Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum announces a change at the helm of the Metro.
Exactly eight weeks after the Mexico City Metro disaster that claimed the lives of 26 people, the chief of the subway system was replaced on Monday.
Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum announced that Florencia Serranía, who became general director of Metro operator STC in 2018, had been replaced by Guillermo Calderón Aguilera, a veteran transport official.
The announcement came a week after Sheinbaum met with President López Obrador and businessman Carlos Slim to discuss plans to repair Line 12, an elevated section of which collapsed on May 3, causing two train carriages to plunge toward a busy road below. Slim’s company Carso Infrastructure and Construction partially built the line, the newest of the 52-year-old Metro system.
“We want to thank Dr. Florencia Serranía for all the effort and work … she has put into the Metro,” Sheinbaum told a press conference.
“… As of today, the engineer Guillermo Calderón Aguilera takes over the management of STC Metro. He is a specialist in the management of projects and processes who specializes in the implementation and operation of urban transport systems,” the mayor said.
Calderón, a former director of the capital’s Metrobús system, said Sheinbaum asked him to focus on delivering a safe and efficient Metro system.
“I want to share that the first instruction I have received from the mayor is to continue with the efforts to guarantee a safe and efficient Metro for passengers,” he said.
With regard to Line 12, the priority, Calderón said, will be to continue to attend to the victims of last month’s tragedy and their families, and to support DNV, a Norwegian company contracted by the government to carry out an independent inquiry into the cause of the accident.
López Obrador pledged last week that the entirety of Line 12, which primarily serves poor neighborhoods in Mexico City’s southeast, will reopen within a year.
A diversion on the Cancún-Playa del Carmen highway will be finished in two months, the governor of Quintana Roo said.
The four-lane, 22.7-kilometer route will help relieve traffic build-up resulting from lane closures due to ground movement below the tarmac. Deep maintenance work is critical to ready the road for construction of a section of the Maya Train in the same location.
Governor Carlos Joaquín González explained the urgency to build the alternative route. “On the federal highway from Cancún to Playa del Carmen there are a lot of delays that are caused by intense traffic. It’s due to damage that the road has in some of its lanes as a result of the ground below caving in.”
Joaquín said Fonatur [the National Tourism Promotion Fund] is building the road.
He called for residents to be patient while the work is carried out.
Last week, a Fonatur representative explained that thousands of drivers were being endangered every day by the ground movement beneath the surface of the highway. He added that experts in civil engineering, geology and geophysics were assessing and implementing repairs.
Security officials and the young child who was found near a semitrailer on Monday.
A boy believed to be two years old was among more than 100 migrants abandoned on a highway in southern Veracruz on Monday after traveling in suffocating conditions in a semitrailer, the National Immigration Institute (INM) announced.
A man traveling in the trailer that was transporting the migrants on the highway between Ocozocoautla, Chiapas, and Las Choapas, Veracruz, was found dead at the same location, having apparently suffocated in the crowded vehicle.
The INM said in a statement that along with members of the National Guard it provided assistance on Monday morning to eight Central Americans who had been traveling in the crowded semitrailer, including the two-year-old boy.
All showed symptoms of dehydration and asphyxiation, the INM said. “Unfortunately, the lifeless body of a young man was found,” the institute said, adding that he was approximately 25 years old.
The INM released a photo of the boy that showed him standing on the shoulder of the highway surrounded by half-filled water bottles, empty snack packets, strewn clothes and black trash bags. The child was shirtless and appeared to have his hands on his face in the partially blurred photo. The INM also published a second photo showing the boy fully dressed and sitting on an immigration worker’s lap.
None of the adults assisted by the INM said they were relatives of the boy. The institute said it notified Veracruz child protection authorities about his discovery so that they would take him into their care, adding that a Guatemalan consulate was contacted because there were indications that the boy might be of that nationality.
The migrants assisted by the INM said that some of their traveling companions had fainted while traveling in the crowded trailer because of a lack of air and heat. Others shouted and banged on the doors of the vehicle to urge the driver to stop, the institute said.
