Schools such as this one in Guanajuato have lost US $29.3 million to robberies during the pandemic, says Mexicanos Primero.
More than 6,000 schools have been targets of robbery during the coronavirus pandemic, according to an education advocacy organization.
Mexicanos Primero said in a new report that 6,008 schools have been burglarized since schools shut in March last year.
Their combined losses total 600 million pesos (US $29.3 million), the group said, explaining that items such as computers, musical instruments, speakers, laboratory equipment, air conditioners, chairs, desks, water pumps, copper pipes and security cameras have been stolen.
Jalisco has recorded the highest number of such robberies with a total of 643 cases followed by Guanajuato with 581 and Aguascalientes with 514. Coahuila and Sonora round out the top five with 500 and 446 cases, respectively.
Mexicanos Primero research director Fernando Ruiz told the newspaper Reforma that the figures were compiled from media reports and from information provided by state governments and schools.
Despite it being located 300 meters from a National Guard base in Tlajomulco, Jalisco, thieves stole this school’s doors, pipes, electrical equipment and even flags.
He said the high number of robberies is one factor that explains low attendance at schools since many of them reopened at the beginning of last week.
“What we’re seeing is that the reopening [of schools] is a failure, at least in the terms that the federal government sought,” Ruiz said.
The facilities at many schools are in poor condition due to being abandoned during the pandemic, he added, citing those in Mexico City as an example. Nine out of 10 schools in the capital didn’t open because of the condition they were in.
He said that a lack of resources and bureaucratic obstacles will make replacing stolen items and carrying out repairs difficult.
In Aguascalientes, for example, some 30% of schools have sustained robberies or vandalism during the pandemic but state education authorities don’t have the money to remedy the situation at all of them, Ruiz said.
He said the federal Ministry of Public Education (SEP) needs to outline what it will do to help schools that don’t have the resources to carry out repairs and replace stolen items.
With the aim of preventing additional robberies and acts of vandalism, Morena party Senator Cecilia Sánchez tabled a document this week that calls on the SEP and the federal Security Ministry to work with their state counterparts to implement or strengthen operations against such crimes.
“With school activities suspended, various media outlets reported a range of illegal acts at educational facilities in all states, proof of that is the report by the organization Mexicanos Primero,” Sánchez said.
“… In the same vein, SNTE [teachers union] secretary-general Alfonso Cepeda Salas announced that 40% to 50% of schools have been vandalized or have recorded thefts during the current health emergency. … [Those figures] represent between 86,000 and 108,000 public schools,” the senator said.
Zuri Merlo is documenting the lives of women business owners in her town of Chipilo, Puebla.
There are probably 50 to 60 female business owners in Chipilo, Puebla, the majority of whom go unnoticed. Resident Zuri Merlo is hoping her project to document the lives and work of these women will change that.
“There is not a lot of information about female business owners in Chipilo,” she said. “The project is to record a little of the history and the legacy that these women have made. The idea is to take photographs and to interview women.
“I will put the information on Facebook, maybe have an exhibit, maybe publish some of their photos and stories as part of a book about Chipilo. My hope is that the government will decide to help women with their businesses or to help them start businesses.”
There’s also a more personal reason for her wanting to do this project. “I have two daughters, and I want to show them that it is possible to be a woman and to have a business.”
Merlo’s desire to undertake this project is, in part, due to her rebelling against the traditional household in which she grew up.
Carolina Zamora, owner of Academia de Baile Blue Dance.
“I am the oldest in my family, and I have three brothers,” she explained, “and my mother, for example, if I was going to ride a bike with my brothers, she would say, ‘You cannot go because you have to stay in the house and help me because you are a girl. You have to do women’s work.’ Or my father, if he was patching a tire, would tell me I could not do it. So there were clear differences between a man and a woman.”
During meals, if her brothers wanted food, she had to serve them, even if she were eating at the time.
“My father would say, ‘Get up and heat the tortillas for your brother’ and I would say, ‘Why me?’ And they would say it is because it is normal that the daughter serves her brothers. When they told me this, I said, ‘I am not going to do it because he can do it himself.’ I understood that a woman was supposed to serve others and I did not like that.”
