The cougar is one of five wild cat species found in Oaxaca.
A young boy has died after a cougar attacked him in Guadalupe Siete Cerros, a community in San Francisco Chapulapa, located in the Cañada region of Oaxaca.
Local media outlets reported that Gabriel Trovamala, 12, went out into the fields to check the crops on August 1 when he was attacked. Trovamala, a member of the Mazateca indigenous community, died of internal bleeding.
Local residents said there have been attacks against livestock and one adult, who was unharmed. They attribute all the attacks to the same animal.
Though the director of the National Commission for Natural Protected Areas (Conanp) asked that people not demonize the large cats, the Mazateca community has organized the placement of traps and plans to hunt the animal down, hoping to prevent another attack.
Oaxaca is home to five of Mexico’s six wild cat species: jaguars, cougars, ocelots, lynxes and jaguarundi all inhabit the mountainous state, according to Conanp.
A customs agent in Matamoros, Tamaulipas has been dismissed after a video caught him asking for a bribe of US $1,000 to let a merchant through without declaring his products.
“A person likes to go to the mall… he has a family,” explained the agent, Saúl Hernández, by way of justification in the video. “You have $10,000 in merchandise. If I asked for $9,000 … it would be robbery, it would be extortion. But 10%, that’s not bad. Legally you would have to pay 25%.”
Little did Hernández know, his target was secretly recording the conversation, which took place at a customs office on the International Free Trade Bridge that connects Matamoros to Los Indios, Texas.
The video was not the first indication of corruption on Hernández’s part. The Federation of Tamaulipas Chambers of Commerce and the vice president of the Confederation of National Chambers of Commerce (Concanaco) have accused the same agent of committing acts of corruption against both merchants and tourists.
Concanaco vice president Julio Almanza Armas said his reports to the General Customs Management Office received no response.
“We solicited an urgent audience with the customs director, Horacio Duarte, to give him our evidence of corruption in the Tamaulipas customs office, but we have received no response,” Almanza Armas told the newspaper Reforma.
But an official announcement came Friday. Customs chief Duarte announced Hernández’s “immediate departure” for loss of trust. “We have a zero-tolerance policy toward corruption.”
María Isabel San Agustín, right, embraces a family member moments after walking out of a Mexico City prison.
An indigenous woman who was sentenced eight years ago for kidnapping was freed Thursday on the grounds that she had been tortured during the investigation.
María Isabel San Agustín, originally of Hidalgo, was arrested in the Mexico City borough of Milpa Alta in 2011 and sentenced two years later to 65 years in prison.
But her case was revisited by federal justice authorities in 2018 and she was ordered released under the Istanbul Protocol, an international set of guidelines on the documentation of torture. The National Human Rights Commission had found evidence of torture after her arrest.
Nonetheless, the 35-year-old had to wait another three years to walk free. Her liberation appears to have been hastened by President López Obrador’s announcement last week that thousands of inmates would be released from jail if they had been victims of torture or were over 75 years old and had not committed a serious crime.
Mexico City Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum announced San Agustín’s release on Twitter.
“I was in communication with María Isabel San Agustín’s family to inform them of the liberation of her release in the next few hours, after suffering torture and spending 11 years imprisoned unjustly.” She added that other similar cases were currently being examined.
The Mexico City Human Rights Commission said Monday that at least 479 people in city prisons were victims of torture. In 49 of those cases it has been determined that torture could have interfered with the investigation of the crimes of which they were accused.
It was an emotional moment yesterday at 6:00 p.m. when San Agustín walked out of a Mexico City prison into the arms of waiting family members. “Justice was done,” she declared to reporters, but cautioned that justice remained to be done in the prison she had just left.
Percentage of people living in poverty by state. coneval
There are an additional 3.8 million Mexicans living in poverty, according to the latest figures compiled by Coneval, the federal agency that measures social development.
In its 2020 report, Coneval said the number of people it classified as poor rose to 55.7 million people, or 43.9% of the population, up from 41.9% in 2018. The coronavirus pandemic was mainly responsible, it said.
The highest growth in poverty levels was seen in states that rely on tourism. Quintana Roo saw the biggest increase in poverty, rising 17.3% to 47.5% of the population compared to 30.2% two years before. In absolute numbers, the poor totaled 893,000, up from 546,000.
The Caribbean coast state was followed by Baja California Sur: poverty was up from 18.6% to 27.6%, an increase of 9%.