The semitrailer eventually stopped and “one of the people smugglers, or supposed ‘guides’ opened one of the doors,” the INM said, adding that most of the men and women jumped out of the vehicle and fled.
“Eight people couldn’t escape,” the INM said, adding that some got out of the semitrailer to lie on the side of the road, while others remained inside the vehicle, apparently because they were too weak to move.
They were taken to a nearby INM facility, where they were given medical treatment and food.
Federal authorities launched an operation to locate and arrest the people transporting the migrants but no arrests were reported.
Fleeing violence and poverty at home and encouraged by the arrival of United States President Joe Biden in the White House, large numbers of Central American migrants have traveled through Mexico this year to seek asylum in the U.S.
Thousands of unaccompanied minors crossed into the United States in 2020, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
During United States Vice President Kamala Harris’ visit to Mexico City earlier this month, Mexico and the United States signed a memorandum of understanding to establish a strategic partnership to address the lack of economic opportunities in northern Central America, namely Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras.
Fourteen percent of cargo trucks are over the legal weight limit, causing major damage to highways around the country, the Transport Ministry (SCT) said.
The SCT’s director of highway maintenance, Salvador Fernández Ayala, said that while overweight vehicles are causing damage to road infrastructure a lack of checkpoints to check cargo weights and dimensions was hampering enforcement.
He also explained that the maximum cargo weight permitted for trucks on Mexican roads is 75.5 tonnes. That’s already far higher than what is permitted by Mexico’s USMCA trading partners: Canada allows trucks to carry 63 tonnes, while the United States only permits 36.3 tonnes.
In 2018, Fernández reported on the poor state of the country’s tarmac: 35% of highways were categorized as being in poor condition and 40% were classified as acceptable. By December authorities plan to have only 10% of highways in poor condition and 59% classified as acceptable.
The SCT’s road infrastructure project spending could surpass 50 billion pesos (about US $2.52 billion) before its conclusion in 2023.
Supporters of legalization celebrate the court's ruling on Monday.
The Supreme Court (SCJN) on Monday struck down laws banning the use of recreational marijuana, declaring once again that its prohibition is unconstitutional.
The court ruled 8-3 that sections of the General Health Law that prohibit personal use of marijuana and cultivation of the plant at home were unconstitutional.
The SCJN previously ruled that prohibiting the use of recreational marijuana was unconstitutional and ordered the Congress to pass laws to legalize the drug. But the Congress has failed to pass the legislation despite the Supreme Court giving it three extensions to do so.
The most recent deadline expired on April 30, prompting the court to effectively legislate on the matter itself.
“[It’s] a historic day for liberties,” Chief Justice Arturo Zaldívar declared after the decision was handed down.
The court’s ruling – a “general declaration of unconstitutionality” with regard to laws banning recreational marijuana – orders the federal Health Ministry to issue permits to adults who ask to be allowed to use and grow cannabis. However, it will remain illegal to possess more than five grams of marijuana and sell the drug.
Before Monday’s ruling, adults could apply for court orders that allowed them to use and grow marijuana but the process was time-consuming, costly and out of reach of many Mexicans.
The new ruling orders health regulator Cofepris to draw up guidelines for the legal use of recreational marijuana and the acquisition of cannabis seeds. People will not be allowed to smoke in public places nor drive or use heavy machinery while under the influence of the drug.
The head of Mexico United Against Crime, an organization that opposes the prohibition of drugs, agreed that the court’s ruling is significant but stressed that the use of marijuana will remain a crime for people who haven’t been granted a Health Ministry permit.
“It must be made very clear that the criminal code hasn’t been modified. Therefore, the crimes still stand, people can still be prosecuted for small-scale drug trafficking,” Lisa Sánchez said.
She said lawmakers, rather than the Supreme Court, should be determining the best way to issue permits, the quantities of marijuana people are allowed to legally possess and where the drug can be used. But there is “a lack of political will,” Sánchez asserted.
Lisa Sánchez of Mexico United Against Crime warned that smoking pot without a permit remains a crime.
Despite the court’s ruling, it is still up to the Congress to pass legislation to create a legal marijuana market, Sánchez said. The approval of such legislation would make Mexico the biggest legal marijuana market in the world.