Her father also didn’t think that a woman should work outside the home. “He still believes a woman is weaker than a man,” she added. “But I do not think there are limits to what a woman can do.”
Merlo doesn’t like to be limited and has certainly shown that she can be successful at a number of things. She has her own business, selling artisanal foods made in Chipilo; she’s raising two daughters and is the director of Chipilo Nostro, an October festival celebrating the pueblo’s founding in 1882.
She came up with the idea for the festival in 2015 and, until the pandemic shut it down, had been a yearly event since 2017. And now she’s taken on the project Mujeres Emprendedoras Chipileñas (Female Business Owners of Chipilo).
Irene Solari de Zeron, owner of Quesería Don Giovanni.
She learned, as might be expected, that women often face challenges that men don’t.
Many of the women she’s interviewed talked about not being taken seriously by men when they first opened their business.
“They do not believe you can do the work,” she said, “but when they see you in your job, your performance, they start to trust you and begin to help you … I believe that this is something that we women have to fight for and win, unfortunately.”
But, she found, once a business owned by a woman was established, men accepted them as equals. “There was no longer discrimination,” she said, adding, “The majority of women were eventually backed by a man, a father, husband, sons or brothers.”
It’s no surprise that most women told her about the challenge of having to work essentially two jobs: at home and at their businesses.
“The biggest challenge for women I interviewed was time,” Merlo said, “because we do not stop doing what we, as women, have to do, like taking care of our husbands and our children, keeping a clean house, all those things … This takes a lot of time, basically dividing our attention between what we put into those things and the attention we want to put into our work. Many times we are not able to focus on growing our businesses.”
Merlo’s upbringing has given her the desire and the drive to prove that she — and other women — can do whatever a man can do and be successful. “Now we have activities like men do,” she said, “and this makes me feel a little excited.”
Families of the missing students outside the National Palace on Tuesday.
The federal Attorney General’s Office (FGR) announced Tuesday that the remains of one of 43 students who disappeared in Guerrero in 2014 has been conclusively identified.
Omar Gómez Trejo, the special prosecutor in charge of the reexamination of the disappearance and presumed murder of the 43 Ayotzinapa rural teachers college students, said that a bone fragment of Jhosivani Guerrero de la Cruz was identified via nuclear DNA testing at the University of Innsbruck in Austria.
“Today we can report … that the identification of Jhosivani Guerrero de la Cruz is certain and absolute,” he said.
The University of Innsbruck identified a bone fragment as matching the DNA of Guerrero de la Cruz’s mother in 2015 but that finding wasn’t considered conclusive.
Gómez said the bone fragment analyzed was found in a ravine in the municipality of Cocula, Guerrero. Authorities found the remains of another Ayotzinapa student, Christian Alfonso Rodríguez Telumbre, in the same ravine last year. DNA analysis at the University of Innsbruck identified the remains as those of Rodríguez.
The remains of three of the 43 students have now been formally identified. Those of Alexander Mora were identified in December 2014.
The previous federal government claimed that the students were intercepted by corrupt municipal police in Iguala on September 26, 2014, after they commandeered a bus to travel to a protest in Mexico City. According to its “historical truth,” the police handed the students over to a local crime gang, the Guerreros Unidos, whose members killed them, burned their bodies in the Cocula dump and scattered their ashes in the nearby San Juan River.
However, the remains of Guerrero de la Cruz and Rodríguez showed no evidence of fire damage.
The parents of the former were notified of the positive identification of their son last weekend. They met with President López Obrador on Tuesday along with other parents of the disappeared students.
A lawyer for the parents, Vidulfo Rosales, said the president told them that the United States had advised Mexico of the arrest of a person allegedly involved in the case. However, it is unclear whether that person will be extradited to Mexico and when that might occur.
Scores of suspects have been arrested in connection with the students’ disappearance but many were later released because they were found to have been tortured while being questioned about their alleged crimes.
