laws on August 11. Further, the petition asks the Commission on Environmental Cooperation (CEC) to investigate and develop a “factual record” on Mexico’s failures, and for the U.S. Trade Representative’s environment committee to initiate a consultation.
This consultation is the first step in the USMCA’s formal enforcement process and could lead to sanctions for the Mexican government.
Historically, the government of Mexico has failed to implement sanctions against illegal fishing in the vaquita’s habitat in the upper Gulf of California, where observers documented more than 1,100 unlawful vessels in November 2020 alone.
The area lies within the Gulf of California, an area of high natural biodiversity that boasts a third of the world’s cetacean species, such as whales, dolphins and porpoises, and includes the remainder of the vaquita population. The small, elusive creatures are often killed as bycatch in gillnet fishing for the totoaba fish, which, like the small porpoise, is also critically endangered and whose swim bladder is illegally traded at prodigiously high prices overseas.
Despite its name, the reality of the ZTA is far from what it purports to be, says Alejandro Olivera, a senior scientist with the Center for Biological Diversity, a nonprofit conservation organization.
“The Mexican government’s plan is silly,” he said.
Officials will be wasting precious time counting vessels within an area where zero fishing is supposed to be tolerated, he explained. “They won’t even bother fully enforcing the fishing ban until 50 illegal boats are detected in this small area.”
Yvette Griffiths of the environmental nonprofit Ninth Wave Global agrees:
“The bottom line here is that there is no genuine political will to act because there are too many other vested interests at play, by which I mean economic interests. So what we essentially have is the authorities paying lip service to conservation while in fact not taking it remotely seriously.”
Totoaba fishermen.
The petition filed with the USMCA Secretariat this month stresses the urgency of putting real pressure on the government to act. With only 10 vaquitas likely remaining anywhere in the world, the time to take action is fast running out.
Yet, in spite of years of regulations, talks and promises by the Mexican government to protect the small porpoise, officials have consistently turned a blind eye to illegal fishing in the Gulf of California.
An absence of government presence, however, does not equate to an absence of power structures altogether; endemic to Latin America are vacuums of power — caused largely by government weakness or neglect — into which external power blocs can step.
In this instance, the traffickers, specializing in the poaching and distribution of the totoaba swim bladder, are diversifications of the cartels that control huge territories across the Baja Peninsula. Using their existing influence and networks to cash in on the lucrative totoaba maw trade, transnational networks ship what is known as the “cocaine of the sea” to China, where they sell for prohibitively high prices.
And given that groups on operations to try and stop the use of illegal gillnets in the area have received anonymous death threats while patrolling the waters of the gulf, it is little wonder that the already scant government patrols are rarely keen to go up against these entrenched interests who stand to gain from continued illegal fishing.
The Mexican government needs both encouragement — to recognize the importance of enforcing sanctions against the illegal fishing which threatens the vaquita — and support in order to make headway into the entangled power structures currently at play in the gulf.
With this in mind, the conservation groups behind the petition say that the need for the intervention of the international community is more pressing than ever.
“Action must be immediate, and it must be radical,” says Griffiths. “The protection of what little remains of the vaquita population is about conserving the biodiversity of the entire ecosystem of the upper Gulf of California. Government negligence means that the vaquita has little chance of survival, but the actions taken now will set precedent for the future.”
The question now is this: will international policies continue to sleepwalk down the same roads in the future, or can alliances such as the USMCA establish a firm and functioning system of intervention to act as potential mitigation for future species and biodiversity loss?
Shannon Collins is an environment correspondent at Ninth Wave Global, an environmental organization and think tank. She writes from Campeche.
Just over 200,000 deaths was the official count as of March 31.
Additional evidence that the coronavirus pandemic has been far deadlier than official numbers indicate was published on Wednesday.
There were almost half a million more deaths than expected in Mexico between January 2020 and March 2021, the national statistics agency Inegi reported.
Based on 2015-19 mortality data, 940,329 deaths were expected in the 15-month period. Instead there were 1,437,805 deaths, a difference of 497,476, or 53%.
Not all such deaths can be attributed to COVID-19 – especially considering that some people have put off seeking treatment for other medical conditions during the pandemic – but most of them likely were.
The federal government acknowledged at the end of March that Mexico’s true COVID-19 death toll was almost 60% higher than the official count of test-confirmed fatalities but the new Inegi data suggests that the real figure could be even higher.
If three-quarters of the excess fatalities were caused by COVID, Mexico’s real death toll at the end of March was 84% higher than the official one.
Excess mortality was more prevalent among men than women between January 2020 and March 2021. Almost 592,000 women died in the period, a figure nearly 179,000, or 43%, higher than that anticipated. Almost 845,500 men died in the same period, almost 318,000, or 60%, more than expected.
The data is consistent with evidence that shows that men are more likely to die from COVID-19 than women.
Mexico City – the country’s coronavirus epicenter since the beginning of the pandemic – recorded the highest excess mortality rate with 85.6% more deaths than expected. México state and Tlaxcala both ranked second with mortality 77.1% higher than expected, while Puebla and Morelos rounded out the top five with rates of 55.7% and 54.8%, respectively.