The bill passed by the lower house stipulated that bricks and mortar stores with the appropriate licenses would be permitted to sell marijuana for recreational purposes but the sale via vending machines, over the phone, online, or in any other way that is not face-to-face would be prohibited.
Hugo Legorreta, a spokesman for Plantón 420, a pro-legalization protest movement that runs a cannabis garden-cum marijuana market outside the federal Senate in Mexico City, said that he and other activists were happy with the court’s latest decision but “attentive to the details that are not yet known.”
“But the [ruling of] unconstitutionality has now been given, that’s a great battle won,” he said.
“It’s a historic day, yes; Mexico has spoken out in favor of a vision of human rights and guarantees for various rights, like the free development of personality,” Legorreta said, referring to a Supreme Court decision that ruled that banning marijuana violated that right.
“… Now it remains unknown what the lawmakers will do, … we’ve already seen that they’re experts in postponing,” he said.
“… A lot of things are still lacking,” Legorreta said, referring to Plantón 420’s demands that people be allowed to grow and possess unlimited quantities of marijuana for non-commercial purposes and that smoking in designated public places be allowed.
“We’re still fighting, the sit-in installed in front of the Senate is not going to move,” he said.
Academics who spoke to the newspaper El Universal said the Supreme Court ruling showed that the democratic system in Mexico works.
“A lot of the parties aren’t very supportive [of legalization], others didn’t attribute importance [to the issue] and those in favor didn’t have a majority. … In general terms, … the parties weren’t in favor of legalizing, they never had a lot of enthusiasm, … and this occurs mainly due to prejudices or not to lose votes among the conservative sectors,” said José Antonio Crespo, a political scientist.
“[But] there is a certain level of democracy, which has been achieved over 30 years, …[including] the autonomy of the Supreme Court. Autonomy is watered down when the Congress is controlled by the ruling party but we have the Supreme Court, the division of powers – progress that we didn’t have 30 years ago,” he said.
The Supreme Court ruling “shows us the different paths the law in Mexico can take,” said Leonardo Núñez González, a political analyst and researcher at CIDE, a Mexico City university.
“Legislative paralysis can have several exits,” he said before blaming the “laziness” of lawmakers for the lack of legalization legislation.
Alberto Aziz Nassif, an academic at the Center for Research and Higher Studies in Social Anthropology, said the Supreme Court ruling is “very good news,” adding that “it was time because the contrast with the United States is abysmal.”
“While they’re making progress state by state there, here we’re not,” he said before criticizing the Congress for being “extremely slow” to legislate despite the SCJN having ordered it to legalize marijuana.
“… It was unable to legislate with the importance the issue deserves and within the established times,” Aziz said.
Some supporters of legalization hope that it will help reduce cartel violence in Mexico but the fact is that most criminal organizations are far more focused on the trafficking of cocaine and synthetic drugs such as methamphetamine and fentanyl as well as lucrative non-narcotic rackets such as kidnapping and extortion.
Financial authorities have warned that cryptocurrencies are not legal tender and that financial institutions that integrate their use will be subject to sanctions.
The joint statement by the banking regulator, the Bank of México and the Finance Ministry came after Banco Azteca owner Ricardo Salinas Pliego said he planned to allow customers to operate with Bitcoin, the world’s leading cryptocurrency.
Salinas called Bitcoin “the new gold” and argued in favor of its value as an investment opportunity and a parallel currency option for his bank’s clients. “At Banco Azteca we are working to bring [Bitcoin] to our clients to continue promoting [financial] freedom,” he wrote Sunday on Twitter.
The Monday statement by financial authorities sought to put a check on Salinas’ plans. “The financial authorities reiterate their warnings … on the risks inherent in the use of so-called ‘virtual assets’ as a means of exchange, as a store of value, or as another form of investment,” the statement read.
“The country’s financial institutions are not authorized to carry out and offer operations to the public using virtual assets, such as Bitcoin, Ether, XRP and others in order to maintain a healthy distance between [those virtual assets] and the financial system,” the statement continued.
Finance Minister Arturo Herrera reiterated the position at a news conference, saying that under current rules cryptocurrencies are prohibited from being used in the financial system, and that regulation is not likely to change.