President López Obrador established a super commission to conduct a new investigation into the Ayotzinapa case shortly after he took office in late 2018. His administration has dismissed the previous government’s “historical truth” but hasn’t established its own definitive version of events.
In Mexico City, one noise you might hear in your neighborhood is the trashman ringing these 'bells' to alert residents to impending trash pickup.
As I’ve written before, Mexico is a very noisy country. And at least in urban settings, it’s not conducive to that loveliest of institutions, the siesta.
But no matter! All that noise is just something to be expected down here, and since I’ve been feeling charmingly perplexed — a state of mind I don’t always manage to find — by what seems like even more noise lately, I’d like to dedicate this week’s piece to examining what exactly some of those noises are.
What might be the source of these noises, you may ask? For the sake of efficiency, I’ve decided to divvy them up into categories (yes, there are enough to make categories).
Services
For the entire first year that I lived in Xalapa, I was completely bewildered by the frequency with which I heard a certain song blaring through the neighborhood on a vehicle as it raced by. “What the hell is that?” I’d ask my compatriots (to be fair, those were the wrong people to ask). The answer was finally revealed to me one day when I heard it and then saw my host-mom run to the front window to wave down the source of the music.
If I’d been able to decipher the lyrics with my fledgling understanding of Spanish, I’d have figured it out earlier: “¡Ya llegó Gas Express!/¡Gas Expess ya está aqui!” (“Gas Express arrived!/Gas Express is here!”). Gas delivery!
In my defense, it doesn’t occur to most North American foreigners that LP gas is something that must be delivered by a company rather than pumped through pipes or wires magically like water or electricity. But by far, it was the greatest mystery to me for the better part of a year.
Another sound that you might hear, at least where I live in Xalapa, is a cowbell. That’s right, a cowbell!
The role of the cowbell, which is rung by a person literally running up and down the street, is to let people know that it’s time to take their trash out to the designated area for pick-up roughly 10 minutes later.
If you miss the cowbell and trash pickup only happens once or twice a week (as it does in my neighborhood), then you might be able to catch a few independent trash collectors who walk through the neighborhood shouting “Quiere basuraaaaaa” (literally, “want traaaaaash”). Walk out of your house and wave them down! You can give them your trash bags for a few pesos.
Finally, there’s a high-pitched whistle used by the person who rides around offering to sharpen your knives. It’s almost like a train whistle but much airier and higher. So, if you hear it and have some dull edges, wave him down and take your knives out!
Things for sale
This is also a big category, and the biggest part of it by far is food. The way to tell what exactly is for sale is, of course, to sharpen your listening skills or take a peek outside as they’re passing. Most people can understand tamales, but camotes (sweet potatoes), elotes (corn with mayo, cheese, and chile pepper), verduras (vegetables) and pan (bread) might get past some people if they’re not used to it.
Sometimes there’s a recording that blares out of speakers affixed to the top of a car, but often the vendors have simply sharpened and perfected their loud calls to announce their presence in your neighborhood.
Agua (water) is another word that gets announced on my street a couple times a week. They’re not talking about water from the faucet, but rather garrafones of water, those five-gallon clear containers of purified drinking water. This is what most people drink from in their homes, as the water from the tap is officially suspect for regular consumption. (I once asked a chemist friend who worked at a water plant about that, and she explained to me that the water wasn’t so much the problem, but rather the outdated pipes that it ran through).
Another frequent noise that I think is more about buying than selling is for fierro viejo (old iron literally, but mostly they mean any kind of old large appliances that don’t work anymore and that you’d like taken off of your hands). They’ll “buy” it from you, though I’m not quite sure for how much.
Miscellaneous
The first thing to go under this category is animals, of course: barking dogs, of which there are sometimes many, top the list. After that — at least in cities like mine whose pueblo’s past isn’t too far removed from the present day — are … roosters!
In the farm animal children’s books of my youth, roosters only crowed at sunrise. Not so in my neighborhood! Roosters (apparently) crow to establish dominance and territory, the habit more closely resembling dog barks than a once-daily sunrise ritual.
