He named Rogelio Ramírez de la O, a consultant and longtime ally, as a replacement for Finance Minister Arturo Herrera, who will be nominated to head up the Bank of México (Banxico), replacing current Banxico governor Alejandro Díaz de León, whose term concludes at the end of November.
Herrera’s appointment as the central bank governor must be confirmed by the Senate.
The Mexican Employers Federation (Coparmex) said the nomination of Herrera “provides certainty and generates confidence.”
José Manuel López, the head of Mexico’s chambers of commerce, said Herrera’s nomination as Banxico governor generates economic certainty.
The finance minister, who was appointed to that position in July 2019, “was always a very important interlocutor for the business sector,” Coparmex said on Twitter. Herrera’s nomination will provide certainty both in Mexico and abroad, it added.
“We believe that the Bank of México is an autonomous constitutional body, and it’s the job of everyone to defend that autonomy,” the group said in another Twitter post.
“With respect to Rogelio Ramírez de la O, … we trust that he will maintain dialogue with all sectors, including the business sector, and that he will play a good role at the head of the ministry.”
The Business Coordinating Council (CCE), an influential umbrella organization representing 12 business groups, also took to Twitter to acknowledge the announcement, recognizing “the work and commitment of Arturo Herrera at the head of the Finance Ministry.”
The Confederation of Industrial Chambers (Concamin) expressed its satisfaction with the appointments, noting, “The growth of the country needs effective and honest public servants.”
The Confederation of Chambers of Commerce, Services and Tourism said Herrera has the credentials to lead the central bank and that his nomination generates economic certainty and observed that Herrera has always been willing to engage with the private sector as finance minister, adding that they hoped Ramírez follows suit.
Such willingness to engage would establish a “direct channel” to the president, which would allow more immediate solutions to problems.
The president said Wednesday that he was announcing Diaz’s successor early to avoid market jitters. He also said that his priorities wouldn’t change as a result of the leadership changes at the central bank and Finance Ministry: no debt, no tax or energy price increases and the poor come first.
López Obrador has already appointed three members to Banxico’s five-person board. Gerardo Esquivel, one of the president’s appointees, celebrated the appointment of Ramírez and the nomination of Herrera.
“[Ramírez] is an excellent economist who will contribute to providing certainty and maintaining economic stability,” he wrote on Twitter. “… [Herrera] is a great economist who understands the importance of institutional autonomy.”
Eggs are the newest tool for thieves in Mexico City: they use them to burgle houses and steal cars.
The so called huevos estrellados or “sunny-side up” method is used by criminals as a surprise tactic, the city’s Security Ministry has warned.
At least five people have been arrested for such robberies.
For vehicle theft, assailants break eggs on the windshields of moving cars to obstruct the driver’s vision. The motorist instinctively turns on the windscreen wipers, smearing the yellow yoke across the glass. Forced to stop, the confused driver exits to clean the mess only to be met by criminals who either rob them, or steal the vehicle.
Properties are being threatened with a more elaborate method. A motorcycle rider throws eggs at the front door of a house to see if anyone is at home. If no one appears immediately, the rider notifies accomplices who arrive in other vehicles and break in to the property and steal possessions.
The tactic is effective because it is low risk: if the criminals throw the eggs and choose not to rob the driver or break into the property, the would-be victim cleans up the mess assuming it to be a juvenile act, which goes unreported.
The egg method has been reported in the boroughs of Benito Juárez, Miguel Hidalgo and Cuajimalpa.
If targeted, drivers are advised to stay calm, not to turn on the windshield wipers and stay inside the vehicle. Homeowners are instructed not to talk about leaving their house in public and always try to have someone on the property.
Things might be different today had president Lázaro Cárdenas followed through with his legalization of drugs in 1940.
“The best way to fight the traffickers,” declared Mexico’s El Universal newspaper in March 1940, a month after radical leftist President Lázaro Cárdenas legalized all drugs and set up a state-run dispensary to dish them out, “is to compete with them on the price of the merchandise.”
Then as now, it was an explosive idea: El Universal itself had branded marijuana “dangerous” only a couple of years previously. Yet it is tempting to speculate how the succeeding eight decades might have panned out had U.S. pressure not forced an end to that bold experiment after just four months.
