The CanSino and Sputnik vaccines are not on the WHO's approved list.
President López Obrador chastised the World Health Organization (WHO) on Tuesday for its tardiness in approving some COVID-19 vaccines.
Two vaccines used in Mexico – the Sputnik V and CanSino shots – have not been approved by the WHO and people inoculated with them will not be permitted to enter the United States under new rules set to take effect November 8.
Speaking at his regular news conference, López Obrador questioned why the vaccines haven’t already been approved given that it’s known they are safe and offer protection against COVID-19.
“I understand that things move slowly in [the National] Palace but I don’t accept it anywhere else. Besides, things aren’t moving so slowly here, we’re now pushing the elephant,” the president said, comparing the federal government to the world’s largest land mammal.
“But in the World Health Organization, … with all respect, it’s inefficiency, we’ve been saying it for a week but there’s no response,” he said.
López Obrador said he asked Health Minister Jorge Alcocer and Deputy Health Minister Hugo López-Gatell to prepare a letter asking the WHO to expedite its approval process, adding that he intended to sign and send it on Tuesday.
He conceded that the WHO might not approve the Sputnik V and CanSino shots but described that outcome as “very unlikely because we’re talking about health, not political or ideological matters.”
“… The bottleneck’s in the World Health Organization. We hope they resolve [the issue] soon, they can do it in 72 hours. They’ve been [considering approval] for a very long time,” López Obrador said before claiming that the delay was caused by “indolence.”
If the WHO hasn’t approved the Sputnik and CanSino shots by the time the United States vaccination requirement takes effect early next month, there is some possibility that Mexicans inoculated with those vaccines will still be able to enter the U.S.
Roberto Velasco, head of the Foreign Affairs Ministry’s North America department, said in an interview Tuesday that Mexican authorities were speaking to their U.S. counterparts about the possibility of people vaccinated with those shots being able to cross the border.
“We’re exchanging information to see if there is a bilateral solution,” he told Milenio Television.
An artisan in Metepec, México state, makes a ceramic cazuela, used in cooking, Many artisans here use lead glazes on their creations. Ppalex1994/Creative Commons
You might think that at this point, everyone knows the danger of lead and that nothing you buy anymore contains it. But in Mexico, that is not quite the case.
Here, the main concern about lead comes not from paint or plumbing, but rather from glazed pottery.
Before the conquest, pottery in Mexico was unglazed. Mesoamericans burnished pieces before firing instead. European lead glaze has both practical and aesthetic qualities, but the making and the use of it over time can have serious health consequences.
Before I continue, let me stress here that the problem is with lead-glazed pottery, especially for wares related to the cooking, storage and serving of food. Unglazed pottery does not contain significant quantities of lead, if any, and those products that have lead glazes strictly for decorative purposes do not pose significant risks for the consumer since they do not eat or drink out of them.
Despite efforts to eliminate lead glazes, they are still widespread on traditional pottery. Any glazed piece bought in Mexico proper that is not certified as lead-free almost certainly has it. Pure Earth México, an NGO whose mission is to eliminate lead poisoning in the country, estimates that two of every 10 Mexican children have toxic levels in their blood because of the use of cooking and serving wares containing the substance.
Serving café de olla, Mexico’s spiced coffee, made in a glazed pot and served in a glazed cup. Marlo Canez/Creative Commons
Lead glazes are dangerous to both artisans and to those whose food touches the final product. For artisans, the danger comes from the fine powder that the glaze comes in, which is easy to inhale and stays in the environment long after it is mixed and applied.
The firing of the glazed piece also puts contaminants into the workshop’s air, which is often part of the artisan’s house, meaning that lead is all over where people work, sleep and eat. Studies in pottery towns such as Santa Fe la Laguna, Michoacán, show high blood-lead levels in the population, especially in women and children, as well as high rates of miscarriages and other health issues.
For the end user, the problem is the leaching of lead into food or beverages. This is particularly problematic for hot foods, acidic foods — think limes, tomatoes and tamarind — and foods stored for long periods.
Officially, Mexico banned lead use in most consumer goods in 1993, but enforcement is spotty at best. Both artisans and the domestic market still demand lead glaze; it is usually cheaper than non-lead counterparts.