There are roosters on my street that crow at me every time I walk by … perhaps my gait looks like a threatening strut? They are not persuaded of my intentions by my repeated “Relax, dudes,” so it’s just something I’ve come to expect. I think I’ll start telling myself that they’re just saying hi.
This is not a complete list by any means: there are rockets and fireworks on pretty much any saint’s day, and when we hear them, we pray that they actually are rockets and not bullets. Partying neighbors (complete with old songs sung in unison by 20 very drunk people at 2 a.m.) are also a common occurrence.
The general attitude seems to be that noise is simply something everyone makes and therefore something everyone has to live with. You can always tune out the sounds with a good pair of headphones, but why try?
A former mayor has been handed an eight-year sentence in the killing of journalist Miroslava Breach in Chihuahua city in 2017.
Hugo Amed Schultz Alcaraz, the former mayor of Chínipas, Chihuahua, admitted to his role as an accessory to the murder. The sentence bars him from future political activity and the right to appeal, and obliges him to provide monetary compensation and a public apology. By accepting the terms, Schultz received a shorter jail term.
Breach was shot eight times in the head on March 23, 2017, after she wrote a series of reports on drug trafficking networks in the state. Former state leader of the National Action Party, José Luévano Rodríguez, and his former spokesman Alfredo Piñera, are still at liberty, despite allegedly directing cartel members to her.
It is thought that Luévano ordered Piñera to record the journalist as she was interrogated about her research. The audio recordings were then given to Schultz, who passed them onto the intellectual author Juan Carlos Moreno, who was sentenced to 50 years in prison last year.
Human rights organization Propuesta Cívica, which accompanied Breach’s family during the trail, said she was murdered for investigating narco-political and corruption networks and exposing the human rights violations of populations in the Sierra Tarahumara. “More than four years after her murder, we have achieved a second conviction against another person responsible,” it added.
In Schultz’s public apology, he stated the importance of Breach’s work as a journalist. “… I am very sorry that actions on my part contributed to her regrettable murder. I want to convey a message to Miroslava’s family in which I acknowledge that my contribution affected Miroslava’s rights and I regret the consequences that they resulted in. The absence of Miroslava Breach as a critical journalistic voice has undoubtedly affected the right of society to public information,” he said.
More than four years after the homicide there is still an arrest warrant pending for driver Jaciel “N” and at least one other suspected intellectual author of the murder.
Mexico is the deadliest country in the world to be a journalist, according to Reporters Without Borders.
Deputy Health Minister López-Gatell at Tuesday's press conference in the National Palace.
The intensity of the coronavirus pandemic has declined in much of Mexico but Quintana Roo and Yucatán are among a small group of states that have seen a recent increase in new case numbers.
Deputy Health Minister Hugo López-Gatell said Tuesday that new infections had spiked 8% nationally after weeks of declines, attributing the increase to higher case numbers in Quintana Roo, Yucatán, Baja California Sur, Campeche, Sinaloa and Veracruz.
“It’s Quintana Roo and Yucatán where there is a significant increase in cases. We’ve called for a reduction of certain activities where people congregate,” the coronavirus point man told reporters at President López Obrador’s regular news conference.
There are currently 1,212 active cases in Quintana Roo and 1,729 in Yucatán, according to federal Health Ministry estimates.
Only Mexico City (5,871) and Tabasco (1,989) have more active cases than the Yucatán peninsula states, which are currently high risk orange on the federal government’s coronavirus stoplight map. Ranking fourth for active cases – one spot below Yucatán and one above Quintana Roo – is Baja California Sur, which an estimated 1,544 people currently have Covid-19 symptoms.
The common denominator for three of the top five states for active cases – Quintana Roo, Yucatán and Baja California Sur – is that they are home to popular tourist destinations.
“This increase has to do with tourism, … something that must be highlighted is that Mexico doesn’t ask for a PCR [or antigen] test to enter the country,” said Andreu Comas, a health academic at the Autonomous University of San Luis Potosí.
“… We’re having a signifiant increase [in case numbers] in the Baja California peninsula and in the Yucatán peninsula because of tourism,” he said.