President López Obrador, who swept to power in 2018, may not have needed to base his campaign around eradicating endemic corruption. Without the chance to skim off huge profits Mexico’s police and politicians might have been clean. Homicides might not now be pushing record levels of 35,000 a year and extortion rackets might not be multiplying.
But as The Dope, a magisterial and immensely readable new history of the Mexican drug trade by British academic Benjamin T. Smith shows, a century of prohibition — barring the 1940 interlude — has had disastrous and far-reaching consequences. Mexico is often seen as a case study of the destruction drugs and violence can wreak.
Whether wholesale legalization is the answer now, as the U.S. battles an opioid crisis claiming 130 lives a day, is an open question and not one Smith addresses.
Nor is it something that López Obrador wants to see, although it could happen very soon. Legislators have missed a host of deadlines to implement a 2019 Supreme Court ruling to legalize pot; either the court now strikes down articles in the general health law that criminalize cannabis, or lawmakers seek yet another extension.
Whatever happens, Mexico is on course to become the world’s biggest legal pot market, joining Uruguay and Canada — and the only producing country to liberalize the drug fully.
The problem, as The Dope describes in riveting detail, is that things may already have gone too far. Smith’s bleak conclusion is that as long as narcotics are outlawed, “incentives to produce and smuggle them will outweigh any economic alternatives.”
In some ways, the violence that Mexicans associate with the drug trade is these days more often about protection rackets — for drugs or other merchandise. Gangs, probably now numbering in the hundreds, have made extortion their main business. As a result, Mexico has descended into what some security analysts have dubbed “disorganized crime.” Or as Smith puts it, “by the mid-2010s, the everyday violence that most Mexicans experienced had little to do with the drug trade at all.”
López Obrador, who idolizes Cárdenas, has tried to ignore the issue of the drug trade as far as possible despite stubbornly high homicide levels topping the list of voters’ concerns. He has slammed the media for “sensationalizing” 37 candidates’ murders ahead of last Sunday’s midterm elections which saw him lose his two-thirds congressional supermajority.
In a scorching rebuke, the last U.S. ambassador in Mexico, Christopher Landau, said López Obrador had displayed a “laissez-faire” attitude toward cartels, which he considered a “distraction.”
The president had already been criticized for going out of his way to shake the hand of the mother of Mexico’s jailed top drug kingpin, Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, and for his cuddly sounding, but so far ineffective, security strategy, dubbed “hugs not bullets.”
Yet, while he offers apprenticeships and grants to keep young people out of the clutches of cartels, and preaches non-confrontation — security forces released El Chapo’s son on the president’s orders in order to avert bloodshed after a fierce shootout in 2019 — he has reneged on a promise to return the army to barracks and has even created a militarized police force to tame cartel violence
Drawing on a decade of research, Smith traces the roots of Mexico’s multiple drug wars from indigenous remedy to the solace of soldiers during the 1910-1920 revolution, to the present day. His pacy narrative is true crime at its historical best, replete with all the larger-than-life characters and thrills and spills of a Netflix narco drama.
It even probes whether the real reason undercover Drug Enforcement Administration agent Kiki Camarena was kidnapped and killed in 1985 — a watershed moment for U.S. counternarcotics efforts in Mexico — was that he stumbled on a covert CIA drugs-for-arms operation.
The Dope is gripping and revealing — but ultimately depressing. Smith skates over what the future holds but it is hard not to agree with his conclusion: “A century and counting; the Mexican drug trade shows no sign of slowing.”
• The Real History of the Mexican Drug Trade, by Benjamin T. Smith, Ebury Publishing, 448 pages
The United States government has asked Mexico to review whether workers’ rights are being violated at an auto parts plant in the northeastern border state of Tamaulipas, making use of a novel mechanism in the new North American free trade accord, which took effect last July.
United States Trade Representative Katherine Tai and Labor Secretary Marty Walsh asked Wednesday for a review to determine whether workers at the Tridonex plant in the border city of Matamoros are being denied the rights of free association and collective bargaining.
Tridonex is owned by Philadelphia-based auto parts manufacturer Cardone Industries, which is controlled by Canada’s Brookfield Asset Management.
Tai’s office said in a statement that the request for review “marks both the second time ever, and the second time in the past month, that the United States has requested Mexico’s review of collective bargaining rights issues under the Rapid Response Labor Mechanism (RRM) in the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA).”
