This Teotihuacán mask was one of the artifacts that INAH said was a fake. Christies.com
Pre-Hispanic Mexican artifacts – including some deemed to be fake – sold for more than 1.6 million euros (US $1.8 million or about 38 million pesos) at an auction in Paris this week that Mexican authorities tried to stop.
The most expensive Mexican piece sold was a Mayan hacha or ax, a Mayan ballgame accoutrement, which went for 692,000 euros. Among the artifacts on offer that the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) has deemed to be fakes was a Teotihuacán mask, which sold for 6,000 euros.
According to INAH, 15 of 72 lots that were promoted as being pre-Hispanic artifacts were in fact more recent fakes.
The auction, which sold items worth a total of almost 3.1 million euros, took place despite Mexico’s objections. The Mexican Embassy in France said in a statement in late October that it had contacted the French Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs to convey its concern about Christie’s auction and another held by the auction house Artcurial in Paris on Tuesday of last week.
This Mayan ax sold for 692,000 euros, more than three times the expected price. Christies.com
In a new statement issued Tuesday of this week, the Mexican Embassy, along with those of Guatemala, Honduras, Colombia and Peru, once again raised concerns about the commercialization of “cultural assets.”
The embassies expressed their “energetic rejection” of the sale of pre-Hispanic artifacts, asserting that it encourages “pillage, looting, illegal trafficking and laundering of assets … by transnational organized crime.”
“… It deprives the extracted pieces of their cultural, historical and symbolic essence, reducing them to mere objects of decoration for individuals … [and] gives rise to a market of fakes,” they said.
Mexico has failed to halt several recent auctions of pre-Hispanic artifacts in France, but authorities of the two countries signed a letter of intent earlier this year to strengthen cooperation against the illegal trafficking of cultural assets.
However, Culture Minister Alejandra Frausto told the newspaper Reforma that France needs to modify its laws to prevent the sale of such objects at auction.
The art news website Artnet reported that Tuesday’s auction was preceded by an in-person protest, a slew of media articles, and a petition that circulated on Change.org that was signed by 44,767 supporters trying to halt the sale.
But Christie’s defended the auction, saying it was conscious of its “duty to carefully research the art and objects we handle and sell.”
“We devote considerable resources to investigating the provenance of works we offer for sale, and have specific procedures, including the requirement that our sellers provide evidence of ownership,” the auction house said.
The Bank of México projects that inflation in the fourth quarter of 2021 will be the highest year-over-year increase in 20 years.
The Bank of México (Banxico) has raised its annual inflation forecast for the fourth quarter of 2021 to 6.8%, a figure that would be the highest year-over-year increase in 20 years.
Included in a statement issued Thursday to announce that the central bank’s benchmark interest rate was increasing 25 basis points to 5%, the new prediction is 0.6% higher than the previous fourth quarter one made in September and well above the annual inflation target of 3% give or take a percentage point.
It came two days after the federal statistics agency INEGI reported that inflation last month was 0.84% compared to September, the biggest October hike since 1998.
Banxico said that inflation is rising not just in Mexico but around the world due to production bottlenecks, government stimulus, increases in the prices of food and energy sources and the reopening of some services.
“… Global and internal inflationary pressures continue affecting annual general and underlying inflation, which in October were 6.24% and 5.19%, respectively,” the bank said.
“The general and underlying inflation expectations for 2021 [and] the next 12 months … increased again, while the long term ones remain stable at levels above the target,” it said.
The Bank of México predicts that general inflation will fall to 6.3% in the first quarter of next year from the anticipated 6.8% rate between October and December of 2021. It forecasts that inflation will continue to fall quarter over quarter next year and into 2023, reaching 4.8% in Q2 of 2022, 3.9% in Q3 and 3.3% in Q4. The bank forecasts annual inflation will drop to 3.2% in Q1 of 2023, stay at that level in Q2 and decline to 3.1% in Q3.
It said its predictions are subject to a range of upside and downside risks, including external inflation pressures, underlying inflation persistence and depreciation of the peso in the former category and coronavirus restrictions and appreciation of the peso in the latter.
Economists at French bank BNP Paribas and economic research consultancy Pantheon Economics are more pessimistic than the central bank with regard to the outlook for inflation in the final quarter of 2021. The newspaper El Economista reported that their analysts are predicting annual inflation will be 7% this quarter.