In Mérida, the capital of Yucatán, brigades of people employed by the state Health Ministry have returned to the streets to distribute hand gel and remind citizens to follow measures to mitigate the spread of the virus, such as the use of face masks.
In Quintana Roo, where more than 100 new cases per day have been recorded in recent weeks and more than 250 Covid patients are currently hospitalized, Governor Carlos Joaquín took to Twitter to remind citizens to continue following the health protocols.
Mexico City, which switched to low risk green at the start of last week, has also seen a slight increase in new cases since easing restrictions. The capital easily leads the country for confirmed cases and Covid-19 deaths with more than 669,000 of the former and 44,100 of the latter.
The national case tally is 2.46 million while the official death toll is 230,428, a figure considered a vast undercount.
López-Gatell advised people with Covid-like symptoms to seek timely medical attention, saying that there is plenty of capacity to treat patients.
“At this time we don’t have saturation problems, … we have ample space in the Covid units,” he said.
Meanwhile, Mexico’s Covid-19 vaccination program continues to roll out across the country with first doses being given to people aged 40 to 49 and second doses already reaching some people in the 50-59 age bracket.
About 37.5 million vaccine doses had been administered in Mexico by Tuesday for a rate of 29 shots per 100 people, according to The New York Times vaccinations tracker.
Alam Méndez working in the kitchen at Pasillo de Humo, his Mexico City restaurant.
“As chefs, we are the ‘messengers of our mothers and grandmothers who cooked for centuries. We are tasked with conserving the cooking traditions of our communities,” says Oaxaca chef Alam Méndez. “Our role is particularly important for those people who did not have the pleasure of being born in Oaxaca.”
Méndez had the pleasure of being born in Oaxaca in 1990, one of three children of another renowned Oaxacan chef and food expert, Celia Florían. This probably “sealed his fate.”
He practically grew up in his parents’ Oaxaca city restaurant, Las Quince Letras, living in the same building until he was 16. He accompanied his father to the market to buy supplies and was given a portion thereof to “play with.”
In middle school, he decided to follow in his mother’s footsteps and began doing some work in the kitchen when he was 14.
“As long as I can remember, the kitchen has been a part of my life — open the door of my house and you are in Las Quince Letras. It wasn’t obligatory; [it was] … something I enjoyed immensely,” says the chef.
Méndez is the son of renowned Oaxacan chef and food expert, Celia Florían.
His parents started the restaurant with no formal training in the business, just a passion for the cooking of their childhoods. Méndez, however, decided to take this passion out into the culinary world of Mexico and beyond.
First, he studied at the Culinary Institute of Mexico in the city of Puebla, then he worked in various restaurants in Mexico, Europe, Guatemala and Chile. One thing his international experience taught him is that it is possible to recreate authentic flavors of Oaxacan cooking outside of the state.
He returned to Mexico from Europe in 2016 to start the Pasillo de Humo (Smoke Hall) restaurant in Mexico City, a small place located in an upscale “food market” called Parían in the international neighborhood of Condesa. Pasillo de Humo refers to the section of Oaxacan markets where grills cooking sausage, marinated beef (tasajo) and more line up and wait for hungry patrons.
Initially, the restaurant’s purpose was to bring authentic Oaxacan flavor to the capital. It still offers 100% authentic dishes such as tlayudas and chicken in red mole sauce.
His efforts here have not gone unnoticed. Food writer and editor James Oseland included Méndez in his cookbook on Mexico City, stating “Pasillo de Humo is a well-appointed restaurant for certain kinds of upscale diner, but the food really does conjure Oaxacan authentically. The flavors and textures of the state come through even in a world so different from his own.”
Méndez was one of seven Mexican chefs selected to compete in the semifinals of the S. Pellegrino Young Chef 2018 competition.
His family’s Oaxacan cooking forms the basis of his work, but his professional training and experiences in Mexico and abroad have broadened his horizons.
“I love Oaxacan cuisine, and I love using herbs, vegetables and other products of the fields,” he says.
But he has also learned to appreciate the cooking in other parts of Mexico and the demands of a sophisticated urban market. For example, he will never change his mother’s mole negro sauce (her pride and joy), but he has experimented with putting it over duck instead of the traditional turkey and cooking the meat in a manner more sophisticated than simply boiling it.