Lead-free glazes need higher firing temperatures, requiring artists to replace or retrofit their kilns. Wares made with non-lead glaze often do not have the same shine or color brilliance that their customers are used to. Small potters work on very thin profit margins and do not have the resources to learn new skills, buy new equipment or look for new markets, even if they are significantly more profitable in the long run.
In addition, many Mexicans are not convinced that lead poses health risks. Its negative effects build up imperceptibly over time, and artisans here have used leaded glazes for centuries with no sudden, dramatic problems. For this reason, Mexican authorities (and to be fair, the rest of the world) did not take lead seriously until the later 20th century.
Set of glazed pitcher and cups from Capula, Michoacán. Alejandro Linares García
Finally, much of Mexico’s population is strongly traditional. In a June 2021 interview, Emma Yanes Rizo, director of the federal handcraft agency Fonart, said the main problem is “… the resistance to changing customs, such as [the use of] cazuelas [clay pots] to cook mole and other foods,” as well as the way artisans have worked for generations.
Fonart reports that even with grants and other support to use lead-free glazes, a number of artisans return to the leaded ones, especially if sales suffer. Today, still over half of the pottery produced in Mexico has dangerous levels of lead, with 10%–20% capable of inducing lead poisoning over time.
But the health problems associated with traditional glazed pottery are not the only reasons to get artisans to switch. Mexico’s exports of pottery have effectively been shut off since the adoption of NAFTA and other trade agreements meant that Mexico cannot meet regulatory requirements in the United States and other countries.
Domestically, markets have been squeezed more recently by the importation of cheaper and lead-free Asian ceramics. Given the cultural and economic importance of Mexico’s traditional pottery, the federal government and NGOs have worked on helping artisans make the switch to lead-free glazes.
These efforts began with the Group of One Hundred in 1991, an organization of intellectuals and artists who campaigned against the use of products with lead, especially traditional pottery. Fonart began its efforts soon afterward by developing non-lead glazes with adhesion temperatures as low as possible so that artisans would only need to make minimal modifications to existing kilns.
Later, the agency added programs to train artisans to work with new materials and new firing techniques, as well as acquire the needed equipment and supplies.
Colonial-period talavera pitcher from Puebla on display at the Franz Mayer Museum in Mexico City. Alejandro Linares García
In 2003, Barro Sin Plomo, a Mexican NGO dedicated to helping pottery makers transition away from lead use, began operations, working extensively with Michoacán artisans by the end of the decade. They helped reconstruct or replace old kilns so that they could not only accommodate lead-free glazes but also be more energy efficient. A similar Mexican organization, Barro Aprobado, was begun in 2009 by culinary professionals concerned about lead issues in pottery.
Both organizations have worked to create markets for those artisans who change over to non-lead glazes. In the case of Barro Aprobado, it certifies that pieces are free of lead and that restaurants are using lead-free wares.
Slowly, traditional pottery with unleaded glazes is becoming more common as knowledge of their use spreads and new glazes are easier to use with acceptable results.
According to Mexican regulations, a piece is “lead-free” if the amount of glaze used on the product contains less than 0.5 milligrams of lead per liter. These regulations are enforced by the health and consumer agencies Cofepris and Profeco.
Such pottery is still not easy to find, but it is easier in upscale shops, Fonart outlets and the fanciest tourist areas. If you already own glazed cookware and want to know if it contains lead, there are simple tests you can do on the pieces, using vinegar or easy-to-buy chemicals. However, be aware that the test may damage the piece.
Both Barro Sin Plomo and Barro Aprobado have a presence online, and it is possible to buy pottery through them. Barro Aprobado just opened its first in-person store in Mexico City in 2021 and lists artisans making lead-free wares by state.
Leigh Thelmadatter arrived in Mexico 18 years ago and fell in love with the land and the culture in particular its handcrafts and art. She is the author of Mexican Cartonería: Paper, Paste and Fiesta (Schiffer 2019). Her culture column appears regularly on Mexico News Daily.
Security Minister Rodríguez at Wednesday's press conference.
Homicides declined 3.4% in the first nine months of the year compared to the same period of 2020, Security Minister Rosa Icela Rodríguez reported Wednesday.
There were 25,392 homicides between January and September, 887 fewer than in the first nine months of last year, while in September murders declined almost 2% to 2,770 compared to 2,819 in August.