They were followed by Tlaxcala, México state and Yucatán.
Poverty figures by state, in percentages and absolute terms, by thousands of persons. coneval
Mexico’s poorest state is Chiapas, where 75.5% live in poverty, a slight improvement over the 2018 figure of 78%. Guerrero, Puebla, Oaxaca and Tlaxcala followed with poverty levels of 66.4%, 62.4%, 61.7% and 59.3%, respectively. Two of those states saw an improvement but the situation worsened in Puebla, up from 58% in 2018, and Tlaxcala, where the figure soared from 51%.
At the other end of the scale were Baja California, with 22.5% of its citizens living in poverty; Nuevo León, 24.3%; Chihuahua, 25.3%; Coahuila, 25.6%; and Colima, 26.7%
The number of Mexicans living in extreme poverty — those with insufficient income to meet the basic needs of food, clothing and shelter — rose from 7% of the population to 8.5%, from 8.7 million people to 10.8 million.
Among social deficiencies, some of which were basically unchanged or improved, lack of access to health care saw a whopping increase from 16.2% of the population to 28.2%, meaning that an additional 15.6 million people fell outside the healthcare system. They were unaffiliated with any of the state healthcare services and unable to obtain healthcare from either public or private providers.
In an executive summary to its report, Coneval described as urgent the need for the healthcare system to transition fully to the Insabi health care service, introduced by the current federal government to replace Seguro Popular, and guarantee healthcare attention to the public.
One sector of the population where poverty levels fell in percentage terms was the elderly. People over 65 accounted for 43.2% of the population in 2018; in 2020 that figure had fallen to 37.9%, likely due to the increases in seniors’ pension introduced by the administration of President López Obrador. However, because of the increase in the seniors population the number living in poverty remained about the same in absolute terms at 4.5 million.
Coneval’s figures are based on a survey of households between August and November, but President López Obrador said on Friday that he did not accept the results.
“… I have for example my own method of measurement … I see the macroeconomic data,” he told his morning press conference. “I have other information and I believe the people are receiving more support and even with the pandemic people have enough for their basic needs and something very important, they have not lost faith and we’re moving ahead.”
With his customary ability to see the positive side of things, López Obrador said the economy is in recovery in most sectors.
“… aviation, tourism, trade, industry, there is an extraordinary recovery, exceptional, to a degree that growth forecasts for this year are more than 6%.”
Measuring poverty
According to Coneval, people are in a situation of poverty when they are lacking access to at least one of six social rights — food, health, education, social security, adequate housing and basic housing services — and their income is insufficient to purchase the canasta básica, or basic food basket. Its value is currently 1,745 pesos in urban areas and 1,256 in rural ones (US $87 and $63 respectively).
Extreme poverty is defined as lacking access to at least three of those social rights, not having sufficient income to purchase the canasta básica and lacking in the nutrition necessary for a healthy life.
Coneval measures poverty in Mexico every two years using data generated by the national statistics agency, Inegi.
Families combing for clues about their vanished loved ones at recently discovered extermination sites in northern Mexico have turned to local cartel leaders for help — revealing their desperation to find any trace of the disappeared amid masses of incinerated bones.
At the end of July, families of those missing in Tamaulipas issued a letter to the Gulf Cartel faction operating in Matamoros, along the U.S.-Mexico border.
“We are not looking for culprits; We are looking for our sons, daughters, fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters and relatives,” they insisted.
Earlier that month, the Mexican government recognized the existence of an extermination site in Matamoros, where more than half a ton of skeletal remains have been found. The location, known as La Bartolina, lies just 12 kilometers from the border at Brownsville, Texas.
In Tamaulipas alone, groups searching for the disappeared have identified 57 such extermination sites since the end of 2012, according to a report from news portal Elefante Blanco.
Just days before the letter from the families in Tamaulipas, the United Forces for Our Disappeared in Nuevo León (Fundenl) issued a press release urging authorities in the northern border state to speed up investigations into five such sites, where more than 600,000 skeletal remains have been recovered since 2010.
The graves classed as extermination sites all share certain macabre characteristics: multiple clandestine graves, containers to incinerate bodies, encampments, confinement areas and victims’ remains.
In an interview with Elefante Blanco, Mexico’s national search commissioner, Karla Quintana Osuna, stated that La Bartolina is the largest extermination site that federal authorities have identified.
“We have decided to designate them ‘extermination sites’ … because they are crematoriums where they have tried to disappear and pulverize at least hundreds of people,” Quintana said in an interview with Milenio.