In the first three months of this year – a period that includes Mexico’s worst month of the pandemic in terms of deaths – there were 29 fatalities per 10,000 people, according to Inegi, an 80% increase compared to the same period of 2020.
Mexico City had the highest per capita death rate in the period with 60 fatalities per 10,000 people. Morelos ranked second with 41 followed by Guanajuato (35) and Tlaxcala (35).
Quintana Roo had the lowest rate with 13 fatalities per 10,000 people followed by Chiapas (15) and Campeche (16). The latter two states have the lowest coronavirus case tallies in the country.
The total number of deaths across Mexico in the first three months of 2021 was 368,906, the highest first quarter figure on record.
Supporters of the bill with a rainbow banner outside the legislature on Wednesday.
The Congress of Yucatán approved same-sex marriage on Wednesday with 20 of 25 lawmakers voting in favor of the bill.
Same-sex couples can now legally marry in 22 of Mexico’s 32 states. The approval in Yucatán came two months after the legislatures of Baja California and Sinaloa voted in favor of marriage equality.
The bill, put forward by independent Deputy Milagros Romero, modifies article 94 of the Yucatán constitution that previously stated that marriage was an exclusive institution between a man and a woman.
Marriage is now defined as a “free and voluntary legal union of two people with equal rights, duties and obligations.”
The Congress previously rejected same-sex marriage on two occasions. Those votes were held in secret, triggering legal action. The Supreme Court recently ruled in favor of the plaintiffs – activist groups and others – and ordered the Congress to hold a new vote.
“Almost three years of constant struggle went by but the final result is for all Yucatán citizens who were discriminated against,” said Silvia López Escoffié, an independent deputy. “We’re very satisfied.”
Two Institutional Revolutionary Party deputies and three with the conservative National Action Party, which holds power in Yucatán, voted against the bill. Governor Mauricio Vila expressed his support for the decision.
“The decision the Yucatán Congress took today is the fruit of our democracy and that makes us stronger as a society,” he wrote on Twitter. “I call on everyone to respect each other and work together. We are always stronger together.”
The Yucatán Congress also voted unanimously in favor of prison sentences of up to three years for anyone offering sexual orientation conversion therapy treatment. Anyone conducting conversion therapy with minors can be incarcerated for double that length of time.
New streetlights were installed in Mérida in 2011, but the next mayor had them removed.
The bank accounts of the city of Mérida, Yucatán, and real estate it owns were placed under an embargo on Wednesday due to the municipal government’s failure to pay a 10-year-old debt owed to the bank Santander.
A Yucatán court set a deadline of 5:00 p.m. Wednesday for the city to pay the 588.8-million-peso (US $28.9 million) debt or reach a repayment agreement with the bank but neither occurred.
A clerk of the court consequently placed an embargo on the city’s assets.
According to Santander, all of the municipal government’s bank accounts as well as 85 properties and five movable assets it owns and two lines of public funding are subject to the embargo.
Santander said it remains open to finding a solution that would allow the embargo to be lifted in a timely manner so as to avoid the adverse impacts of such a mechanism.
The large debt dates back to March 2011 when the municipal government signed a contract for street lighting with AB & C Leasing that was financed by Santander.
When the municipal government changed in 2012, authorities notified the bank that it wouldn’t make repayments to the loan, arguing that there were irregularities with it. The mayor at the time was Renán Barrera Concha, who is currently serving a second term at the head of the municipal government.
Barrera said the 5,000 Chinese-made streetlights rented by the municipal government led by Angélica Araujo didn’t work and ordered their removal. He took the decision to cease making 8-million-peso monthly repayments to Santander.
Araujo has described that decision as irresponsible and warned that the citizens of Mérida would be adversely affected by it.
The 2012-15 government led by Barrera launched legal action aimed at extricating itself from responsibility to pay back the loan but in 2014 a Mexico City judge ordered it must do so, ruling that the contract and the previous administration’s transfer of responsibility for it to Santander were legal.
During a period of several years, the Mérida council continued to wage a legal battle against its responsibility to service the loan but had no success. Late last month, a Mexico City court once again ruled that it must repay the loan, paving the way for the Yucatán court to set Wednesday’s deadline.
Mayor Barrera has not commented publicly on the matter. He was elected to a third term as mayor at elections held on June 6.
The suspect in the abduction of a baby in Jalisco.
Authorities in Jalisco are searching for a newborn baby who was abducted Wednesday evening at the Zoquipan general hospital in Zapopan.
A woman dressed in surgical clothing approached the infant’s mother and asked to be given the child so she could take it to the nursery area of the hospital.
Shortly after, the mother asked if she could see the baby but was told there was no record that hospital staff had taken it from her.
A search of the hospital revealed no sign of the baby but a woman in surgical dress believed to be the kidnapper was caught on security video.
State officials have issued an amber alert for the child, identified as Mexican, female with short, black hair, white skin, about 50 centimeters in length and weighing 3.68 kilograms.
Her abductor is believed to be aged 35-45 with a light brown complexion.
Anyone with information about the case is asked to call 333-030-4949 (local) or 555-346-2516 (national).
Governor Enrique Alfaro said the “full force of the state” was being applied to search efforts. “It’s not possible that such a level of wickedness can exist,” he said on Twitter.