Just over 50% of all homicides in the first nine months occurred in just six states. As always, Guanajuato was the most violent with 2,655 followed by Baja California, with 2,368; Michoacán, 1,982; México state, 1,946; Chihuahua, 1,884; and Jalisco, 1,884.
In contrast, the five least violent states all recorded fewer than 100 homicides during the period. They were Yucatán, Baja California Sur, Aguascalientes, Campeche and Tlaxcala. Mexico City was the 13th most violent entity with 779 recorded homicides.
Just under 40% of all homicides in September occurred in Mexico’s 50 most violent municipalities, where the federal government bolstered security efforts in July. Rodríguez said homicides in those locations declined 8.4% in September to 1,098 from 1,199 the month before.
The security minister asserted that femicides – murders of women and girls on account of their gender – declined 63% in September compared to August, but data she presented didn’t back up that claim. There were 68 femicides in September, a 37% drop compared to the 108 in August.
The September homicide and femicide numbers lifted the total number of murders since President López Obrador took office to above 100,000. Official data shows there were 97,532 homicides and 2,812 femicides between December 2018 and September 2021 for a total of 100,344 murders.
The figure is 16% higher than the total for the last three years of the Enrique Peña Nieto administratin.
Rodríguez also presented data for a range of other crimes at López Obrador’s regular news conference.
Among those that decreased in the first nine months of the year compared to the same period of 2020 were tax crimes, organized crime offenses, firearms offenses, kidnappings, carjackings, cattle theft, business robberies, vehicle theft and home burglaries.
Among those that increased were human trafficking, electoral offenses, robberies on public transit, muggings, extortion and rape.
The security minister also presented data that showed that fuel theft declined 94% from 74,000 barrels per day in December 2018 to just 4,300 barrels per day in the first 10 days of October 2021.
The reduction in the incidence of the crime known colloquially as huachicoleo has generated savings of almost 172.3 billion pesos (US $8.5 billion) pesos over the past 34 months, the government claims.
In a quarterly survey by Mexico's statistics agency, 94.3% of residents of Fresnillo, Zacatecas, said they felt their city was unsafe.
The percentage of Mexican adults who feel unsafe in the city where they live is at its lowest point in eight years, according to a new security survey that found that Fresnillo, Zacatecas, is seen by its residents as the least safe city in the country.
Conducted by the national statistics agency INEGI in September, the 32nd National Survey on Urban Public Security found that 64.5% of respondents believe the city where they live is unsafe, a 2.1% decline compared to the previous survey.
The figure is the lowest recorded since INEGI first conducted the quarterly survey in 2013. The percentage of adults who consider their city unsafe has declined 9.2% in the almost three years since President López Obrador took office in December 2018, even as homicides were at or near record levels.
The most recent survey found that 69.1% of women and 58.8% of men feel unsafe in their city. Three-quarters of respondents said they feel unsafe when using automated teller machines in the street, while 68.7% said the same about public transport. Banks and streets they regularly use were identified as unsafe places by 61.4% and 56.2% of respondents, respectively.
Highways, markets, parks, shopping centers, one’s own vehicle, workplaces, one’s own home and schools were also identified as unsafe places, but by less than 50% of respondents.
The Los Venados playground in the Mexico City borough of Benito Juárez, where only 21% of residents said they felt unsafe. Thelmadatter/Creative Commons
Fresnillo, a medium-sized city 60 kilometers north of Zacatecas that is notorious for violent crime, was identified as unsafe by 94.3% of residents who participated in the survey. It was one of just three cities identified as unsafe by more than nine in 10 residents.
The other two were Ciudad Obregón, Sonora, and Irapuato, Guanajuato, where 92.5% and 91.7% of residents feel unsafe.
More than 80% of respondents said they feel unsafe living in eight other cities. They were Coatzacoalcos, Veracruz (89%); Naucalpan, México state (88.3%); Zacatecas city (86.1%); Ecatepec, México state (85.1%); Tlalnepantla, México state (85.1%); Cancún, Quintana Roo (84.7%); Uruapan, Michoacán (81.6%); and Cuernavaca, Morelos (80.4%).
Tijuana, Baja California, and Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, were the most violent cities in Mexico in the first five months of the year in terms of homicides but only 78.1% and 59.9% of residents, respectively, rated them as unsafe.
