Four of 10 adults have now received at least one dose of Covid vaccine.
Mexico recorded more than 11,000 new coronavirus cases on Tuesday as the third wave of the pandemic continues to gather strength.
The federal Health Ministry reported 11,137 new infections – the highest single-day tally since early February – increasing the accumulated case total to 2.6 million.
There are currently 63,093 active cases across the country, according to Health Ministry estimates, an increase of 23% compared to a week earlier. Just over a third of the estimated active cases – 21,743 – are in Mexico City.
México state ranks second with more than 5,000 followed by Sinaloa, Veracruz, Quintana Roo, Baja California Sur, Nuevo León, Tabasco, Jalisco and Yucatán, all of which have more than 2,000.
An additional 219 Covid-19 fatalities were also reported Tuesday, lifting the official death toll to 235,277, a figure considered a vast undercount. About one in five deaths occurred in Mexico City, the country’s coronavirus epicenter since the beginning of the pandemic.
Coronavirus cases and deaths in Mexico as reported by day. milenio
He said case numbers in this wave are similar to those in the first and second waves but hospitalizations of Covid-19 patients and deaths are down 75% due to vaccination. Just over a quarter of general care hospital beds set aside for coronavirus patients are currently occupied while 21% of those with ventilators are in use.
Four in 10 Mexican adults have received at least one vaccine dose, according to the latest Health Ministry data, and hundreds of thousands of additional shots are being administered every day. More than half a million were given Monday.
Baja California, where the campaign to vaccinate adults concluded in late June, has the nation’s highest vaccination rate among adults – 79% – followed by Mexico City (63%), Baja California Sur (54%) and Yucatán (52%), the Health Ministry said.
Chiapas, where just 19% of adults are vaccinated, has the lowest rate followed by Puebla and Guerrero, both of which have rates of 29%.
López-Gatell said a campaign is underway to boost the rate in Chiapas, explaining that 41 mass vaccination centers have been set up and health workers are traveling to communities across the state to administer shots. The aim is to reach a 40% vaccination rate by the end of this month.
In northern border municipalities, the government is aiming to vaccinate adults of all ages as quickly as possible to expedite the reopening of the border with the United States to nonessential travel. A mass vaccination campaign is currently underway in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, and López-Gatell urged all unvaccinated residents to go and get a shot.
Mexico received more than 6.4 million additional vaccine doses last week and is expected to receive almost 3.8 million this week.
Health Minister Jorge Alcocer said Tuesday that vaccination against Covid-19 can reduce the risk of severe disease and death by up to 96%. Mexico has used six different vaccines – Pfizer, AstraZeneca, CanSino, Sputnik V, SinoVac and Johnson & Johnson – all of which have different efficacy rates.
UPDATE:
The Health Ministry on Wednesday reported 12,116 new confirmed cases of Covid and 230 more fatalities, bringing its total figures to 2.61 million infections and 235,507 deaths.
After it published statistics on the murders of journalists since he took office, President López Obrador called the newspaper Reforma a 'bulletin of conservatism.'
President López Obrador on Monday accused the newspaper Reforma of publishing propaganda after it reported that 56 activists had been killed in Mexico since the current federal government took office.
But the government’s own Interior Ministry (Segob) subsequently acknowledged that the real figure is in fact 68.
In a report published Monday, Reforma cited data from the human rights organization Front Line Defenders that showed that 24 activists were killed in 2019 and 20 were murdered last year. It added 12 murders of activists counted by the National Human Rights Commission in 2021 to arrive at the figure of 56, although the newspaper acknowledged that the number could in fact be higher.
Speaking at his regular news conference on Monday, López Obrador claimed that the figure of 56 murders of human rights and environmental activists was “propaganda of our adversaries disseminated by Reforma.”
He described the Mexico City-based newspaper, of which he is frequently critical, as a “bulletin of conservatism.”