One dish that shows his respect for the other cuisines of Mexico is oregano chicken with mole rojo. (Oregano is a Mediterranean herb that is used in various parts of Mexico but not so much in Oaxaca.) His experimentation has received approval from his traditional mother.
“His ability to combine tradition with the contemporary, making dishes his own, is something that fills me with pride,” she says.
Oaxaca is one of Mexico’s most traditional states, and it might seem unusual for a man from here to become a chef. Méndez disagrees. It may have been that way in the past, he says, but certainly not now. In addition, certain dishes in the state have always been cooked by men, especially for major gatherings, he explains.
Ensalada de la milpa (Cornfield salad).
One example is caldo de piedra (literally “stone soup”), where the broth is boiled by adding a heated rock. Another is barbacoa, traditionally made in a pit dug into the earth.
Méndez’s international experience and a chance meeting with restaurateur Chad Sparrow has taken him to the United States, more specifically to Washington, D.C. Sparrow visited Pasillo de Humo and, highly impressed with what he saw and tasted, offered Méndez the head chef spot and the chance to be the inspiration behind Urbano 116, a restaurant with the aim of recreating authentic flavors of Mexico City.
Unfortunately, this did not pan out. The high-end restaurant business is an unforgiving one, and the owners switched gears to, of all things, Tex-Mex cuisine. Méndez understandably decided to leave the venture. But he still believes that there is a market for authentic Mexican regional food, especially in D.C. He has started a new joint venture called Maíz 64. The 64 refers to the number of varieties of native corn in Mexico.
Méndez hopes to open the restaurant by the end of the month and reproduce traditional Oaxacan fare. Oseland shares Méndez’s optimism about promoting the cuisine in the United States, noting that tastes for Mexican food have become more sophisticated in the past decades.
“What is so special about what Alam can offer a diner in Washington, D.C. is a chance to taste the true flavors of Oaxaca,” he says, “because who better to channel them than Alam, who ‘literally’ has Oaxacan food flowing through his veins.”
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.
Herbert and his family fled Guatemala when gang members said they would kill his family if he didn't join. joseph sorrentino
I strongly disagree with Carlisle Johnson’s recent article in this newspaper in which he suggested that offering migrants a free bus ride home would solve the migrant and refugee problem that Mexico and the United States face.
Like Mr. Johnson, I’ve spent hundreds of hours interviewing and photographing Central Americans in Mexico and the U.S.
I’ve been in — and stayed in — shelters in Tapachula, Tenosique, Ixtepec, Tlaxcala and Mexico City. I’ve interviewed women in Texas detention centers and others who were recently released.
While almost everyone I interviewed would certainly have preferred going home, no one said they would — because the threat of violence was all too real. They were certain that a return home would be a death sentence.
Virtually everyone I interviewed had been victimized by gangs, most often the Mara Salvatrucha and MS-18. Many had had relatives killed.
A long scar on his neck bears witness to migrant Felix Antonio’s encounter with gang members who slashed his throat. joseph sorrentino
A migrant I met named Felix Antonio said his mother was murdered by a gang (“God knows why,” he told me), and he’d had his throat slashed. A Guatemalan named Herbert said that he and his family fled when gang members told him that if he didn’t join, his family would be killed.
Juan Alberto was living in Tapachula with his family when I met him. A son and a grandson had been killed by Mara Salvatrucha thugs, and he’d fled with his wife, two sons and two grandkids. I asked him if he missed his home in Honduras.
“Oh, so much. So much,” he replied.
I asked him what would happen if he did return to Honduras. He replied in silence, just moving one finger across his throat.
And I disagree with U.S. Vice President Harris’s simplistic message to Central Americans: “Don’t come.”
The vast majority fleeing the Northern Triangle countries of Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala aren’t migrants leaving their countries for economic reasons. They’re refugees fleeing unimaginable violence at the hands of gangs who control much of those countries and the endemic corruption that enables them.