The RRM is a feature that gives member countries the ability to request the investigation of specific facilities accused of violating the labor standards outlined in the USMCA, such as workers’ rights to collective bargaining. The first time the RRM was employed was when the U.S asked Mexico to review whether workers at a General Motors facility in Silao, Guanajuato, were being denied the right of free association and collective bargaining. Mexico agreed to that review and also committed to complying with the United States’ latest request.
Cardone Industries said it would cooperate with a review but added that it believed that “the allegations are inaccurate.”
This request comes a month after the largest labor federation in the United States, the AFL-CIO, petitioned the U.S. government to lodge a complaint against Mexico in relation to workers at the Tridonex plant allegedly being denied the right to independent union representation.
Workers say they were prevented from switching to a different union after they became disgruntled with their existing one, which is controlled by Tridonex, because the union didn’t support their fight for higher wages. Many workers were fired for withdrawing their support for the SITPME union, according to the head of the union they wanted to join.
The United States Trade Representative said the Interagency Labor Committee for Monitoring and Enforcement, which is co-chaired by Tai and Walsh, reviewed the AFL-CIO’s RRM petition and determined that there was sufficient evidence that workers’ rights had been denied.
It said Mexico has 10 days to agree to conduct a review and, if it agrees, 45 days from Wednesday to remediate the situation.
“Enforcing the higher labor standards in the USMCA is a core pillar of the Biden-Harris administration’s worker-centered trade policy,” Tai said.
“The rapid response mechanism was created to quickly address labor disputes, and this announcement demonstrates our commitment to using the tools in the agreement to stand up for workers at home and abroad.”
Walsh said that “workers’ ability to exercise their fundamental human rights to freedom of association and collective bargaining without retaliation is essential to building independent unions in Mexico.”
Using the labor enforcement mechanisms in the USMCA is “a critical step in assuring that U.S. and Mexican workers share in the benefits of trade,” he said, adding that “we look forward to continuing to work closely with the government of Mexico to resolve this matter.”
An airman prepares containers of cloud seeding solution.
The Mexican air force has been assigned a new mission: seeding clouds in an effort to combat the prolonged drought.
The drought has affected as much as 85% of Mexico’s territory since July last year, leaving large reservoirs at exceptionally low levels, straining water resources for drinking, farming, and irrigation.
As of May 31 the area affected had declined to 72% due to rainfall in many parts of the country. However, areas facing extreme or exceptional drought conditions — located in Sonora, Chihuahua, Sinaloa, Durango, Nayarit, Colima and Michoacán —increased due to a shortage of rain.
Cloud seeding thickens clouds and increases the probability of rain by up to 15%, using an acetone solution and silver iodide, which is commonly used as an antiseptic or in photography.
The chemical, prepared by the Ministry of Agriculture, is transported by plane to clouds at 5,000 meters high.
Air force pilot Guadalupe Rojas explained the method.
“When we arrive at the area, we do a preliminary reconnaissance before starting the seeding. The type of clouds is analyzed, and once safety is guaranteed, we take an entry point and enter below the cloud. We search for any ascending currents and spread the chemical,” he said.
The process was tested last March in the San Quintín Valley, Baja California, and later in Nuevo León and Coahuila to help battle fires resulting from the drought.
Air force meteorology expert Francisco Ramírez said the operation is weather dependent. “We always need adequate weather conditions. In the case of Nuevo León there was a fire, but a cold spell helped and … [the cloud seeding] worked,” he said.
He added that the operation will continue in Sinaloa, Chihuahua and Sonora, where the drought remains prevalent.
United States Vice President Kamala Harris and President López Obrador meet at the National Palace.
President López Obrador has been criticized on social media after he bestowed a new title on United States Vice President Kamala Harris and appeared to mispronounce her name.
AMLO, as the president is best known, welcomed Harris to the National Palace in Mexico City on Tuesday for a bilateral meeting on issues including migration, security and trade.
When Harris arrived at the seat of executive power, López Obrador welcomed her as “president” rather than “vice president.” In addition, he addressed the 49th vice president of the United States as the masculine presidente rather than the feminine presidenta, according to some social media users and media reports.