The president asserted that a government program to protect human rights defenders and journalists that has been deemed at risk has not failed and is functioning as it should. The federal Ministry of the Interior, however, said in a statement issued later on Monday that seven journalists and two rights activists who were beneficiaries of the so-called “protection mechanism” have been killed since December 2018.
The ministry said a total of 43 journalists and 68 human rights defenders have been killed since December 1, 2018, the day on which López Obrador was sworn in as president.
Among those who have been murdered in the last 2 1/2 years are Baja California water rights activist Óscar Eyraud Adams, Chihuahua women’s rights activist Isabel Cabanillas de la Torre and Chiapas environmental activist José Luis Álvarez Flores, who worked to preserve the habitat of howler monkeys.
Turbulent waves and strong currents on the Pacific coast can be dangerous to swimmers: so far this year at least eight people have died in Oaxaca alone.
According to state authorities, the majority of accidents occurred after the victims ignored red flags on the beaches, which indicate that it is unsafe to swim.
Esteban Vázquez, Civil Protection officer on the Oaxaca coast, detailed the fatalities.“We believe eight people have died so far in 2021, two in the Huatulco area, two in the Zipolite area, two more recently in the San Agustinillo area recently and finally two more in the Puerto Escondido area … [at least half] these drownings have been due to recklessness,” he said.
Puerto Escondido resident Teresa Rivera said she was aware of the danger. “At Puerto Escondido … the swell is very strong. It is not suitable right now for the little ones, in fact, I’ve brought a 5-year-old along and we are just going to walk on the shore,” she said.
Lifeguard operations have been stepped up to prevent further fatalities, but Godofredo Vázquez, head of Puerto Escondido’s lifeguards, advised swimmers against entering the sea unattended. “Where there are no lifeguard booths, it is a little risky to be entering the sea,” he said.
At least 10 more people have been rescued this year on Oaxaca’s coast. Meanwhile, in Mazatlán, Sinaloa, three people, two of them minors, were rescued from the sea at about 3:30 p.m. on Sunday.
Mauricio, 20, Alma, 15, and Diego, 13, all from Durango, were aided by lifeguards at Playa Cerritos beach after they had tired when trying to return to shore.
Later on Sunday, Xóchitl, 16, was assisted by lifeguards after injuring herself by falling from a banana boat and was transferred to hospital.
Microdosing is the practice of consuming very small amounts of certain recreational drugs like LSD or psilocybin as a therapeutic. Microgen/Shutterstock
Microdosing, using micro amounts of recreational drugs, often LSD or psilocybin, has reached Mexico, and one of its epicenters is San Miguel de Allende, a popular destination for American and Canadian expats living abroad.
“We had a client that had been on antidepressants for 30 years. When Covid started, she was super anxious, and then she started with the protocol,” says a psilocybin provider in San Miguel de Allende who asked that his name not be used because the drug is illegal in Mexico. “After one month, she picked up a paintbrush — she was a painter and hadn’t held a brush in her hands in five years. In a few months, she had 10 finished pieces. And there are so many stories like that.”
When asked why most people seek him out, he said older people are microdosing to prevent degenerative mental disease. “Some people just want to experiment with psilocybin in microdosing, and some people want to use it to deal with depression and moderate anxiety,” he says.
According to this provider, around two years ago there were murmurings of microdosing (using a tenth or twentieth of a typical recreational dose on a regular basis) in Mexico City. San Miguel clients began asking about acquiring the drugs locally.
San Miguel de Allende has become an epicenter for microdosing in Mexico. Depositphotos.com
He and his partner, after some extensive research, developed what they believe to be a balanced regime (called a protocol) that includes other legal fungi and some vitamins for maximum benefit. The results, he says, have been unbelievable.
Another client, with Lyme disease, says her brain fog has lifted, her depression is gone and even her tremors were reduced in just a few months.
Hard science behind psychedelics is historically patchy. There was excitement in the 1950s and 60s that these drugs might mean solutions to PTSD, depression and a whole range of mental illnesses.