Over the last 15 years, more than 80,000 people have disappeared in Mexico. According to a report by the federal government in April, Tamaulipas and Nuevo León are among the five states with the highest number of disappearances reported.
InSight Crime analysis
Recognizing the existence of extermination sites in Mexico is an important step toward understanding the magnitude of the country’s crisis of forced disappearances. However, there is still a long way to go to address the systematic human rights violations that have occurred in the country’s northeast, where criminal groups remain in power.
The areas where extermination centers have been detected once had a significant presence of the Zetas and the Gulf Cartel. These drug groups were involved in several episodes of extreme violence that claimed the lives of thousands of victims.
For example, the Piedras Negras prison in Coahuila was used as an extermination center where the Zetas murdered more than 150 people between 2010 and 2012. Their bodies were then burned in diesel-filled barrels known as “ovens.” Police and prison personnel were aware that the prison was being used as a death camp.
Previously considered some of the most violent groups in Mexico, the Zetas and the Gulf Cartel no longer wield the same power after fracturing. Splinter groups, though, continue to terrorize locals. For example, in June, shootouts in Reynosa left 26 people dead, many of whom were said to be bystanders. A cell linked to the Gulf Cartel was blamed for the gunfire, as well as for the kidnapping of 119 people.
State actors also play an important role in the abuses. In January, for example, 19 people – including Guatemalan migrants – were massacred and burned in the Tamaulipas municipality of Camargo. At least 12 members of Tamaulipas’ special operations group (GOPES), which answers directly to the state governor, were held responsible. That same month, residents of Tamaulipas’ Ciudad Mier reported being forcibly displaced after the disappearance of two people at the hands of the GOPES.
Likewise, in 2019, the DEA accused elements of the unit of detaining and disappearing people, turning them over to the cartels.
The government of Andrés Manuel López Obrador has promised to allocate more resources to the search and identification of missing persons and has created search commissions in each state.
However, most of the burden continues to fall on family members, search groups and other non-governmental organizations, which face bureaucratic barriers, corruption and government negligence.
Activists searching for the disappeared are also constantly threatened for their work and the state rarely offers them protection. On July 16, a woman was murdered in Sonora state after spending months looking for her husband with a group called the Searching Mothers of Sonora.
According to the report by Elefante Blanco, members of the group that discovered La Bartolina in Matamoros have received threats since the government recognized it as an extermination center.
Forced disappearance cases in Mexico face high levels of impunity and investigations into the extermination sites and the clandestine graves have been halting and cumbersome. Authorities are often indifferent. Searchers say that much can be done to speed up identifications and prosecutions, including those of complicit state officials.
“People knew. The authorities knew. Something of this scale cannot happen without them knowing what is happening,” Quintana, the national search commissioner, told Milenio.
Reprinted from InSight Crime. Victoria Dittmar is a writer with InSight Crime, a foundation dedicated to the study of organized crime.
Millennials' average monthly earnings were 7,251 pesos.
Millennials played a key role in the reactivation of the Mexican economy in late 2020 as pandemic restrictions were relaxed, according to a study by BBVA Research.
The population segment counted for almost one third of the working population from August 21-November 28, the period in which infection rates had begun to drop.
The economy had been widely forecast to suffer a deep recession in the second half of 2020, which was largely avoided by the flow of remittance payments from the United States and workers returning to their duties, including about 20 million people in the millennial age category.
There is no absolute consensus on the dividing line between millennials and its preceding, older population group Generation X. For the purposes of the study, BBVA defined millennials as people 25-39 years old in 2020, having been born between 1981 and 1995, while Generation X covered people between 40 and 54 years, born between 1966 and 1980.
The personal income earned by millennials attested to their value to the workforce. On average, they earned 7,251 pesos (about US $364) per month, while Generation X workers averaged just 12.3% more.
The data showed that the labor market valued millennial workers with professional or postgraduate training, but barely distinguished those with bachelor’s degrees from their peers with only primary or secondary education.
The study also revealed the difference in salaries between millennial men and women. In Yucatán men earned 72.4% more than their female peers. In Durango, Baja California, Tamaulipas, Aguascalientes, Michoacán, Chihuahua and Nuevo León, the income gap was over 30%. The state of México, Veracruz, Oaxaca and Quintana Roo were those with the lowest differentials.