López Obrador has also received flak for mispronouncing the vice president’s first name, Kamala, as “Kabala.” Whether he actually replaced the “m” in Kamala with a “b” is unclear and questionable, but that didn’t stop Mexican media from having a field day with the apparent mispronunciation.
“Welcome, ‘Presidente Kabala’” said a headline in the El Universal newspaper. “¿Presidente Kabala? AMLO changes the position and name of Kamala Harris,” derided El Financiero.
Visita oficial de la vicepresidenta de Estados Unidos, Kamala Harris, desde Palacio Nacional
Whether AMLO actually calls Harris presidente is also debatable. Take a listen, make your own mind up and let us know your thoughts in the comments section below (available to subscribers).
But the president’s alleged list of faux pas didn’t end there. He was also chastised for not wearing a face mask.
“KABALA, nice to meet you. AMLO without a face mask #languagewithoutwords,” one Twitter user wrote.
“The first two words that López Obrador said to the vice president were errors,” another Twitter user said. “1) She’s not a presidente. 2) Her name isn’t Kabala.”
According to a column in the newspaper Reforma, the president made no fewer than six protocol errors when welcoming Harris to the National Palace. He got Harris’ title wrong; he used the incorrect masculine term presidente; he didn’t formally welcome her to Mexico, saying only mucho gusto (nice to meet you); he got her name wrong; he failed to address her by her first name and surname and he wasn’t wearing a face mask although she was.
AMLO acknowledged on Wednesday that he misspoke by calling Harris “president” but didn’t admit any other errors.
“It was a very good meeting with Vice President Kamala Harris. It was so good that I called her ‘president,’ I got it wrong, … I’m not infallible,” he said.
Woman make gorditas in Bernal's historic center. All photos by Joseph Sorrentino
Bernal, a small pueblo in Querétaro, has a lot going for it. It’s designated as a Pueblo Mágico, or Magical Town, and it’s easy to see why when you walk down its cobblestone streets lined with colorfully painted buildings and past shops and carts featuring local foods and crafts.
Bernal features a museum with 300 masks from all over Mexico and the Museo de Dulces (Sweets Museum), which highlights the locally made cajeta (caramel). Looming over it all is Peña de Bernal, the huge monolith.
It’s an easy 40-minute ride from the capital city of Querétaro and is located along the wine and cheese route.
Bernal’s a very walkable pueblo, and there are lots of places to stop for food, drinks or shopping. It wasn’t overly crowded on the Friday in May that I was there, but I’m told it does get packed on most weekends.
Unfortunately, the Museo de la Mascara, the mask museum, was still closed in May, and the Museo de Dulces didn’t open until 1 p.m., and I had to leave Bernal before then. But the first-floor store was open and selling all sorts of locally-made cajeta treats.
Bernal’s historic center is full of tourist oriented stores and vendors.
“Don Julio Rodríguez Velázquez started making cajeta and traditional sweets in 1961,” said Maricela Luna, who was running the store’s counter. “We have the only factory making cajeta in the pueblo.”
She said the most popular treats are the natillas, little squares of cajeta with toppings like sesame, nuts or amaranth. “Our products are artisanal,” she added.
There are too many other sweets to name. If you visit, just know that it can be difficult to show any type of restraint; I wasn’t able to.
There’s been some confusion as to the correct height of Peña de Bernal, the monolith. Some reports list it as 288 meters (945 feet) while others claim it’s 360 meters (1,181 feet). Either of these would make it the third tallest monolith in the world, behind the Rock of Gibraltar and Brazil’s Sugarloaf Mountain.
But according to an article in the journal Geosphere, more accurate measurements found that at its highest point, Peña de Bernal is 433 meters (1,421 feet) tall, making it the tallest monolith in the world. I’m sure there will continue to be debate but there’s one thing that’s certain: that thing is big.
There’s a trail leading up on one side of the rock and, although not dangerous, it isn’t for the faint of heart, either. There are some fairly steep — but thankfully short — climbs along its length, and footing is dicey in some spots.
One hiking website said it’s a Class II trail, one that requires walking over loose stones or sometimes needing to use your hands for balance in spots, something I found to be true. Further on, it turns into a Class III trail, requiring a lot more skill and even further, Class IV, which requires a guide and special hiking gear.