While research sprung up all over the world, it was hindered by very public incidents like Timothy Leary’s Harvard study and reports that started to filter out to the general public about users’ bad trips, suicide attempts and psychotic episodes (even though, as Michael Pollan notes in his book How to Change Your Mind, “It is virtually impossible to die from an overdose of LSD or psilocybin, … and neither drug is addictive”).
By 1970, the U.S. government had categorized both LSD and psilocybin as Category 1 drugs. Scientific research on them became impossibly bogged down in bureaucracy and restrictions.
But studies and experiments with psychedelics never really went away, mind you. There were dozens of them (both academic and not) around the world that continued into the 1970s and 1980s, some even government supported and funded by grants — until money ran out and restrictions kicked in.
María Sabina, the Oaxaca healer whose appearance in Life magazine sparked a 1950s interest in psychedelics that bloomed in the 1960s.
During that time, advocates and scientists explored psychedelics on the sidelines in a world that wasn’t quite ready to embrace them … yet.
In 2000, a Johns Hopkins University psychedelic research group was the first to get regulatory approval again in the U.S. to research them on healthy patients who had never used them before. Their 2006 psilocybin study got the world excited about researching these drugs again.
Author and longtime psychedelics advocate James Fadiman added the term microdosing into our daily lexicon. His 2011 book The Psychedelic Explorer’s Guide, offers first-person reports of microdosing from a range of users.
Instead of an ego-disintegrating trip, microdoses are said to provide daily benefits — clarity, creativity, an open mind, and open heart — without impairing your ability to function normally. This more mellow version of psychedelic use has been promoted in the past five years by Silicon Valley types looking to enhance their creativity and focus in the workplace.
Mexico has a long history with hallucinogens used by pre-colonial indigenous cultures. In fact, the spark that ignited the psychedelic craze in U.S. and other nations in the 50s was lit in Huautla de Jiménez, a small town in Oaxaca
Writer Robert Gordon Wasson convinced a local curandera to let him participate in a traditional hallucinogenic mushroom ceremony. His 1957 Life magazine article introduced “magic mushrooms” to a larger audience.
Apple founder Steve Jobs’ comments that taking LSD helped inspire his company’s design ethos, likely sparked the microdosing trend in Silicon Valley. Wikimedia Commons
But many I spoke to seem most interested in microdosing’s purported benefits for anxiety, depression and hopelessness — especially coming off a year and a half of isolation and pandemic chaos.
“I spent some years in the past on antidepressants,” says Ron Alexander, a retired writer now living in San Miguel. “I did Prozac and … I was really taken with it, but it kind of stopped working. A couple of years later … my doctor prescribed something else, and I did that for several years, and [then] it sort of stopped working … The depression didn’t really emerge again for me in a crippling way until Covid. ”
Alexander had researched how antidepressants diminish your frontal cortex and when a friend told him about microdosing, he believed psilocybin might be a more natural remedy.
“For me, the depression is putting a negative twist on too many things, catastrophizing things …” he says. “When I started microdosing, almost within days, all that lifted and I was happier. It had a bold impact.”
Other users are more interested in the possibility of opening and expanding consciousness and imbuing internal balance, as well as cultivating compassion.
Erika Haag, who has a regular yoga and meditation practice, was interested in what microdosing could do for her long-term emotional stability.
Many microdosers claim that in very small doses, psilocybin, the active ingredient in “magic mushrooms,” can help with symptoms of mental illness. Daniel Patrick Martin/Shutterstock
She and her husband had taken medicinal plants in larger doses and benefited a lot from the experience. “Once it helped us get through a really intense relationship crisis, and it’s allowed us to grow so much on so many different levels,” she says.
While Alexander’s approach to microdosing is more casual, Erika and her husband have followed stricter protocols.
Each protocol is a little different, with other substances to balance the psychedelic’s effects on the body. Haag says she enjoyed the experience but decided that microdosing was increasing her sensitivity too much and discontinued it after eight months.