There are reasons to be wary of Bitcoin’s immediate integration: the cryptocurrency’s valuation has had a turbulent recent history. It fell to a five-month low last Tuesday, due to China’s crackdown on cryptocurrency mining and trading after reaching a high of US $63,000 on April 13.
However, the premise is also a threat to financial authorities, who are used to central banks having authority over currencies. In contrast, Bitcoin has not depended on any central institution since its anonymous creation in 2009.
Salinas is no neutral bystander. Banco Azteca is one of the country’s leading remittance processors, which are increasingly being sent in Bitcoin. He is also something of an ally to the president, having previously backed a bill that would have forced the Banxico to buy up foreign cash.
The entrepreneur is worth about US $15.8 billion according to Forbes, making him Mexico’s third richest person. He runs TV Azteca, Mexico’s No. 2 television broadcaster, and Grupo Elektra, a retailer founded by his grandfather in the 1950s that targets lower-middle class consumers.
If President López Obrador was chastened by his losses in midterm elections this month, he has not shown it.
The morning after the June 6 vote, the government published a law to extend the mandate of Supreme Court President Arturo Zaldívar, who is close to the president, in what critics fear may provide a template for López Obrador to extend his own term beyond 2024.
Within days, the president vowed to pursue constitutional reforms in the areas of energy, elections and security, despite having lost the two-thirds majority needed for such changes in Congress. He accused the “perverse, slanderous, immoral” media of poisoning voters against him and attacked the middle class as selfish social climbers.
Despite the fiery rhetoric, to some this looked more like business as usual for López Obrador rather than a shift to a more radical agenda after his Morena party lost about a fifth of its seats in Congress and more than half the districts in Mexico City.
“Clearly AMLO will keep on being AMLO, and this is something businesses and society have to learn to live with — we’re not going to change him,” said Antonio del Valle, head of the Mexican Business Council representing the country’s biggest companies, using the president’s nickname.
“But after three years, we can understand by now that, just as he isn’t going to change politically, he won’t change his economic policy either … and that reassures me a lot.”
Top business leaders have learned to look past the veteran populist’s incendiary messaging and applaud how he has resisted pressure to borrow heavily for a big spending splurge, like other leftists in Latin America.
One chief executive, who asked not to be named, said the president’s “bark is worse than his bite.”
While his rhetoric remains confrontational, many observers expect little deviation from a plan he mapped out long ago to achieve his vaunted “transformation” of Mexico: social programs to tackle deep income inequality, infrastructure projects in the poor southeast to create jobs and energy self-sufficiency based on fossil fuels.
After a stint as mayor of Mexico City in 2000-2005, in which López Obrador displayed a pragmatic streak, “I was expecting him to be more moderate, and he hasn’t been”, said Porfirio Muñoz Ledo, a totemic figure of the Mexican left and one of the few in the ruling Morena party who is critical of the president.
López Obrador’s desire to extend Zaldívar’s term to secure a potentially more compliant judiciary and his attacks on the respected electoral authority INE, as well as independent regulators, have sounded alarm bells.
“I hope he won’t toughen the presidency to oppose institutions,” said Muñoz Ledo. “Mexico’s presidency is already very powerful.”
Claudia Sheinbaum, López Obrador’s protégée and the mayor of Mexico City, ridiculed what she said had been opposition efforts to portray the election as a watershed for Mexico’s democracy with “this idea that it would be the last time we voted because we were heading for dictatorship.”
Graham Stock, a partner at BlueBay Asset Management, saw “limited opportunity” for López Obrador to radicalize without a congressional supermajority and rejected comparisons with Venezuela’s late authoritarian leader Hugo Chávez.
“He’s a fiscal conservative, so he won’t be spending money in a dash for growth,” he said. “The chaos and destruction narrative that his opponents have always tried to say would happen — I don’t buy that . . . He’s not the next Chávez, he’s quite unique.”
After winning a landslide in 2018, López Obrador has kept supporters loyal with handouts, higher pensions and big increases to the minimum wage. His stubborn refusal to take on more debt meant there was no Covid-19 stimulus program, triggering a deeper recession last year than in many Latin American peers.