Tiffany Pence, my hiking partner, suggested we stop before reaching the more challenging sections, and believing that discretion is the better part of valor, I agreed.
On the way down, we passed Peter Rochac, a 23-year-old Texan, and a couple of other people who were climbing up the sheer face of the monolith that, to me, looked like the Dawn Wall at Yosemite.
“This is a moderate climb,” said Rochac, smiling when I must have looked incredulous. “It’s called sport climbing.” He pointed to a small ledge above us. “The anchors are pre-set, and it won’t take more than five minutes to get to that.”
There’s also a more difficult section he planned on tackling with Alfredo Pérez, his guide from Aventuras Denali. Pérez handed me his business card, and printed on it was the question, “When was the last time you did something for the first time?”
The card advertised rappelling, bungee-jumping and some other rather extreme sports I’m thankfully too old to try for the first time. But I’ve kept his card in case I get that promised second childhood.
The monolith Peña de Bernal towers over a vineyard.
Tiffany told me that it’s a tradition to drink a michelada, beer mixed with — at least — lime and hot sauce (the recipe varies widely) and served in a glass whose rim is dipped in salt. It was early in the day, so we skipped that, but we did feast on another local tradition: blue corn gorditas at El Negrito Gorditas y Micheladas.
Gorditas are made from masa (corn meal) and are large, thick, round and stuffed with any number of tasty foods. I’m planning on a return trip to Bernal and will hike Peña de Bernal later in the day just so I can have a michelada and two gorditas.
Querétaro is considered to be the Americas’ first winemaking region, with the first vines planted by the Spanish in 1531. Bernal’s located at the upper edge of the region, and it’s definitely worth taking the time to visit some of the nearby vineyards and artisanal cheese makers, several of which are located just south of the pueblo.
And no trip to Bernal is complete without sampling some famed Nun Farts.
There were signs in front of a number of stores in the pueblo advertising the Pedos de Monja. I’d never heard of them before and didn’t even know what the phrase meant, so I asked Tiffany what they were. She explained that they are a candy famous throughout Querétaro. My curiosity piqued, we entered Mercadito Las Bugambilias.
“Pedos de Monja is originally an Italian recipe,” explained Mauricio Ramos, the store’s owner. “In Italy, it is a small cookie, and it is called Petto di monca, which means ‘Nun’s Chest.’”
Apparently, an Italian chef in Barcelona came up with the recipe and name sometime in the 19th century. I couldn’t find any information about why he decided to call them “Nun’s Chest.”
“The Spanish, they could not pronounce the Italian word petto, so they changed it to pedo,” Ramos said. “In Querétaro, we have our own recipe.”
The ones I ate in Bernal were delicious chocolate candies filled with almond paste. The slogan on the package was, “Más vale adentro que afuera” — better in than out. I agree.
Samuel García is believed to have won in large part due to the efforts of his online influencer wife Mariana Rodríguez.
Millennial-style politics have well and truly arrived in Mexico: the victory of a baby-faced 33-year-old candidate in the Nuevo León gubernatorial election has been largely attributed to the online campaigning of his 25-year-old social media influencer wife.
Samuel García, a former state and federal lawmaker, won handsomely in the race for the prized governorship of the northern border state – an economic powerhouse – attracting about 37% of the vote in Sunday’s election.
It was a phenomenal result for the Citizens Movement (MC) party candidate given that polls showed that he had just 13% support early in the campaign.
He was certainly helped by the emergence of a video in which the Morena party’s candidate, Clara Luz Flores, appeared alongside NXIVM sex cult leader Keith Raniere.
But the main reason for the sharp increase in García’s popularity was undoubtedly his wife’s indefatigable promotion of him – mainly on the photo and video social networking service Instagram, on which Mariana Rodríguez currently boasts 1.7 million followers.
García’s victory will likely change the way politicians think about campaigning in the 2024 elections.
García is no social media slouch himself – he has about 2.5 million followers across Facebook, Instagram and Twitter – but his wife’s somewhat offbeat, sometimes humorous and less-political Instagram posts and stories were credited as having greater “cut-through” with voters.
“It has been Rodríguez, not García, who has arrived to revolutionize the way of doing politics, and winning, in Mexico,” the newspaper El País said in a report published Tuesday.