“In theory, you are supposed to do it for one year, but right now I am trying to work without living by dogmas and instead listen to my body and what I need,” she says. “I felt really good stopping for now.”
For the hesitant microdoser, there is plenty of information online these days, including an entire Reddit subgroup. Both Fadiman’s and Pollan’s books have also spiked interest in this new form of self-medication. And as attitudes change about psychedelics, work to decriminalize psilocybin in both Mexico and the United States continues, with the hope that new research will find ways to use these drugs to benefit a larger population.
Like so many other ancient traditions, psychedelics may be a key to navigating life that the modern world is just starting to understand.
Lydia Carey is a regular contributor to Mexico News Daily.
A business that closed in El Paso, Texas, due to a decline in business from Mexicans in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua. al día dallas
The closure of the Mexico-United States border to nonessential traffic since early last year due to the coronavirus pandemic has caused big economic losses in U.S. border cities but some gains in their Mexican counterparts.
The economies of U.S. border communities have suffered losses of US $10 billion since March 2020 due to the inability of many Mexicans to cross the border to go shopping, eat in restaurants and fill up their cars, according to a study by José Iván Rodríguez Sanchez of the Baker Institute Center for the United States and Mexico at Rice University in Texas.
Meanwhile, Mexicans who would normally shop in the United States have spent an additional 45 billion pesos (US $2.24 billion) in Mexican border cities since the beginning of the pandemic, according to the Confederation of Chambers of Commerce, Services and Tourism (Concanaco).
In shopping districts located near border crossing points in towns and cities in Texas, the lack of Mexican visitors has forced many stores to close, reported the news website Al Día Dallas. A large number of the shuttered businesses – many of which sell items such as clothes, shoes, perfume, wedding dresses and 15th birthday dresses – had depended on Mexican customers for years, if not decades.
“To walk around and see businesses closed is very sad,” said Teclo García, director of economic development for the city of Laredo, Texas, located across the border from Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas.
“That’s the most painful thing, we don’t know whether they will open again or not.”
The estimated US $10 billion in losses is set to rise as the border between remains closed to nonessential traffic, although there is an expectation that it will open relatively soon as the priority vaccination of young people in Mexican border communities continues.
“Border businesses are facing an unprecedented crisis because thousands of people are no longer crossing to consume and that deals a direct blow to the heart of these border communities,” Rodríguez told Al Día Dallas.
“And the Mexicans are also losing because they used to cross [the border] to buy goods they got more cheaply in the United States and now they have to buy them in Mexico at a higher price,” he said.
His remarks are backed up by United States Department of Transportation data that shows that vehicular traffic from Mexico to the U.S. declined 50% annually to March 2021, while cross-border foot traffic was down almost 61%.
The silver lining for Mexico is that the inability of many Mexicans to cross into the United States has benefited businesses in Mexican border cities from Tijuana in the west to Matamoros in the east, according to Julio Almanza, a Concanaco vice president in the northern border region.
He said the economies of Mexican border cities have also benefited from visiting U.S. citizens, who have routinely been let into Mexico despite the border ostensibly being closed to nonessential travel for most of the pandemic before restrictions on southbound travel were recently eased.
Many Americans first came to Mexico to look for essential items they couldn’t find at home, such as toilet paper, and they have continued to come, Almanza said.
Sales in Mexican border city businesses “have increased 40% permanently,” he said, adding that the flow of U.S. visitors increased further as vaccines were rolled out rapidly north of the border.
The owner of Blue Propane says Gas Bienestar will be good for Mexico.
The owner of a Sonora-based gas company has thrown his support behind the federal government’s plan to create a new state-owned LP gas distribution company, saying it will help lower prices and break a monopoly in Baja California.
President López Obrador announced last week that the state oil company Pemex would establish the new utility within three months. Gas Bienestar (Well-Being Gas), as the new company will be called, is needed to create additional competition in the LP gas market because it is dominated by five large companies and gas prices have been rising “unjustifiably” above inflation, he said last Wednesday.