The cities identified as unsafe by the lowest percentage of survey respondents were San Pedro Garza García, Nuevo León (14.5%); Benito Juárez, Mexico City (21.8%); Los Cabos, Baja California Sur (22.2%); San Nicolás de los Garza, Nuevo León (28.6%); and Saltillo, Coahuila (29.5%).
Members of 27,000 households in 90 cities, including the 16 boroughs of Mexico City, were surveyed by INEGI. Just under a quarter of those polled said they expected the security situation in their city to deteriorate in the next 12 months, while 34.6% predicted it would remain the same.
Black market cigarettes cost the federal treasury around 13.5 billion pesos a year.
The percentage of contraband cigarettes smoked in Mexico has skyrocketed in the last decade: from 2% in 2011 to almost 19% of the market in 2021, the Confederation of Industrial Chambers of Mexico (Concamin) said in a report.
“Illegal cigarettes in Mexico, 10 years lost” was presented on Monday to coincide with the national day for combating contraband and crime.
The report says 18.8% of the country’s cigarettes are contraband, quoting data from Oxford Economics, and explains that while some of the contraband is illegally imported, the majority is produced in Mexico. Domestic production has grown in the last three years and now represents two thirds of the contraband market, the report said.
The black market for cigarettes costs the treasury around 13.5 billion pesos (about US $670 million) per year due to tax evasion, the report claimed. It highlighted unfair competition for legitimate sellers and said the black market was helping to fund criminal activities which negatively effect public security. However, it said the illegal cigarettes do comply with some health regulations.
Concamin explained that two thirds of illegal cigarettes do not carry the security code which proves compliance with tax regulations. “Illegal cigarettes are a multidimensional problem that has become sophisticated in recent years. Although before there was no local production of illegal cigarettes, today we can see in the market many brands do not have the security code that the government requires through the [tax regulator] SAT. This dynamic represents two thirds of the problem,” it said.
According to the latest health alert issued by the Federal Commission for Protection Against Health Risks (Cofepris), there are more than 245 brands of illegal cigarettes in Mexico, mainly of Chinese origin. The brands Win and Brass stand out as leaders in the contraband market, with 6.7% of total cigarette sales.
According to federal attorneys in New York, Iván Reyes agreed to help the El Seguimiento 39 cartel ship cocaine from Mexico to the US. File photo
A former Federal Police commander who collaborated closely with the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and other United States authorities has pleaded guilty to drug trafficking conspiracy in a U.S. federal court.
The United States Attorney’s Office in the Eastern District of New York said Tuesday that Iván Reyes Arzate, former commander of the Federal Police’s Sensitive Investigative Unit (SIU) – comprised of personnel vetted by the DEA, pleaded guilty in federal court in Brooklyn to cocaine trafficking conspiracy.
It said that Reyes, nicknamed “La Reina” (The Queen), received a US $290,000 bribe in 2016 in exchange for agreeing to assist the El Seguimiento 39 cartel ship cocaine from Mexico to the United States. That organization has links to the Sinaloa Cartel, the Beltrán Leyva cartel and other Mexican cartels, the U.S. Attorney’s Office said.
United States Attorney Breon Peace said that Reyes, who turned himself into U.S. authorities in 2017 and was convicted and jailed on a separate conspiracy charge in 2018, “forged a deplorable alliance with drug traffickers and betrayed not only the people of Mexico he was sworn to protect but also his law enforcement partners who put themselves at risk to disrupt the [El Seguimiento 39] cartel.”
“Reyes Arzate turned a blind eye toward drug traffickers, enabling criminal enterprises to operate with impunity, while serving as a commander in the Mexican Federal Police,” said Ray Donovan, the DEA special agent in charge of the criminal investigation.
If Reyes cooperates in the US case against former federal security minister Genaro García Luna, above, Reyes could receive a more lenient sentence.
“DEA and our law enforcement partners worked tirelessly to isolate and identify this bad seed and bring him to justice.”
The U.S. Attorney’s Office noted that SIU officers in Mexico routinely work with U.S. law enforcement authorities to combat narcotics trafficking, money laundering and other criminal activities.
Reyes was assigned to the SIU in 2003 and became its commander in 2008, a role he held until 2016. It made him the principal point of contact for information sharing between U.S. and Mexican law enforcement personnel assigned to the investigative unit.
Before and during his tenure as an SIU officer and commander, he completed numerous law enforcement training courses offered by organizations such as the DEA, the Organization of American States, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the United States Department of Defense.