Rodríguez’s frequent posts, which gave countless people a candid insight into the couple’s life and relationship, also served to humanize García and apparently endear him to voters, which ultimately translated into his comfortable victory on Sunday.
(Institutional Revolutionary Party-Democratic Revolution Party candidate Adrián de la Garza was nine points behind in second place).
According to a report by the Associated Press, the couple “rocketed to fame” after Rodríguez posted a video to social media in which she panned her phone away from García as he rattled off the names of towns they had visited during a campaign trip.
“Do you want to see my sneakers?” she says before showing off her bright orange, phosphorescent, shoes. “Fosfo, fosfo,” she says, referring to the sneakers, which just so happen to be the same color as the MC’s branding.
“Fosfo, fosfo” quickly became part of the colloquial lexicon of northeast Mexico, which served to raise García’s profile.
According to El País, which describes Rodríguez as a “mega-influencer,” García’s attractive, blonde wife “has achieved what no other institutional or political apparatus has achieved in the history of Mexico: develop a leader by the force of [social media] likes.”
Like a “fish in water” in the world of social media, Rodríguez was able to “mobilize thousands of followers who would be transformed into voters” for García, the newspaper said.
With slogans such as the oft-repeated “hay que tumbar la vieja política” (we have to tear down old politics) and a range of nimble social media strategies, Rodríguez, who has ample experience promoting countless products on social media, including her own makeup brand, effectively sold her husband to voters through her social media accounts.
She brought strangers into their home through social media, the couple danced virtually with followers and Rodríguez even made García the subject of good-natured ridicule in some of her posts, laughing and teasing her husband — the couple wed at the start of the coronavirus pandemic — and inviting her large legion of followers to follow suit.
Rodríguez’s posts also likely distracted some voters from a federal investigation into García for allegedly receiving resources of illicit origin and using them for electoral gain.
Mariana Rodríguez is known as an online influencer who has promoted her own makeup brand. YouTube
It is not the first time that an attractive woman has helped her husband obtain power — Angélica Rivera, a telenovela star, certainly played a role in broadening the appeal of her ex-husband, former president Enrique Peña Nieto, in the 2012 presidential election — but the way in which Rodríguez did it is revolutionary, at least in Mexico.
Through social media promotion, Rodríguez and García became an “irresistible product,” El País said — “so white, so rich and so authentic, even virtually.”
“… The Mariana formula to win elections has arrived in Mexico to transform traditional politics,” the newspaper said. “And everything points to the effective use of social media being a powerful weapon for those who manage to master it in the lead-up to the 2024 presidential elections.”
President López Obrador — who has 8.8 million followers on Facebook alone — could claim that he has mastered the medium, but the constitution bars him from seeking a second term.
While Rodríguez is undoubtedly the bigger, brighter social media star in the Nuevo León power couple, García’s online politicking had an impact as well.
“Yes, he’s an influencer. I follow him on Facebook, and that’s how I found out about his campaign,” Monterrey resident Fernando Gutiérrez told the Associated Press. “I like his platform, and what’s more, he opposes the traditional politicians who have governed here before.”
“I voted for Samuel because he’s young, and he has offered [public] safety,” Yesenia Aguilar, also of the Nuevo León capital, said. “I also wanted to send a message to the president — that I think he has done everything wrong, the way he handled the pandemic. I am not happy with him because of so many deaths, women’s killings, so much crime.”
Denise Dresser, a Mexican academic and political columnist, was less enthused about the governor-elect, his wife and their very 21st-century campaigning style.
“Now people are coming into politics who have an entertainment factor, those who dance and sing. It’s not just a Mexican phenomenon, it’s worldwide,” she said. “It is a degradation in which politics is becoming something else, a show.”
Former cabinet minister Luis Videgaray rejected the finding and said he would challenge the Ministry of Public Administration's decision.
The federal government has banned former cabinet minister Luis Videgaray from holding public office for 10 years for failing to disclose all his assets when he was a member of the 2012–2018 administration led by ex-president Enrique Peña Nieto.
The Ministry of Public Administration (SFP) announced Tuesday that it had applied the maximum possible punishment against the former finance and foreign affairs minister for making incorrect asset declarations during three consecutive years between 2015 and 2017.
Videgaray, a highly influential member of the Peña Nieto government who also faces allegations of corruption, rejected the SFP’s finding and said he would challenge its decision “without litigating the matter in the media or on social networks.”