There were also marked differences in earnings depending on where millennials lived. For example, the average salary of a millennial employed in Nuevo León was 11,100 pesos a month (about $557), while in Chiapas it was 4,458 pesos (about $224).
The BBVA study was based on the Survey of National Household Income and Expenditure by federal statistics institute Inegi published on July 28. The data was collected from August 21-November 28, 2020.
Alejandra Valencia's bronze win at this year's Tokyo Olympic Games is part of a diverse history of Mexican medalists dating back to the turn of the 20th century. CONADE
When Mexican diver Joaquín Capilla Pérez headed into his final Olympics at Melbourne, Australia, in 1956, one thing was missing from a dazzling resume: a gold medal.
He closed that year with a splash, placing first. He ended his Olympic career with one gold, one silver and two bronze medals over three Summer Games.
With four medals overall, he remains Mexico’s most decorated Olympic medalist.
The long history of Mexican Olympic achievement includes a diverse medley of sports, from diving to equestrianism to boxing. There are some complicated moments, such as Mexico City’s experience hosting the 1968 Summer Games, in which Black American athletes participated in a notable social protest and student demonstrators died in an infamous massacre at Tlatelolco.
More recently, the men’s soccer team won a gold medal at London in 2012 and taekwondo practitioner María Espinoza placed second on the all-time Mexican medals list, with three, while race-walkers have accumulated 10 medals over the years, the most Mexican medals in a track and field category.
Diver Joaquín Capilla, center, won gold at the Melbourne games in 1956. He holds Mexico’s record for the most Olympic medals won by an athlete.
In Tokyo this year, Luis Álvarez and Alejandra Valencia won bronze in mixed-team archery, while in diving, the tradition of excellence continues: divers Gabriela Agúndez García and Alejandra Orozco Loza won bronze in the women’s synchronized 10-meter platform.
“I think Mexico has an interesting history generally in the Olympics,” said William Beezley, a professor at the University of Arizona. “Not high numbers of gold medals, but interesting stories, at least.”
Mexican Olympic achievements began in Paris in 1900 with a bronze in polo.
“Mexico has a long history of sports related to horses,” said Zacatecas-born scholar José Alamillo, a professor at California State University-Channel Islands. “It goes back to the charro [cowboy] and the charreria [equestrianism].”
Mexico fielded its first official Olympic team for the 1924 Paris Summer Games. The National Olympic Committee looked to indigenous running traditions among the Tarahumara community, as a route to success in 1924 and 1928 (the Summer Olympics in Amsterdam).
Although the Tarahumara athletes were veteran long-distance runners, they did not win Olympic marathon medals.
Boxer Francisco Cabañas brought home a silver medal from the 1932 Games in Los Angeles.
“The story goes that the distance was too short,” Beezley said. “These guys were used to running 50, 60 miles. Just doing a marathon distance was only half what they were used to. They were just getting warmed up, getting ready to go. It’s just a story. The real story is, who knows?”
In the next decade, flyweight boxer Francisco Cabañas won one of Mexico’s first two individual Olympic medals — a silver at the 1932 Summer Games in Los Angeles. Gustavo Huet Bobadilla also won a silver medal that year for shooting in the small-bore rifle, prone, 50 meters competition.
“Boxing [in Mexico] starts to take off in the late 1800s during the Porfiriato,” said Stephen Allen, a professor at California State University-Bakersfield and the author of A History of Boxing in Mexico: Masculinity, Modernity, and Nationalism. “There is a lot of incorporation of foreign sports from the U.S. and Europe. The Porfiriato pushed the elites to want to do the same activities as Europeans and Americans.”
Ironically, Allen noted, boxing was eventually banned. The working class in Mexico wasn’t allowed to participate for fear that the sport “would teach the working class how to fight,” he said. That did not change until the 1900s.
In the Olympics, “Mexico has been represented well by boxers,” Alamillo said. “[Cabañas] stood out because boxing is huge in terms of Mexican sports.”
Outside the arena, Mexican athletes faced another foe: racism.
Humberto Mariles with his horse, Arete, at the 1948 Olympics in London, where they won three medals, two of them gold.
“You definitely see a lot of Mexican stereotypes at the Olympics dating back to 1932,” Alamillo said. “Mexican athletes would be represented in sports journalism, often stereotyped, in many ways … very much a caricature of Mexico, stereotypically ‘hot-tempered,’ very much similar to a lot of racial stereotypes in Hollywood regarding Mexicans.”