When he is sentenced in January, Reyes faces a mandatory minimum sentence of five years in prison but could be jailed for up to 40 years.
The former commander could receive a more lenient sentence in exchange for cooperating with U.S. authorities in their case against former federal security minister and Federal Police chief Genaro García Luna, who is accused of taking multimillion-dollar bribes from the Sinaloa Cartel.
The trial of García, security minister in the government led by former president Felipe Calderón, is scheduled to commence in the United States next week.
The wreckage of the two vehicles after Tuesday's accident. civil protection jalisco
Seven people were killed and another three were injured in Jalisco on Tuesday when a cargo truck tipped over onto a family’s pickup on the Jalostotitlán-Tepatitlán highway near San Miguel del Alto about 122 kilometers northeast of Guadalajara.
The truck, which was transporting bicycles, sustained a mechanical fault, according to one report.
The driver lost control and the truck tipped over, killing the two men traveling inside, and severely injuring another.
Two children, two men and a woman traveling in the pickup were crushed by the falling truck and two other people in the pickup were injured.
A video uploaded to social media showed that both vehicles were destroyed in the collision. The pickup also caught fire, Jalisco Civil Protection said.
Civil Protection officers, firefighters, Red Cross paramedics, National Guard personnel and investigators attended the accident. Officials from the Jalisco Institute for Forensic Science (IJCF) recovered the bodies.
Alexis Sánchez acted soon after 5:30 p.m. Saturday to avoid an explosion in a restaurant in Benito Juárez, southwest of the historic center, in what the media outlet Telediario compared to a scene from a Hollywood film.
Sánchez explained how the event unfolded:“We were trying to turn off the tank, but would not turn off because the valve was broken, so at the instruction of our superiors, it was ordered removed,” he said.
He added that he was the right person to be called upon. “We are a team of six to seven people, but I believe that it was my courage, the energy inside of me, that allowed me to remove the 45-kilogram cylinder,” he said.
The moment in which Sánchez fled the restaurant with the tank was caught on video and went viral online.
Once he placed the tank upright on the street outside, his colleagues attempted to spray the flames to extinguish them, but it wasn’t until one of the firefighters approached the tank to close the valve that the blaze was brought under control.
No reports of injury or material damage have been recorded, Telediario reported.
The manager of the restaurant, Arturo Quiroz, praised the firefighters. “For me, they are heroes — how they resolved the situation. The courage of this firefighter to take the flaming tank, to remove it and to try to avoid the greatest possible risk in the facilities, I am very grateful to the firefighters; the truth is they acted incredibly. I am still a little emotional about the situation: the truth is that we must all support the firefighters for these kinds of actions,” he said.
Twitter users were equal in their praise. “The firefighter who carried the burning gas tank on his shoulder. Medal winning … far surpasses any Marvel character!” wrote one Twitter user, comparing the Sánchez to a superhero from the Marvel movie franchise.
Another of the firefighters, Adrián Santana, explained the versatility demanded of him and his colleagues.
“What we usually attend to most are gas leaks. Anything that could be an emergency, but normally it is gas leaks, fallen trees and, yes, we attend fires … [but] a lot of people confuse us with only that,” he said.
A still from 7 Million and Rising, a INUTW film about the Latin American indigenous group Guardians of the Forest's participation in the 2019 Global Climate Strike in the US. INUTW
“We are our own stories,” says Lupe Puc, a Maya elder. “And the medium is not important; it’s the sharing of who we are that makes us.”
For the indigenous communities of Mexico, storytelling is the most crucial means available for exchanging knowledge, and now — with the help of filmmaking technology — for sharing their stories more widely.
Since 2014, the innovative and groundbreaking film production company If Not Us Then Who (INUTW) has been producing films that identify and empower individuals the world over — including in Puebla — enabling voices that highlight the role of indigenous communities as stewards of their lands and raising awareness for their political plight.
“As the climate crisis hurtles towards disaster,” explains Puc, “and the rights of rural communities are being bulldozed by government corporations intent on expansion at any cost, it is vital that communities are able to represent their own perspectives, and INUTW is helping to achieve that.”
If Not Us Then Who began as a production company known as Handcrafted Films, run by British filmmakers Paul Redman and Tim Lewis. Lewis now works as the organization’s general director.