Pamela Díaz Loubet of BNP Paribas and Andrés Abadía of Pantheon Economics predicted annual inflation of 4.5% and 4%, respectively, at the end of 2022. They said that their forecasts assumed that Mexico’s economic recovery, and consumer demand, will continue to be weak.
GDP slumped 8.5% in 2020 as the pandemic and associated restrictions ravaged the economy, and Banxico noted that preliminary data showed that there was a contraction in the third quarter of this year. However, the central bank said it expected growth to resume this quarter despite ongoing risks associated with the pandemic, the persistence of an “environment of uncertainty” and anticipated “slack” economic conditions.
The airlines Volaris and VivaAerobus will soon be hearing from Profeco's legal team, the federal consumer protection agency announced.
The federal consumer protection agency (Profeco) has taken action against the airlines VivaAerobus and Volaris, who it says have been committing an “abusive practice” by charging for carry-on baggage.
The agency placed its characteristic “suspended” stickers across the two airlines’ airport kiosks in San Luis Potosí and Puerto Vallarta. But that does not mean that ticket sales or services are prohibited, Profeco clarified. Rather, it signifies the initiation of proceedings against the airlines for violating the law; the airlines’ operations will not be affected in order to avoid inconveniencing consumers.
The move comes just three days after Profeco announced that Mexico’s three biggest airlines, Aeroméxico, VivaAerobus and Volaris, were all violating consumers’ rights by charging for carry-ons, and warned them to stop.
Aeroméxico was able to make peace with the agency and agreed to stop charging for hand luggage carried onto a plane’s passenger cabin.
“In the face of Profeco’s call, the airline ultimately reconsidered,” Profeco said of Aeroméxico. “From now on, will include hand baggage up to 10 kilograms at no extra cost, even for the cheapest tickets.”
Thus, consumers with Aeroméxico basic economy tickets can immediately begin to bring their carry-ons on board, and the airline will shortly post updated terms of sale on its website, the agency said.
Households are shown in blue and persons in red. milenioinegi/la jornada
The size of Mexico’s middle class shrank by 6.3 million people between 2018 and 2020 due to the economic impact of the coronavirus pandemic, according to the national statistics agency INEGI.
The middle class was made up of 53.5 million people in 2018 but the number declined to 47.2 million last year, according to INEGI estimates based on data collected by the National Income and Household Spending Survey (ENIGH). The figures include adult and child members of middle class families.
INEGI’s adjunct director of research Gerardo Leyva told the newspaper El Universal that the reduction in the size of the middle class further entrenches Mexico’s status as a country of predominantly lower class people.
The size of the lower class grew by 8.6 million to 78.5 million in 2020 from 69.9 million in 2018, while the upper class shrank to just over 1 million from 1.8 million two years earlier.
“More than 99% of the population of Mexico is lower class or middle class,” Leyva said.
“The middle class is 37.2% of the population and the lower class is 62%. So Mexico continues to be basically a lower class country,“ he said, adding that the data shows that a claim in a 2010 academic book that Mexico is a predominantly middle class country is incorrect.
“The middle class declined because of the pandemic,” the INEGI official said.
Mexico’s GDP shrank by a whopping 8.5% last year as the pandemic and associated restrictions crippled the economy, and millions of people lost their jobs or earned considerably less.
“… The majority of the population is still concentrated in the lower class and I believe it will take some years of progress to be able to change this situation and make the middle class the majority,” Leyva said.
Based on ENIGH data, INEGI also estimates that 42.2% of households across Mexico are middle class.
The percentage of middle class households is higher than the national average in 13 states, among which Mexico City ranks first.
INEGI estimates that 58.9% of households are middle class in the capital. Ranking second to 13th for the highest proportion of such households are Colima, 54.6%; Jalisco, 53.6%; Baja California, 53.1%; Sonora, 51.9%; Baja California Sur, 51.1%; Querétaro, 50.5%; Sinaloa, 50%; Nayarit, 49.9%; Quintana Roo, 45.7%; Nuevo León, 45.6%; Michoacán, 44.6%; and Chihuahua, 43.3%.
The average income of households considered middle class was 22,297 pesos per month (US $1,080) in 2020, while for lower class and upper class households it was 11,343 pesos (US $550) and 77,975 pesos (US $3,775), respectively.
Site of a Mexico City historic legal brothel, known as a casa de tolerancia. It is now a restaurant.
I’m standing in front of the first casa de tolerancia in Mexico City – you’d call it a brothel today – with historian and tour guide Genevieve Galán. What is today one of the city’s oldest Lebanese restaurants has suddenly taken on a completely different look: I can picture the women entertaining their male clients in the walled-in courtyard and then at some agreed-upon moment leading them upstairs to complete the trade of bodies for cash.