Jorge Castañeda, a former foreign minister from the conservative PAN party, said he believed López Obrador had wasted an opportunity to use his “enormous legitimacy” to enact far-reaching reforms.
“What you have to do is what he hasn’t done, although he could have: a serious tax reform,” he said. López Obrador has promised to close loopholes rather than raise taxes.
“It could seem short-termist, but it’s a pragmatic logic,” said Gerardo Esquivel, a deputy governor of the Bank of México. “All past attempts at fiscal reform have been political flops … In his opinion, it’s more transformative to make people pay what they have to and get salaries where they should be.”
Mexico’s economy is now on the rebound after contracting 8.5% in 2020 and is heading for growth of 6% or more this year, helped by President Joe Biden’s US $1.9-trillion stimulus package in the U.S.
But a climate of uncertainty lingers, stoked by López Obrador’s cancellation of partially built airport and brewery projects, weighing on the investment that Mexico needs to break out of its traditionally weak growth rates.
López Obrador’s unrelenting attacks on political enemies, including the rich, the media and the business class, have also fuelled concerns about the risks of further dividing an already deeply fractured and violent society.
“The most important thing is to stop the polarization of the country: rich versus poor, north versus south,” said the chief executive of one Mexican bank. “We all need to row in the same direction for the boat to advance.”
Although there seems to be nothing there now but open water, Isla Bermeja was on maps as early as 1539. Google Maps shows where the island was believed to exist.
First appearing in a Spanish compendium of all the islands of the world in 1539, Bermeja has flummoxed sailors, fishermen and politicians since it seemingly vanished from the ocean around the turn of the 21st century.
22°33’N, 91°22’W. Take a boat to these coordinates and you are almost certain to find nothing but empty water and open skies despite the fact that, dating back to the 16th century, this phantom islet in the Gulf of Mexico was clearly visible on maps and charts.
Isla Bermeja’s dematerialization only became apparent over the course of negotiations between the governments of Mexico and the United States in 2008 and 2009 over who had drilling rights to parts of the Gulf of Mexico, in which the phantom island was considered crucial for determining national marine boundaries.
“Isla Bermeja was a controversy because it was a key area of the Exclusive Economic Zone in the Gulf of Mexico,” geographer and islands specialist Israel Baxin Martínez explains. “There were official searches around this time to see if there was some remnant of this island because the expansion of this zone for Mexico would mean an abundance of oil.”
Off the north coast of the Yucatán, it would have been the northernmost Mexican island in the gulf. As a result of its absence, Mexico lost rights to a maritime area that was believed to hold 22.5 billion barrels of oil.
The Mexican government searched for Isla Bermeja’s remnants, hoping it would help the nation secure drilling rights in the area, says geographer Israel Baxin. UNAM
It has been speculated that the island disappeared as a result of natural geographic shifts in the ocean floor and rising sea levels that have already swallowed remote islands in Hawaii, Japan, and the Arctic.
It could also be, of course, that the island never existed and that its appearance on early maps was merely the result of erroneous observations by cartographers.
With such a plentiful stock of black gold on the line, and the complex political latticework that oil negotiations necessarily entail, conspiracy theories about the cause of the island’s disappearance abound.
It is even common chatter among fishing communities along the coast of the Yucatán that the island was destroyed deliberately to allow the United States to eat into the Exclusive Economic Zone.
However, when negotiations began in 2009, oil production rates had been dropping — or failing to increase — every year since 2004. In spite of this, oil revenues count for 10% of Mexico’s export earnings, and therefore are a significant contributor to national GDP.
Notwithstanding the continuing global slump in oil demand as a result of the rise of sustainable fuel options and a more widespread awareness of the damaging effects of drilling for and burning crude oils, the loss of the territory to the U.S. represented a significant blow for economic expansion.
“It’s a conspiracy theory, of course,” an unmoved Martínez says.
Yet the layman’s whisper has seeped into the political chat at large: in November 2008, six senators from the then governing National Action Party (PAN) raised questions about Isla Bermeja, citing suspicions that the island had been made to vanish deliberately by American powers in order to give the U.S. more leverage in negotiations over marine territory.