Jorge Alberto Elías Retes, owner and president of Blue Propane, said he approved of the president’s proposal, saying the entry of the new company into the market will help drive LP gas prices down in cities across Mexico.
He also said Gas Bienestar’s arrival in Baja California will put an end to an effective monopoly in the northern border state.
Companies owned by members of the Zaragoza Fuentes family have long controlled the gas market in the state, Elías said, adding that the family has created new firms in order to give the impression there is competition when in fact there is not.
“For more than 20 years in Baja California, 12 members of the Zaragoza Fuentes family have controlled 58 permits for the storage, sale, distribution and transport of liquefied petroleum gas,” he said, adding that federal and state authorities have failed to “sanction them for the control they maintain over the market.”
Putting an end to such monopolies is urgent because they affect the nation’s poorest families the most, Elías said.
“… LP gas monsters across the country and particularly in Baja California have distorted the market to benefit themselves at the expense of the most humble families,” he said.
Grupo Tomza, owned by the Zaragoza family, is one of the five large companies López Obrador was referring to last week, the news website Forbes México reported.
Blue Propane’s attempt to enter the market in Tijuana – where gas prices are among the highest in the country – was stymied by a series of legal impediments that prevented the opening of 10 LP gas distribution points, Elías said.
“… We’ve been victims of this gas cartel that has paid off authorities of the three levels of government,” he said, claiming that the Zaragoza family has financed political campaigns in Baja California for decades.
Ramírez: Government will end up creating a substandard company.
Lawyers for Blue Propane say that Zaragoza companies have co-opted officials to create a network of institutional support that makes it practically impossible for a new firm to enter the market in Baja California.
The president of the LP gas industry association Amexgas also said that the creation of a state-owned gas distribution company is a good thing, provided it enters the market on a level playing field.
Carlos Serrano told the newspaper Milenio that Gas Bienestar must compete under the same rules that govern private gas companies and if that is the case its competition is welcome.
Víctor Ramírez, spokesman for the Mexico Climate and Energy Platform, a renewable energy advocacy group, raised concerns about the cost of creating a new company from scratch.
“I don’t see it being a good strategy, it’s going to be very expensive,” he said in an interview, asserting that buying delivery trucks and purchasing and setting up storage terminals alone will cost about 11 billion pesos (US $548.9 million) at a “very conservative” estimate.
Ramírez also said it’s doubtful that a new company will be ready to enter the market within three months, as López Obrador claimed would occur.
“Having this in three months and having a subsidy to reduce the price of gas is very complicated,” he said, adding that creating Gas Bienestar will cause Pemex’s debt – already above US $100 billion – to grow.
In addition, Ramírez predicted that the government will end up creating a substandard company.
“…They won’t achieve something important but what they will achieve is to raise Pemex’s costs,” he said.
Beatriz Marcelino, head of energy consultancy firm Grupo Ciita, agreed that it is unlikely that the government will have a new company ready to go in three months. Obtaining the necessary permits, provided there are no delays, will take at least eight months, she said.
“We doubt that it can be done in three months,” Marcelino said, noting that the Energy Regulatory Commission (CRE) can take more than a year to grant gas distribution plant permits. Environmental impact assessments can take up to six months to complete, she said.
Serrano said that more than 2,000 permit applications, including ones filed two years ago, are awaiting approval by the CRE.
Marcelino said the government won’t want to wait for more than a year to obtain the necessary permits to allow Gas Bienestar to begin operations and expressed concern that it could seek favorable treatment from the CRE, whose governing body is conveniently stacked with people hand picked by López Obrador, a situation that experts warned could cause the regulator to lose autonomy.
Cubans gesture during a protest against the Cuban government in front of the offices of the International Organization for Migration (IOM) in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, on Monday. REUTERS/Jose Luis Gonzalez
President López Obrador offered his own remedy to Cuba’s largest protest in recent memory when he replied to a journalist at Monday morning’s news conference: end the U.S. trade embargo.