As Galán explains, this building was designated by the colonial-era Catholic Church in Mexico City as a necessary evil. The church created a place where it might control these wanton women and “keep them safe” from nefarious elements like pimps and abuse.
“People say that during the viceroyalty, they were so intolerant and that modern societies are the tolerant ones, but what you find is the opposite. Nineteenth-century society acted as if [prostitution] didn’t exist, as if it weren’t happening,” says Galán, “In the 16th and 17th centuries, there was an attitude that ‘it’s going to happen, it exists,’ so better to contain it in one part of the city.”
There were rules, of course. Women had to be older than 12 and technically orphans, with no family to take them in. They also had to have experience, meaning no virgins could live here.
Also, the Casa de Gallas, as it was known, wasn’t free. Women had to pay rent to live there.
In 1865, Emperor Maximilian ordered Mexico City’s ‘public women’ documented, believing prostitution a necessary evil best regulated. Health Ministry archives
Even though prostitutes could make up to 25 times the salary of a cook or a washerwoman, in the end women found it more economically viable to work clandestinely in hotels and brothels around the city, outside of official control.
Galán, a local historian, has spent years studying the social and political nuances of this salacious trade, among other topics that touch on the history of sexuality and the body.
Inspired by historian Sara Matthews’ writing about similar topics in relation to the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, Galán pursued her undergraduate and master’s degrees in history here in Mexico City and went on to study in France under Georges Vigarello, a sociologist of the body, at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences in Paris.
When not teaching or fulfilling the million other commitments of her academic life, Galán likes to wander the city and imagine its history through the various lenses of her research.
Today, she’s giving me the Sex in the City tour. While playing off the name of the lighthearted 1990s comedy that ran on TV for years in the United States, the tour deals with much darker themes — that of the complex history of sex and sexuality that has shaped Mexico City since Spanish colonization.
“What I think is interesting is the metaphor between the city and the bodies of women,” Galán says. “In this era, the idea of honor was super-important. It’s said that the elites of the time were extremely controlling, but that is because they believed that if women weren’t controlled, watched over, the luck of the king and the luck of the city were at risk. So there was a need to set aside these spaces.”
Genevieve Galán has dedicated much of her academic career to studying the way institutions in Mexico City have historically represented women’s bodies.
She takes me to the former grounds of the Recogimiento de Santa María Magdelena, an expansive complex that once held women found guilty of sexual deviancy crimes. The most common was the crime of “stealing a man” and forcing him to have sexual relations with her.
Social mores at the time dictated that after these trysts, the man had to marry the woman, but if he refused, she was seen as the guilty party and sent here to work and pray for repentance. In the 18th century — when it was no longer believed that women could repent and be introduced back into society but that they should be locked away for their own good — the complex converted to a jail.
“Women who were rebellious, who drank too much, lots of cases of dementia that weren’t understood as dementia at the time, were all brought here,” Galán says.
As we wander through Mexico City’s historic downtown, she explains how attempts to control women’s bodies and income were just the beginning. Race, social status and family bloodlines were factored into the notions of what should be done with women, who as sexual beings were considered uncontrollable and as humans viewed as little more than children in need of protection.
“For a long time, [biblical] original sin — when Eve bit the apple — was thought of as the sin of pride, of vanity,” Galán says. “In the 16th century, this started to change, and it started to be seen as the sin of sexuality.
“So there is this idea that women, through the bloodlines, were the ones who passed along good and bad habits. So, if you stepped out of line, then you would pass on those sinful habits to your children and, again, this was a risk to the success of the kingdom — and the city was a microcosm of the kingdom.”
One of the entrances to the Recogimiento de Santa María Magdelena in Mexico City, which once held women convicted of sexual deviancy crimes.
This is a tour full of difficult stories — of how women at the time had few life options besides the convent, marriage or prostitution — but it’s also a fascinating time capsule of colonial Mexico City and the intricate negotiations that played out in the lives of women (and men) of the era.
To tour the city with a historian is a unique treat. Galán flows forth with information in a way that only comes with intimate knowledge about her topic. She’s also a wealth of knowledge about the city’s architecture and general history, pointing out the resting place of Hernán Cortés or stopping to show me the working studio of Mexican artist Joaquín Clausell and his exquisite sketches of the human form hidden in one of the rooms at the Museo de la Ciudad de México.