This, however, is a more-than-suspect allegation. It is scarcely believable that an entire island could be destroyed or obfuscated from the map without somebody noticing, and there is already a precedent for confusion around the existence of small islets.
In the Pacific, for example, Martínez cites islands that, through issues with cartography or nomenclature, either do not exist or are existentially confused. He cites as examples cartographical inaccuracies appertaining to the Isla de Cedros and the Revillagigedo Islands southwest of the southern tip of Baja California, a large archipelago famous for its endemic flora and fauna.
“Conceptually,” Martínez continues, “we notionally believe that everything that is mapped must exist. So, because the island was mapped in the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries, the assumption was that the island existed, and the map record confirms it.”
In these cases, Martinez says, the existence of the islands was “a continually unconfirmed truth,” which is as much to say that once an entity is mapped, its existence is assumed and replicated without question.
Bermeja (circled in red) on a map from 1846. Theories of what happened to the island range from it being subject to ocean floor shifts or rising water levels to it being destroyed by the US to gain oil rights. It also may have never existed.
Bermeja, however, is a little different. Historically, the island was mentioned in the cartography of explorers in the 18th century, but it is additionally mentioned in other documents, including a number of official inventories at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century — some of which were government inventories.
“The question with Bermeja in particular is that it’s not just mentioned in cartographic history,” says Martínez. “It has a much larger backlog of studies and a presence in the official inventories.”
Since 2009, there have only been four official expeditions to find Bermeja, alongside a handful of journeys by enquiring journalists and the generally curious.
In the last decade, TV Azteca and the National Autonomous University launched maritime research campaigns to locate the territory, but the missions came to the same conclusions as those sponsored by the government: that the island does not exist and that there are no vestiges of such a body of land in the area.
It is telling that there was little interest in the island until it was believed to have been taken away; like a child with toys, the Mexican cultural consciousness was uninterested in an uninhabited island miles into the gulf until it was no longer there.
“Culturally, what we see with Bermeja, as in many other cases, is that people don’t care about what they’ve got, but they do care about what they’ve lost,” Martinez reflects. “People are jealous of what has been taken from them, but they refuse to do anything with what they already have.”
And therein — perhaps — lies a much greater truth, one that has little to do with disappearing islands and much more to do with the unquestioned lies we build up around us in order to perpetuate the myths of who we believe ourselves to be.
Shannon Collins is an environment correspondent at Ninth Wave Global, an environmental organization and think tank. She writes from Campeche.
An artist's rendition of section four of the Maya Train, where it will run adjacent to the highway between Cancún and Izamal.
The National Tourism Promotion Fund (Fonatur) withheld critical information about the US $8-billion Maya Train railroad when it sought funding for the project from the federal Finance Ministry (SHCP).
The newspaper El Universal reported Monday that Fonatur, which is managing the construction of the 1,500-kilometer tourist and freight railway through Chiapas, Tabasco, Campeche, Yucatán and Quintana Roo, hid “critical information” related to the Maya Train route, expected passenger demand and construction risks.
Professional services firm PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) was paid 32 million pesos (US $1.6 million) by Fonatur to carry out a financial analysis of the project but many of its key findings were not included in a cost-benefit analysis the tourism fund submitted to the SHCP.
El Universal, which obtained almost 7,500 pages of documents delivered to Fonatur by PwC , said the multinational warned of an extremely complex process to build a section of the railroad through jungle between Xul-Ha, Quintana Roo, and Escárcega, Campeche.
PwC also said that construction of the 250-kilometer section would come at great cost and have a significant environmental and social impact.
But Fonatur didn’t include that information in the analysis it submitted to the SHCP. “In other words, fundamental information about this section was hidden,” El Universal said.
Fonatur also withheld a range of other information from the SHCP, including warnings from the Federal Electricity Commission that it would face “significant difficulties in building electrical lines parallel” to existing highway infrastructure, “which generates doubts about the practicality and capacity to deliver a railroad beside it.”