Juan Alberto and his family left Honduras after a son and grandson were killed by Mara Salvatrucha gang members. joseph sorrentino
Until the violence is curtailed, they will continue to come.
I once spoke at length with an advocate in Hermanos en el Camino, a shelter in Ixtepec, Oaxaca. I told him that I was amazed how, despite the dangers Central Americans faced on their journey through Mexico, they continued to take the risk.
He told me that their reasoning was this: “If I stay, I die. If I go, I may die. They choose between certain and possible death.”
Ken Salazar was president Barack Obama's secretary of the interior and a senator for Colorado.
United States President Joe Biden announced Tuesday that he would nominate Ken Salazar, former senator for Colorado and ex-secretary of the interior in the Obama administration, as the next U.S. ambassador to Mexico.
Salazar, also a former attorney general of Colorado and co-chair of Biden’s Latino Leadership Committee during his presidential campaign, will succeed Christopher Landau as the United States’ top diplomat in Mexico if his appointment is confirmed by the U.S. Senate.
It will be the first diplomatic post for the 66-year-old descendant of Spanish immigrants who grew up in a large family in the San Luis Valley in Colorado.
Salazar, an opponent of former president Donald Trump’s hardline immigration policies, will take up the ambassador’s position at a time when Mexico and the United States are making greater efforts to work together to stem the flow of migrants to the U.S. and to address the root causes of migration in northern Central American countries. However, there are also difficulties in the bilateral relationship, including Mexico’s treatment of United States energy investors and President López Obrador’s anger at the U.S. government’s funding of Mexican civil society organizations he considers political opponents.
Arturo Sarukhán, a former Mexican ambassador to the United States who has worked closely with the ambassadorial nominee, told the newspaper El Universal that Salazar, as the top U.S. diplomat in Mexico, will have a direct line to President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris at the White House, adding that is “something that hasn’t happened for a long time.”
Salazar and US President Joe Biden worked together in President Barack Obama’s administration, and Salazar was co-chair on the Biden campaign’s Latino Leadership Committee.
Sarukhán, ambassador to the U.S. during Felipe Calderón’s 2006–2012 presidency, described Salazar as “a reserved man who listens … and analyzes issues before speaking out about them.”
“Some would say he is reserved, but, rather, I believe that he is a keen observer who prefers to think twice before giving his opinion and taking a position. He has a great political nose,” he added.
“As a senator, he played a key role in the debates about migration reform and … the trafficking of weapons to Mexico. As interior secretary, he played a central role in the establishment of the Big Bend-Boquillas binational park and in the sensitive negotiations about water in the Colorado River and the agreement about exploration and exploitation of cross-border [oil] reserves in the Gulf of Mexico. And he knows agricultural trade and cross-border environmental impact issues very well,” Sarukhán said.
Enrique Berruga, a former Mexico representative to the United Nations, said the nomination of Salazar — whom he described as a person with “a very high political profile — is a sign that the relationship with Mexico is a priority for the U.S. government. His closeness to Biden and Harris will mean that he doesn’t have to “navigate the bureaucracy to have access to them when he needs it,” Berruga said, predicting also that Salazar will place particular emphasis on environmental issues in Mexico.
United States Mexico expert Duncan Wood, vice president for strategy and new initiatives at the Washington-based Wilson Center and a senior adviser to the center’s Mexico Institute, said that Salazar will be in a strong position to shape relations between Mexico and the U.S. due to his proximity to Biden.
“The ambassadors that have the greatest impact on the bilateral relationship are those who really speak with the voice of the president” and that will be the case with Salazar, Wood said.
Former Mexican ambassador to the US Arturo Sarukhán believes Salazar will have a direct line to the White House, “something that hasn’t happened for a long time.”
The challenge will be convincing Mexican government officials to collaborate with him, he added. The United States government is “trying to build a very positive relationship” with Mexico but whether that occurs depends on “the willingness of President López Obrador and his cabinet,” said Wood, who predicted in March that the president’s “exaggerated nationalism” in pursuit of energy sovereignty would lead to clashes with the U.S.
Salazar has to send a message to the Mexican government that the United States “expects a much more cooperative attitude,” he said.