By the end, we have covered everything from venereal diseases to apparitions of the devil and the caste system of colonial Mexico.
A unique approach to the city’s history, Galán’s Sex in the City tour allows you to see the capital through a completely different lens than any other tour I know. As a woman, you can’t help but wonder — if you had you lived during that era, would you have been a sinner or a saint?
Activists at a 2020 protest against gender violence in Quintana Roo. EFE
Abuse and sexual assault of female hotel workers is a major and growing problem in Quintana Roo, according to an investigation by the newspaper El Universal, and most cases go unpunished.
In a report published Wednesday, the newspaper said that over the past five months it conducted interviews with dozens of former and current hotel employees in the Riviera Maya, reviewed assault and rape complaints and spoke with victims and their families.
It said the stories of the mainly young employees, many of whom move to Quintana Roo from other Mexican states or Central and South America, show that violence in the tourism sector is constant.
“… According to this investigation, violence against tourism sector workers is growing year by year. The majority of their employers don’t have protocols to act in situations of assault and in many cases they discourage reporting [the crimes],” El Universal said.
The newspaper recounted one case in which a chambermaid originally from Tabasco was beaten and raped at an exclusive Riviera Maya hotel by a United States tourist in 2010. The Riviera Maya includes Cancún and the coastal area to its south, where Playa del Carmen and Tulum are located.
El Universal said the woman reported the crime to her supervisors and hotel managers, who organized a 50,000-peso payment (US $2,400 at today’s exchange rate) in exchange for her not reporting the crime to authorities.
The tourist returned home without being held to account for his actions and the woman was dismissed, the newspaper said.
El Universal also noted that there have been cases of female hotel workers being murdered, including a 21-year-old woman from Chiapas whose body was found on the grounds of the Hard Rock Riviera Maya Hotel 10 days after her death earlier this year. According to authorities, Ana Gómez, a dishwasher at the hotel, was raped and murdered by a hotel security guard.
El Universal said the cases of violence against female tourism sector workers that do “reach the hands of the state don’t advance,” with the exception of the few that garner media attention or trigger protests.
It also noted that Quintana Roo has the highest sexual assault rate in the country, with 26.3 cases per 100,000 people between January and July. In addition, the municipality in which Cancún is located, Benito Juárez, ranked eighth for femicides in the same period.
While chambermaids are more likely to be murdered when they are not at work, on the job they face the constant risk of becoming victims of sexual assault and rape perpetrated by guests.
“There are all kinds of guests: good guests, guests who say hello to you but there are others who have raped [female hotel workers],” said Jazmín, a chambermaid from Veracruz who has worked in Riviera Maya hotels for more than a decade.
“One guest closed the door on me and came out naked and I escaped via the balcony. Fortunately I was on the first floor and I jumped. But if I didn’t have that opportunity who knows what would have happened,” she said. “On another occasion another guest also closed the door on me but I escaped telling him no.”
In addition to suffering sexual assaults, chambermaids are also routinely insulted by their superiors and accused of stealing items and/or cash from guests’ rooms as a pretext for dismissing them, El Universal said.
The abuse of hotel staff by other employees doesn’t end there. Jazmín was gifted lingerie by her boss when she was working as a hotel gardener and cleaner before becoming a chambermaid. He told her that if she had sex with him he would reduce her working hours but when she declined he gave her extra work and didn’t allow her to have a lunch break.
El Universal asked the Confederation of Mexican Workers (CTM), which represents some 6,500 hotel workers in Quintana Roo, about the situation female employees face and was told by a local assistant secretary that the union “doesn’t tolerate bad attitudes toward women.”
Gerardo Bacelis said the CTM encourages its members to report any incidents of abuse at work to the union and the human resources departments at the hotels at which they work.
But he claimed the problem is not as big as it is made out to be, saying that one hotel company he works with has only received two complaints in the past six months and they were made by male employees against other men.
However, according to women’s collectives, many cases of abuse against female workers are not reported to employers or authorities due to fear of re-victimization, lack of confidence in the justice system and fear of detention or deportation if the workers are in Mexico illegally.
The disgraced former governor of Chihuahua, César Duarte, may soon be on a flight home. A U.S. judge approved his extradition back to Mexico to face charges of conspiracy and embezzling government funds, in a case that has shed light on the use of the country’s cattle industry to launder money.
Federal Judge Lauren Luis ruled there is “probable cause to believe” that Duarte “committed the crimes charged in the extradition complaint,” according to the order filed November 8.