If Not Us Then Who not only funds and trains indigenous people to make documentaries about their situations, it organizes screenings around the world. INUTW
In the beginning, Redman and Lewis were idealistic travelers dreaming of using documentary filmmaking as a forum to raise the voices of the communities they visited when they reached the Philippines: there they had seen firsthand the widespread deforestation caused by palm oil plantations.
They began documenting the impact on the people there. But, despite their best efforts, they found that there was something missing.
INUTW’s regional coordinator Thalía Castillo explains that it came down to who was telling the stories.
“They were trying to be as faithful as they could to the authentic point of view of the communities, but as a filmmaker you can never step out of your own perspective. So the goal changed; it became about teaching people in communities to be communicators and to make the films themselves so that they could spread their voices globally.”
And so began, slowly, the process of training people to create their own documentaries.
Initially, training was informal, but when, years later, the young people they had worked with began to produce short films, it became clear that there was scope for a new dream.
Paul Redman, one of the founders of If Not Us Then Who, was inspired by Filipino climate activist Yeb Saño’s speech at the UN in 2013. Twitter
Thus was born the Emerging Filmmakers Professional Development Programme, which uses master classes and workshops to support indigenous storytellers and grassroots collectives in their resistance to land dispossession and climate threats. The films allow remote indigenous communities in many parts of the globe to open a dialogue between land and environmental defenders — who are the frontline against the impacts of climate breakdown — and policy makers.
INUTW is currently mentoring 20 people from Central America, Brazil, and the Philippines. In addition, there is a program operating in the Cruz de Ocote ejido (communally owned land) in Ixtacamaxtitlán, Puebla, where activists are campaigning against the immense destruction to community-managed forests posed by a mining concession.
In partnership with the Mexican NGO, the Project on Organization, Development, Education and Research (PODER), INUTW provides the trainees in Puebla with equipment to film. It is then the people on the ground who formulate questions, conduct interviews and shoot footage.
This campaign is largely designed to reach the Mexican government, as well as to raise the voices of the communities in Puebla in international forums and with leaders who might otherwise never learn of their realities.
After the pandemic last year forced the world to retreat inside, the importance of storytelling has never been more apparent, or more pressing. For INUTW, 2020 proved remarkably fruitful: the switch to online mentoring and distribution brought about a surprising level of expansion.
Undoubtedly, COVID-19 significantly worsened many of the environmental and land-rights issues threatening rural indigenous communities and led to the immediate losses of community members to the virus. However, having to innovate ways of coping with being unable to interact face-to-face allowed filmmakers and organizations alike to evolve and to test the horizons against which they set their goals.
Ejidos - Successful Community Managed Forests in Mexico - Mexico
A INUTW participatory film on successful forest management on ejidos, or communally held land, by indigenous members of the community.
“From what I can see,” says Castillo, “the internet allowed us to expand more widely in a way we didn’t think was possible before. We had a dream to train people from communities, and we’ve been evolving. But with COVID, we couldn’t go to the communities.
“Yet the lockdown gave aspiring filmmakers time to create, and the digital age allowed us to spread their stories. I’m not saying that virtual is better — of course, it can’t replace person-to-person interaction — but it has been valuable.”
Castillo reflects that film is uniquely situated as a medium for indigenous stories to be told in a time when people are struggling to reach each other face-to-face, as well as to express the diversity of the indigenous cultures in Mexico.
“There is no one indigenous culture,” she said. “We’ve always known that there are different stories to be told.”
Perhaps most valuably, then, the work done by If Not Us Then Who highlights that the world needs resilient storytelling. At heart, INUTW is a team of driven people who want to do good things and who believe in the power of storytelling as the most important tool we have to raise the voices of indigenous communities across the globe.
“It is a breakthrough to be able to work directly with such inspiring people on the ground — where things are actually happening,” says Castillo, “and to be able to watch the change that it creates.”
Shannon Collins is an environment correspondent at Ninth Wave Global, an environmental organization and think tank. She writes from Campeche.
Private donations fund initiatives such as this: money to help cover shortages of cancer medications at a hospital in San Luis Potosí.
Representatives of civil society organizations have denounced a proposed tax reform that was approved in general terms by the lower house of Congress on Monday, warning that they will receive fewer donations if it becomes law.
The ruling Morena party is seeking to reduce the percentage of income a worker can claim in deductions.