In addition, it didn’t disclose warnings that it was likely to face significant opposition from environmental groups, especially in places such as the Calakmul Biosphere Reserve in Campeche.
PwC warned of a total of 10 construction and operational risks for the Maya Train that Fonatur didn’t disclose or didn’t disclose fully to finance officials.
The risks, which PwC said have a high probability of materializing, “would have a severe impact” if they occurred, El Universal reported, noting that they could cause cost overruns and delays for the government’s signature infrastructure project.
“The [possible] delays range from one to 10 months and the overruns could reach 20% of the [total cost of the] project,” the newspaper said.
Among the likely problems identified by PwC were a lack of coordination in the management of the project; delays in obtaining social approval; delays in obtaining environmental permits; difficulties in obtaining right of way permission; deficient management of the construction contracts; geological risks – there is a vast underground water network on the Yucatán peninsula; and erroneous estimates about demand for Maya Train services.
(The government has said that as many as 18 million people could rise the train annually, an estimate described as pie in the sky by Francisco Javier Gorostiza Pérez, a former train boss and ex-government official.)
Given President López Obrador’s enthusiasm for the train – which he says will spur social and economic development in Mexico’s southeast – it is unlikely that the SHCP would have rejected funding for the project had it been informed of the information Fonatur hid from it. However, withholding information is not a good look for a government that says it prides itself on being transparent.
The government has already faced criticism for carrying out a referendum in 2019 that found overwhelming support for the project but which didn’t meet all international human rights standards, according to the United Nations.
Legal challenges have held up construction of some sections of the railroad but the government is forging ahead, pressuring companies to build it a cracking pace so that it can open before López Obrador leaves office in 2024.
The government has even engaged the army – a favored infrastructure contractor that is also building the new Mexico City airport, among other public works – to build some sections of the railroad, a move that could make resistance to the project more difficult.
The government is adamant that the railroad – which will also offer local services to residents of the five states through which it will run – will begin operations in 2023. It has found a company to build the required trains but it remains to seen whether demand for the service will be high enough for the government to recoup its investment costs and deliver the economic benefits touted by the president, the railroad’s preeminent backer.
The president has branded a commercial featuring the Papantla Flyers as racist, after it was also criticized by the Ministry of Culture.
An advertisement for Mexican cash loans provider Moneyman shows the Dance of the Flyers ceremony in full motion and asks: “Do you know what the number of flyers’ spins and your first Moneyman loan have in common? Both will generate zero interest.”
A block of text displaying “$4,000” — the maximum zero interest payment — then falls from the top of the screen to extinguish a flute player.
The pre-Hispanic ritual, which is principally practiced in Veracruz and Puebla, was named an intangible cultural heritage by UNESCO in 2009. In the ceremony, participants climb a 30-meter pole tied by ropes, before they jump towards the ground and spin around the pole 13 times. One participant remains at the top, dancing and playing a flute and drum.
The president stated his disapproval at Monday morning’s press conference, the mañanera: “A few days ago there was a questioning of the dance of the Voladores de Papantla: racist,” he said.
Culture Minister Alejandra Frausto Guerrero had already condemned the commercial in similar terms: “An advertisement where the ceremony is offended, discriminated against, devalued and ridiculed; which is considered sacred by the preservers of this ancestral practice … This is one more example of the racism of certain social groups in Mexico toward indigenous peoples,” she said.
Frausto also offered her support for cultural organizations which promote the tradition. “We energetically join the pronouncements that have been made against this commercial and offer our full support to the Council for the Protection and Preservation of the Ritual Ceremony of the Flyers,” said added.
The actor in the commercial, Arath de la Torre, apologized on social media after thousands of complaints. “I feel a deep admiration for the Papantla Flyers and pride for all the traditions that are part of our culture, so under no circumstances do I want to collaborate in any campaign where my participation could be interpreted as offensive to any person,” he said.
The tradition is believed to have originated with the Nahua, Huastec and Otomí peoples in pre-Hispanic central Mexico.
The 13 rotations completed by each Papantla Flyer are a symbolic representation of falling through the 13 heavens of the Sun God, and together equal 52 spins: the number of years in an Aztec “century,” or calendar round.