Between 2011 and 2014, Duarte is accused of embezzling more than 96 million pesos (around US $5 million) in government funds through a far-reaching corruption network designed to “deviate public money into companies directly linked to him,” according to the charges Mexican authorities filed against him in 2019.
Among the entities Duarte allegedly used to launder money was the northern Chihuahua branch of a major ranchers’ union, of which he was a shareholder and former chairman of the board.
The judge wrote that the evidence produced by the government, which included witness testimony and government and bank records, was “sufficient … to support the accusations against [him].”
The U.S. Marshals Service arrested the former governor, who served between 2010 and 2016, in July 2020 in Miami. “He fled Mexico after being charged with fraud and corruption and had been on the run for over three years until his arrest,” according to U.S. authorities.
Duarte will not be extradited immediately, as he and his legal team will almost certainly challenge the ruling. In the meantime, he remains jailed in the state of Florida.
InSight Crime analysis
The embezzlement case against Duarte offers rare insight into how Mexico’s local cattle ranching unions — and the cattle industry in general — are exploited to launder illicit funds.
In Duarte’s case, “money transferred from the state treasury to the union … was not used as earmarked. Instead, according to a forensic finance expert, that money ended up in bank or trust accounts, property, and companies that primarily benefited Duarte, his family members, and his associates,” according to court documents.
Duarte is suspected of using the ranchers’ union in a number of ways to launder stolen funds, including through purchasing cattle. In one case, Duarte allegedly acquired 2,600 head of cattle that were in the union’s facilities, of which some 1,500 “inexplicably disappeared,” according to reporting from Milenio.
He also reportedly made an almost $3 million payment to the union to purchase 116 pieces of unspecified livestock equipment, although prosecutors allege there was never any documentation to support that those purchases were ever actually made. The majority of one multi-million-dollar transfer supposedly made to buy oatmeal, beans and corn for livestock producers was even “expended paying Duarte’s taxes for the year 2014,” prosecutors alleged.
These local unions are susceptible to money laundering due to a number of factors. One principal reason is the high amount of informal cash transactions in the buying and selling of cattle, which InSight Crime confirmed during recent field work in southern Mexico.
But the ex-governor isn’t the only one to see money laundering opportunities in Mexico’s cattle industry. The family of José Antonio Yépez, alias “El Marro,” the now-jailed former leader of the Santa Rosa de Lima Cartel, allegedly laundered illicit proceeds made from fuel theft by purchasing cattle.
El Marro’s brother, Rodolfo Juan Yépez Ortíz, allegedly transferred 400,000 Mexican pesos (around US $20,000) to a company reportedly founded with Duarte and owned by one of his nephews, according to reports from Mexico’s Financial Intelligence Unit.
Using cattle as an efficient means to launder money is not exclusive to Mexico, as criminal groups like the Cachiros and the Valle Valle in Honduras, and the Mendoza and Lorenzana clans in Guatemala, have also relied on this mechanism.
InSight Crime investigator Victoria Dittmar contributed reporting to this article. Reprinted from InSight Crime, a foundation dedicated to the study of organized crime.
Sewing defects were identified in some, but on the whole the rankings were high.
Consumer protection is taken seriously in Mexico. So seriously that the national consumer protection agency decided to inspect the characteristics of men’s underwear. And some were found wanting.
In a new report, the agency analyzed 20 products made by 14 brands for accurate labeling, sizing, tendency to shrink in the wash, durability, tear-resistance and other measures, running a total of 180 tests on the boxers.
Most received a grade of excellent or very good. Models from the brands Dockers, Fruit of the Loom, George and Polo got dinged for minor sewing defects. The George Seamless model as well as the Zaga Bóxer and Skiny Bóxer Basic lost points for having fiber types (synthetic, artificial or cotton) that differed by more than 3% from what the labels indicated.
Profeco recommended that when buying boxers, consumers check the item, consider price and quality and make sure to choose the correct size, preferably going with a 100% cotton option. At home, boxers should be washed before being worn and not left for long periods of time in the sun, the consumer agency said.
Full statistics and analysis of the boxers can be found in Spanish in Profeco’s monthly publication, Revista del Consumidor, or Consumer’s Magazine.
China's representative to the UN, Zhang Jun, and Russia's UN representative, Vasily Nebenzya, made remarks about the anti-poverty proposal but did not endorse it.