A decade later, an inspiring friendship blossomed between two rivals who each overcame racial prejudice: Mexican diver Capilla and United States competitor Sammy Lee, an Asian-American.
“You can definitely see both Sammy Lee and Joaquín facing these things, especially how they were represented in sports media,” Alamillo said. “There were a lot of similarities.”
Although Capilla enjoyed many triumphs, he later struggled with personal issues. “[Capilla] ended up in poverty. Things went bad for him,” Beezley said.
Another Mexican Olympian with success on the podium but difficulties later in life was Humberto Mariles, a three-time equestrian medalist at the 1948 Summer Games in London — including two gold medals, the only time a Mexican has topped the podium multiple times.
Mariles, later jailed for murder, “was a strange guy, is all I can say,” Beezley said.
Fencing silver medalist María del Pilar Roldán, Mexico’s first female Olympic athlete to win a medal, shone in 1968, the year Mexico hosted the Games.
Scholars had much more to say about Mexico City’s experience hosting the 1968 Summer Games.
“For Mexico’s establishment, the 1968 Olympics, and the 1970 World Cup, were supposed to be a moment when the world watched as a ‘new’ and ‘progressive’ Mexico emerged on the global stage — with a thriving economy, an artistic flair and a new level of technological sophistication,” said Mark Dyreson, the director of research and educational programs for the Penn State Center for the Study of Sports in Society.
“Clearly, hosting the 1968 Olympics is head and shoulders the most important moment” in Mexican Olympic history, Dyreson said. “Mexico became the first nation in the Western Hemisphere outside the U.S. to host a Games — and the second nation after Japan in [1964] outside of Europe or its former British colonies — the U.S. and Australia — to host.”
Yet the Games ended up being remembered for off-the-field moments reflective of the era.
“The 1968 Olympics still have an important legacy in Olympic history,” Alamillo said. “I think there are a couple of reasons why. First, you have the African-American athletes, Tommie Smith and John Carlos. They raised their gloves during that year’s national anthem [in the Black Power salute after winning gold and bronze, respectively, in the 200-meter dash]. “I think that protest still stands out today in thinking about the history of Black athletes making a statement.”
“The other reason is Tlatelolco, the massacre at Tlatelolco, [which] in many ways tainted the Games.”
The Mexican military detain protesters at what came to be known as the Tlatelolco massacre of 1968.
In 1968, 10 days before the Olympics opened, the military shot unarmed student protesters gathered at the Plaza of Three Cultures in Mexico City’s Tlatelolco.
“Ultimately, Mexico could not escape the global forces that swept the world in the late 1960s and highlighted the endemic problems of racial discrimination, economic disparities, social conflicts and other maladies that impacted most nations,” Dyreson reflected.
“What was supposed to be Mexico’s coming-out party instead descended into the tragedy of the Tlatelolco massacre,” he said.
Nevertheless, Mexican athletes marked positive milestones that year: fencer María del Pilar Roldán became the country’s first female Olympic medalist when she won silver. Track and field competitor Enriqueta Basilio lit the Olympic flame, the first woman to do so.
At Sydney in 2000, 32 years later, weightlifter Soraya Jiménez became Mexico’s first female gold medal winner. Ana Guevara won a silver medal in 2004 in Athens.
At the 2016 Summer Games in Rio, taekwondo athlete María Espinoza captured her third Olympic medal to tie Mariles at second place for the most medals won by a Mexican.
At the 2016 Summer Games in Rio, María Espinoza captured her third Olympic medal in taekwondo.
Guevara, who Beezley called a role model, eventually was elected to Congress and served from 2012 to 2018, where she had to confront men who were “opposed to women athletes, to women being in politics,” he said.
In general, he added, Olympians here have “served as important role models in Mexican society for what’s possible, what can be accomplished.”
Rich Tenorio is a frequent contributor to Mexico News Daily.
Video footage of diver Joaquín Capilla at the 1956 Games in Melbourne.
The grand prize winner at Santa Clara's copper competition.
The copper artisans of a Magical Town in Michoacán were celebrated last week with the 76th hammered copper competition, where 80 prizes were handed out to artisans who submitted 561 pieces for judging.
Medals and prize money totaling 440,000 pesos (US $22,000) were awarded to the winners, whose work was on display with that of all 244 artisans last week at the Copper Museum in Santa Clara del Cobre.
An elaborate centerpiece was the grand prize winner, earning a gold medal for José Sergio Velázquez García.