An individual can currently claim deductions for an amount equivalent to up to 32% of their income but if the proposed reform passes Congress the figure will decline to just 15% in January. The 32% figure includes claimable deductions of up to 15% of one’s income for expenses such as medical, education and transport costs, 10% for retirement fund contributions and 7% for donations made to civil society organizations.
But under the proposed reform – whose objective is to collect more tax revenue to increase funding for government social programs – there will be no specific quota for tax-deductible donations. Instead, the makeup of the 15% maximum deduction will be at the discretion of the individual taxpayer.
Representatives of several organizations say the proposed reform will take away the incentive for citizens to make donations.
“People don’t donate to deduct taxes … but rather out of conviction, [because they want] to support causes and help the neediest people. But the act of removing these kinds of tax incentives doesn’t contribute to the strengthening of a philanthropic culture that is sorely needed in Mexico, especially in a context of pandemic, violence and economic crisis,” Dominique Amezcua of the organization Alternativas y Capacidades told the news website Animal Político.
Abril Rocabert of the same organization – which aims to strengthen the “ecosystem” in which Mexican civil society organizations operate – said the removal of the tax incentive for donations would affect more than 5,000 civil society organizations.
“In many cases donations allow civil society organizations to pay for their entire operations so losing them or seeing them seriously reduced could compromise thousands of social assistance services,” she said, noting that more than 700,000 people are employed by such organizations.
Among the groups that would be affected are those that support cancer victims, assist migrants, provide free legal help to low-income people, run shelters for victims of domestic violence, defend human rights and protect the environment.
The director of the Network for Children’s Rights in Mexico told the newspaper Reforma that the tax bill is a “disproportionate measure.”
Tania Ramírez said the extra revenue the government would take in as a result of the reform would not be significant in terms of overall tax collection. However, the amount of money civil society organizations receive in donations – some 8 billion pesos (US $395.1 million) annually – is very significant for them, she said.
Ramírez said it was regrettable that the parliamentary majority led by Morena has not listened to the concerns of civil society.
Edith Olivares, executive secretary of Amnesty International in Mexico, said the survival of thousands of organizations will be threatened if the proposal passes Congress.
“Many civil society organizations live off small donations from private citizens,” she said, adding that the money, in Amnesty International’s case, is used to denounce human rights violations.
“We think that a measure of this kind adds to the constant federal government narrative of insulting the work of civil society organizations; we can’t see it outside this context and that’s why we’re so worried,” Olivares said.
President López Obrador has railed against civil society organizations he sees as opponents of his government, such as Mexicans Against Corruption and Impunity and press-freedom group Article 19, and even sent a diplomatic note to the United States government asking it to explain why it funds such groups.
José Mario de la Garza, a lawyer and president of an organization that provides free legal advice to low-income people, said that “reading between the lines” one could reach the conclusion that the federal government’s objective with the tax reform is to weaken civil society organizations, especially the ones that are most critical of the government.
“… [The text] of the proposed reform doesn’t say it but in practice it would seem that the interest of the government is to limit the resources organizations receive so that their participation [in Mexican society] is greatly reduced and counterbalances are avoided,” he said.
“In other words what this reform is seeking to do is to weaken the system of checks and balances on government by limiting the funding possibilities of civil society organizations that depend on donations.”
David Pérez Rulfo of the Jalisco-based community organization Corporativa de Fundaciones noted that only 35% of donated amounts are tax-deductible and therefore less than 3 billion pesos out of the approximately 8 billion pesos donated annually can be deducted from people’s tax obligations.
The amount tax authorities are currently missing out on due to tax deductions is minimal when compared to the size of the federal budget, he said.
If, as expected, the reform passes both houses of Congress and becomes law, Mexico runs the risk of being left without a range of services that vulnerable people depend on, according to Ricardo Bucio, president of the Mexican Center for Philanthropy.
“The government is seeking to attend to needy people with its [social] programs and that’s good,” he said.
“But civil society organizations provide services to needy and vulnerably people that the state – the three levels of government in other words – doesn’t have the capacity to look after. For example, a child with a disability is not taken care of with a bimonthly scholarship of 2,700 pesos [US $133] nor do you improve the life of a female victim of violence with a monetary transfer,” Bucio said.
“That’s why the permanent presence [of civil society organizations] is needed, … their participation [in society] is essential,” he said.