Forty-seven countries have expressed support for the global anti-poverty plan President López Obrador presented at the United Nations earlier this week, Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard said Wednesday.
Speaking at a Security Council meeting he chaired on exclusion, inequality and conflict at the U.N. headquarters in New York on Tuesday, López Obrador outlined “a global plan of fellowship and well-being” to benefit 750 million people around the world who live on US $2 or less per day.
He said the plan could be funded to the tune of US $1 trillion annually by G20 members as well as the world’s 1,000 richest people and 1,000 largest companies.
Ebrard told the president’s morning press conference Wednesday that 47 countries have already signed up to collaborate on the plan.
“There is great interest; numerous regional organizations have shown their interest in participating in the formulation of the plan,” he said, adding that it could be applied as soon as next year.
Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard made an appearance at Wednesday’s presidential press conference, where he said there is great interest internationally in the president’s anti-poverty plan.
“… [This] is the beginning of a route that Mexico is proposing. What is seen is a reaction of a lot of interest,” Ebrard said.
The foreign minister didn’t say which countries expressed support for the anti-poverty plan, but Russia and China appear unlikely to be among them.
In his remarks at the Security Council meeting after López Obrador spoke, Russia’s permanent representative to the U.N. said that “not even the [United Nations] Peacebuilding Commission nor the Security Council have the tools to facilitate the formation of sustainable and independent economic models nor guarantee the exchange or transfer of technologies, strengthen infrastructure, develop the industrial or agricultural sectors or create jobs.”
Vasily Nebenzya also said that human rights, development and climate change issues should be raised in “specialized platforms” that have the tools to deal with them and which have “universal or broad representation” of U.N. member nations.
“I’m specifically referring to the [U.N.] Economic and Social Council and the General Assembly,” he said.
Many Mexican news outlets interpreted Nebenzya’s remarks as a dismissal or rejection of the plan outlined by López Obrador.
However, the president did in fact say that the anti-poverty plan would be presented in detail to the General Assembly, and simply summarized the plan during his remarks to members of the Security Council, of which Mexico is currently a non-permanent member.
For his part, China’s U.N. representative said that “to promote and guarantee social equality, firm institutional agreements are needed.”
“… History has show us over and over again that undermining the principle of sovereign equality and arbitrary interference in the national interests of other countries [and] the imposition of external political models on developing countries … often result in internal conflicts in said countries, and that leads to a breeding ground for extremist ideologies that help those that preach hate and incite violence,” Zhang Jun said.
Newspapers similarly interpreted those remarks as an indication of non-support for Mexico’s plan, although it’s unclear how helping to lift people out of poverty would cause more, rather than less, violence.
AMLO, as the president is best known, got a warmer response for his proposal from members of the ruling Morena party, including federal Deputy Patricia Armendáriz, who suggested Mexico’s leader is worthy of the Nobel Peace Prize.
“… The plan is of great importance and it has great viability,” she wrote on Twitter, adding the hashtag #amlonobeldelapaz, or #AMLOpeacenobel.
The nation's capital beat out metropolises like Moscow, Seoul and Tokyo for the Guinness world record. Facebook
Mexico City is the most connected city on Earth, according to Guinness World Records. The capital city won the title thanks to its 21,500 free internet access points, beating out Moscow in second place, Seoul in third and Tokyo in fourth.
“Technology does not make sense if it isn’t for the benefit of the inhabitants, especially the most marginalized of our city,” said Mexico City Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum.
The government also announced that it would be extending the free Wi-Fi access points to a number of locations, including public elementary and middle schools and city universities.
The city’s explosion of free Wi-Fi access began three years ago, at which time the city only had 98 public internet hotspots available, said José Antonio Peña Merino, the head of the Digital Public Innovation Agency. Peña said the initiative cost residents “zero pesos.”
“On the contrary, over two years we have saved 864 million [pesos] in city internet contracts,” Peña said, or US $41.8 million at today’s exchange rate.
The city’s free internet network is provided by Telmex, the telecommunications giant owned by Carlos Slim, Latin America’s richest man according to Forbes magazine.
At the thousands of free internet access points, there are 2.8 million connections every week using 3.3 terabytes of data, the equivalent of 58 million high definition videos or 17.5 million photos, said Rodolfo Alberto Sánchez García, the commercial director of Telmex.
In 2020, the National Institute of Statistics and Geography (INEGI) found more than 84 million Mexicans were internet users. In urban areas, 78.3% of residents accessed the internet, compared to 50.3% of rural area residents.