Santa Clara, located an hour from the capital Morelia, is a Purépecha town whose inhabitants mined and worked with copper in pre-Hispanic times.
After the Conquest, they were encouraged to continue creating copper crafts by Spanish Bishop Vasco de Quiroga and the town became synonymous with the production of copper goods throughout the colonial period.
Award-winning pieces at this year’s copper competition
Mexico argues that most of their weapons are smuggled from the US.
U.S. gun manufacturers on Wednesday accused the Mexican government of looking for a scapegoat by filing a civil lawsuit alleging that they engaged in negligent practices that have led to illegal arms trafficking and homicides.
The National Firearm Industry Trade Association (NSSF) said allegations of wholesale cross-border trafficking of guns were “patently and demonstrably false.”
“These allegations are baseless,” said NSSF spokesman Lawrence Keane. “The Mexican government is responsible for the rampant crime and corruption within their own borders. Mexico’s criminal activity is a direct result of the illicit drug trade, human trafficking and organized crime cartels that plague Mexico’s citizens. It is these cartels that criminally misuse firearms illegally imported into Mexico or stolen from the Mexican military and law enforcement.
“Rather than seeking to scapegoat law-abiding American businesses, Mexican authorities must focus their efforts on bringing the cartels to justice.”
The association said all firearms sold at the retail level in the U.S. are sold in accordance with federal and state laws, with an FBI background check.
Mexico filed the suit Wednesday against 11 manufacturers in a federal court in Boston, alleging that they and other gun makers knew that their business practices caused illegal arms trafficking in Mexico.
A government study published last year said that some 2.5 million illicit weapons have crossed the border into Mexico over the past decade.
The gun manufacturers disputed those numbers, claiming that less than 12% of the guns seized by Mexico in 2008 had been verified as coming from the U.S. They also charged that Mexican soldiers defect to work for drug cartels, taking their U.S.-made rifles with them.
Weapons used by Mexican cartels also come from Central America and China, they said.
On Thursday morning, President López Obrador defended the suit and accused gun manufacturers of providing organized crime with custom-made weapons.
He said the intention was not to challenge U.S. citizens’ right to carry arms but to encourage controls over their manufacture and sale.
Protesters display a banner with the words, "The Mayan people of Homún don't want the farm."
Some 500 residents from the Mayan town of Homún, Yucatán, traveled to protest in the state capital Mérida Tuesday, fearing that a 49,000-head hog farm in the town’s vicinity would be reopened. A court decision on the matter is due Thursday.
Producción Alimentaria Porcícola (Papo) was built in a Natural Protected Area that attracts tourists for its “ring of cenotes.” Residents have expressed concern that water in the area could become contaminated by pig urine and excrement; a potential disaster for 80% of the population which depends economically on tourism.
The farm has not been in operation since 2018 due to a Yucatán court verdict. That decision was unanimously upheld by the Supreme Court in May, meaning Papo has been forced to remain closed pending tomorrow’s decision in the state’s Second District Court.
However, residents of Homún have alleged that the state government, led by Governor Mauricio Vila Dosal, was attempting to wield influence on the court in favor of reopening the farm.
On June 6, Papo filed a document before the judge which had been issued by the state Ministry of Sustainable Development. In the text the ministry’s legal director, Karen Aguirre Bates, stated that farm was “sufficiently equipped to achieve compliance with the maximum permitted limits of pollution.”
Earthjustice, a nonprofit environmental law organization, filed a friend of the court brief prior to the Supreme Court’s decision in May, which detailed “substantial scientific evidence about the grave and irreversible harm to human health and the environment associated with industrial hog operations … contamination of water, including naturally occurring freshwater wells known as cenotes; emission of noxious air pollution; the spread of dangerous pathogens and contribution to climate change.”
Resident Martina Ramirez Soberanis called on the state government to stand in opposition to the farm. “We believe it is time for the state government of Yucatán … to take a stand against the abuses of the mega pig factory … [which is] trampling on the rights of the Mayans of Homún,” she said.
Another protester complained that the voice of local people was being ignored. “These people from the companies do not love Homún, they just want the farm. We did our consultation and the people of Homún said ‘no, and no,’ and we continue to say ‘no,’ and we will keep defending the water for the future of the children … we are going to continue in the struggle … we remain united and we will defend the sacred water.”
It has been estimated that Papo would generate over 272 million kilograms of urine and feces each year, more than is generated by the entire human population of Tijuana.