United States Senator John Hickenlooper indicated that he believes that Salazar is up to the task of bringing the U.S. and Mexican governments closer together.
“Of all the people I worked with in politics, Ken Salazar has, perhaps, the greatest ability to bring people together that are seriously crosswise,” he said on Tuesday. “I would love to see him as ambassador to Mexico.”
Berruga, however, believes that cultivating a closer relationship between López Obrador and Biden, who haven’t met face to face since the latter took office, will not be easy and is unlikely to happen.
“I think that the relationship will remain distant and [making it closer] is beyond … the ambassador, whoever he is. It’s not a problem with Ken.”
Parents of children with cancer protesting medicine shortages say that it is the only way to get the government to do anything about the problem.
Long-running protests against the shortage of medications to treat children with cancer continued on Tuesday: parents of ill boys and girls blocked access to Terminal 1 of the Mexico City airport and pledged to stay there until the federal Health Ministry resolves the problem.
About 20 mothers and fathers of cancer patients from Mexico City, México state, Veracruz and Aguascalientes joined the protest, according to the newspaper El Universal.
They said the problem of medicine shortages has worsened at the hospitals where their children are treated. Not only is there a shortage of cancer drugs but also of basic painkillers, the parents said.
“We went to the National Palace because the Interior Ministry hasn’t given us a solution,” Omar Hernández Ibarra, president of an association of parents of children with cancer, told El Universal.
“We know that the health minister is there every Tuesday with the deputy [health] minister, but we went in vain. The problem is that it’s no longer just cancer drugs that are lacking; paracetamol and diclofenac are now also in short supply, and in the [Federico Gómez] children’s hospital [in Mexico City], the MRI machine hasn’t been working for months. They refer children to other hospitals, but it needs to be fixed,” he said.
Medication shortages persist despite the federal government signing an agreement with the UN to collaborate on the international purchase of medicines, medical supplies and vaccines. File photo
“We no longer want to be given false promises. … We won’t leave the airport until the health authorities make a commitment with a specific date of when we will have the medications that haven’t arrived for children’s chemotherapy and to calm their pain.”
El Universal reported that at about 6 p.m. Tuesday, health authorities gave the protesting parents lists of medications that have been distributed to hospitals across Mexico, but the parents said that the quantities sent are insufficient.
“They give us lists on which it’s shown they sent oxaliplatin to Campeche, dated May 2021, but they [only] sent 72 pieces; this medication lasts for an average of three weeks and then what? This has been a constant: they deliver a few medications, they promise us there won’t be shortages, but then we have to go out and protest,” Hernández said.
The Mexican Institute for Competitiveness (Imco), a think tank, said in February that “the lack of a comprehensive medications policy that ensures competition and the proper functioning of the market has caused problems in guaranteeing people’s timely access to quality medications.”
“The implications of this failure have become pronounced during the Covid-19 pandemic; … changes in the public purchasing system to acquire medications, regulatory challenges and the lack of strategic vision in the pharmaceutical sector have caused shortages, cost overruns and a lack of transparency in purchasing processes,” Imco said.
Parents of child cancer patients in Mexico City in November 2020 seeking petition signatures for a congressional bill guaranteeing the availability of treatments.
To guarantee easy access to medications in Mexico, the think tank proposed a range of measures, including that the government increase public spending on health, plan the purchase of medications in advance and “with flexibility” and promote and coordinate dialogue between the Health Ministry and the Economy Ministry “to build a comprehensive pharmaceutical policy in favor of the development of the market.”
The federal government this week published an executive decree aimed at facilitating the direct adjudication of public purchases, especially in the health sector. As a result, the government will have greater freedom to purchase medications without having to run a competitive tendering process.
The presidential decree, which made changes to an article of a public purchasing law, “seeks to give greater flexibility to public entities to obtain the goods necessary for the performance of their functions,” the Finance Ministry said, adding that it will be particularly relevant to health sector purchases.
It remains to be seen whether the reform will help put an end to cancer drug shortages, which have plagued the country and triggered protests since 2019.