Hundreds of Cubans began protesting late last week against extended electricity blackouts and to demand Covid-19 vaccines. The gatherings spread throughout the country and escalated into demands for “freedom” and political change. Protesters shouted “Down with dictatorship” and “Homeland and life” – a play on the communist revolutionary slogan “Homeland or death,” posing a rare challenge to the regime of President Miguel Díaz-Canel, the successor of Fidel and Raúl Castro.
“The truth is that if [the international community] really wanted to help Cuba, the first thing to do is suspend the blockade … as the majority of the world’s countries are demanding … That would be a truly humanitarian gesture,” López Obrador said.
“No country in the world should be surrounded, blocked: that is absolutely contrary to human rights. You cannot create a fence and isolate an entire people for political reasons,” he added.
Mexico is prepared to provide the island’s population with medication, vaccines and food if requested, the president stated, before tasking Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard with establishing a link to provide aid.
AMLO, as the president is commonly known, said it was a matter for the people of Cuba to resolve, without addressing their lack of democratic recourse to help mediate the dispute. “The issue must not be politicized and humanitarian support must not be used as a banner to interfere in matters that only correspond to the Cubans to resolve … They must respect the self-determination of the Cuban people,” he said.
“I believe a resolution should be sought through dialogue, without the use of force, without confrontation, without violence.”
President Díaz-Canel repeated AMLO’s demand later on Monday, blaming the United States for the protests and promising to “confront and defeat” the trade embargo, which intensified during the presidency of Donald Trump.
However, he did not replicate his Mexican counterpart’s peaceful rhetoric: the protests were designed to “fracture the unity of the people,” he said, adding that the demonstrators “got what they deserved,” in allusion to police repression. Díaz-Canel had warned on Sunday that “provocations will not be allowed” and repeated Fidel Castro’s mantra: “The street belongs to the revolutionaries.”
Daniel, a Cuban studying in Mexico who declined to give his last name, said the blockade was too often a convenient excuse for the island’s leadership. “I don’t think in the short term raising the blockade is the solution to the protests in Cuba. The thousands of Cubans that are protesting in the street are there because of the poor administration which hasn’t been able to overcome economic inefficiency in the country for more than 60 years … The Cuban government is always blaming the blockade … they haven’t known how to develop the country from the inside. It’s an agricultural country that can produce from the Earth, which can produce food … but it’s easier to blame the blockade,” he said.
At the United Nations General Assembly on June 23, 184 countries voted in favor of a resolution to demand the end of the U.S. economic blockade for the 29th year in a row.
A relative of a victim reacts as members of the marines offer an apology to family members of victims for their role in the 2018 forced disappearances. REUTERS/Daniel Becerril
The navy offered a rare public apology on Tuesday for its potential role in the abductions of dozens of people who went missing from a northern border town in 2018 during operations against drug cartels.
As many as 40 people disappeared between February and May in Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas, across from Texas, which has long been a flashpoint in turf wars between drug cartels.
In April, Mexican authorities charged 30 marines for allegedly participating in the forced disappearances there and said they would carry out the investigations within six months.
About two dozen family members of victims of the missing attended an outdoor ceremony in a small park in the center of Nuevo Laredo.
“This institution of the Mexican state deeply regrets the situation,” Navy Rear Admiral Ramiro Lobato told the ceremony. He added that the navy would keep collaborating with officials to seek justice for the victims.
During the event, family members called out the names of their disappeared loved ones and responded in unison, “Present.”
Along with the army, the navy for years assumed a central role in the government’s military-led crackdown on drug cartels, which was launched in 2006.
Their deployment led to frequent complaints of rights abuses by the armed forces, including forced disappearances.
“We are asking the marines for justice,” said Leticia Martínez Borjas at the ceremony. Her husband, Gabriel Gasper Vazquez, disappeared on March 26, 2018.
“No one deserves to live with this uncertainty of whether their loved one is alive or whether he’s no longer in this world,” she said.
The charges against the marines marked the first high-profile move against military personnel by President López Obrador.
The U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights had denounced the disappearances, including those of at least five minors, as “horrific.”
Julie Metz, author of the besteller Perfection, will discuss writing from family history with author Danielle Trussoni in an online event on July 18.
“Go with what you know” is a writer’s maxim that inspires many hopeful authors to begin penning a memoir or novel based on their family history. Nothing could be easier, right?
But in reality, the art of researching and writing about one’s family history — and especially family secrets — is actually one of the biggest challenges a writer can take on: family stories are notoriously complex and at times told among members in an unreliable fashion. Not every member may be happy to assist their relative in unearthing painful or awkward family histories. Often, family stories span continents, making research difficult.
On July 18, the San Miguel Literary Sala’s Distinguished Speakers Series will help aspiring writers by bringing authors Julie Metz and Danielle Trussoni to a live Zoom discussion on the art of researching and writing about family secrets and the challenges of condensing it onto the page — be it fiction or memoir.
Ever since the pandemic forced the San Miguel de Allende, Guanajuato, literary organization to go virtual in 2020, it has been offering its annual diverse fare of author readings, writing workshops, interviews and panel discussions with major authors — including the well-known San Miguel Writers’ Conference — online each month, with events spread out over 2020 and 2021.
Known for its small, intimate workshops and author appearances that give audience members the opportunity for a brief one-on-one encounter with the guest speakers, the organization has strived to continue that tradition as it moved online. Events have been conducted via videoconferencing software that allows viewers to ask questions and interact with the guest. This casual discussion between the two authors will be no exception.
Danielle Trussoni is the author of the Angelology series of novels.
Julie Metz is the author of Eva and Eve: A Search for My Mother’s Lost Childhood and What a War Left Behind. Interweaving personal memoir and family history, the book is a heartfelt ode to her mother, who escaped the Nazis as a child in Vienna in 1940. Metz is the New York Times bestselling author of Perfection. She has written for numerous publications, including The New York Times, Salon, Dame, Redbook and Glamour.
Danielle Trussoni, the bestselling author of the Angelology series of novels, has recently released a new work, The Ancestor, in which a woman unravels the truth about her family and learns that her true inheritance is not the castle in the Italian Alps or the family’s noble title but rather her genes and the choices her family has made.
The author currently writes a horror column for the New York Times Book Review and recently served as a fiction jurist for the Pulitzer Prizes. She holds an MFA in fiction from the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she won the Michener-Copernicus Society of America Award.
The two authors will conduct this event as an engaging and interactive conversation, with viewers allowed to “come up on stage” via videoconferencing and ask questions of the writers.
One of the mountain roads included in the public works project.
The “Connecting Querétaro” highway project has upgraded 226 kilometers of road for an investment of 1 billion pesos (about US $50 million), improving transportation among 300 communities in the sierra, the state government reported on Sunday.
Before the project, roads were in poor condition, some only providing one lane and others being unusable in heavy rain.
The hydraulic concrete highways have transformed residents’ lives by connecting communities, providing access to hospitals and schools, improving public transport, and enabling products to be transported and emergency services to reach people in need, the government said in a prepared statement.
The project provided social benefit too: local labor was sought which helped boost the local economy, and female workers were encouraged to join the workforce in a new precedent for public works in the state.
In one case, 40% of the workers employed in the modernization of roads in the Landa de Matamoros municipality were female.
Querétaro officials say other states have looked to follow suit and replicate the model of female participation. They have signed an agreement to produce a public works manual from a gender perspective, which seeks to ensure that contractors employ women.
Querétaro is one of the country’s safest and most affluent states. From January through May, Querétaro only recorded 92 homicides, compared to neighboring Guanajuato, the country’s most violent, which registered 1,545.
Querétaro’s namesake capital city placed fifth in the Financial Times’ Latin American Cities of the Future 2021/22. The only city in the country that ranked higher was Mexico City, which came first.