In a statement posted to Twitter, the former minister, now working as an academic in the United States, said the SFP considers him “administratively responsible” for omitting details about bank accounts in his 2015–2017 assets declarations.
“The ‘bank accounts’ to which the SFP refers are in fact credit cards, which didn’t have a debit balance at the reporting date for each declaration,” Videgaray said.
He added that he did in fact mention them, writing that the cards were not included in the liabilities section of his declarations because there was no debt on them but were included in the “observations and clarifications” section.
“The declarations are correct, and there was no intention to hide information about assets from the SFP,” Videgaray wrote.
“Finally, it’s important to highlight that in the letter through which I was notified of the resolution, the SFP itself expressly acknowledges that I didn’t obtain any benefit or profit derived from the supposed lack of veracity in the declarations,” he said.
“… It’s the duty of all Mexicans to support the fight against corruption led by President López Obrador. In my case, I will do it contesting the resolution institutionally, with full respect to the Ministry of Public Administration.”
The SFP countered Videgaray’s statement, asserting that the former minister had indeed failed to report bank accounts, in which it said there was money that the minister had an obligation to declare.
“The failure to report balances in accounts constitutes a serious administrative offense,” the government’s internal corruption watchdog said, adding that the decision to ban the former official from holding office had gone through an administrative process and didn’t amount to a “mere accusation.”
“We welcome the [legal] challenge announced, where we’ll defend the legality … of our penalty,” it said.
The SFP notified Videgaray of his sanction on May 11, but the decision was not made public at the time because Mexico was in the official campaign period leading up to Sunday’s elections, during which the government is obliged by electoral rules to refrain from acts that might be viewed as propaganda that favors the ruling party.
Videgaray is also under investigation for his possible involvement in a case in which the state oil company Pemex bought a fertilizer plant at an allegedly vastly inflated price during Peña Nieto’s government. He is also linked to a bribery case involving Pemex and Brazilian conglomerate Odebrecht.
The accusations are “false, absurd, inconsistent and reckless,” he said. “Lozoya’s accusations are invented lies to try to get out of the consequences of his own actions.”
AMLO with supporters in El Fuerte, Sinaloa in 2019.
As I was scrolling through the New York Times last night, I found an editorial by Mexican economist and sociologist Jorge Zepeda Patterson titled, “Despite it all López Obrador has my vote.”
Obviously, I had to read it. While Mexico’s president is someone I would have voted for all three times (when he ran for president in 2006, 2012 and won in 2018), though not a fourth, his behavior since becoming president is something that’s had me completely bewildered more than a few times.
But Zepeda made a great point: there are essentially “two Mexicos,” and the side that AMLO has made it clear that he’s on — despite the fact that many of the “have-nots” are not actually currently being helped by him — makes up a significantly larger population. Numerous social programs plus rhetoric aimed at reminding the underprivileged that he’s on their side maintain the popularity of both the man and the party that he leads.
The “two Mexicos” Zepeda referenced made me think back to the several years I spent teaching at an American high school in the city of Querétaro. It was my first exposure to “the other Mexico,” as before then, I’d only really hung around with what could best be described as middle-class Mexicans.
The campus itself was beautiful and well-kept, the students well-dressed and mostly light-skinned. It was regarded as one of the top schools in the state, and teachers were recruited both nationally and internationally to ensure the students’ consistent exposure to both languages.
This was my first exposure in Mexico — ever, really — to kids who had grown up having everything they needed and wanted. Most were the children of the city’s elites: business owners and politicians. Tuition for just one child was quite a bit more than would be affordable under Mexico’s minimum wage, and all the students’ families had servants employed in their homes.
Many students there also had their own (new) car as soon as they turned 16, and a few had bodyguards waiting for them right outside the school parking lot to escort them home. Some of them were “poor” by comparison to their more extremely wealthy classmates: maybe they drove an older car or went on less-elaborate vacations.
I was certainly poor compared to even the poorest ones — and I was not poor (not for Mexico, anyway).
The year I started teaching, 2006, was the year that López Obrador ran for president against Felipe Calderón. Those of you who were here, or who followed the news during that time, will remember that AMLO set up his “legitimate government” in Mexico City’s zócalo for several months, insisting that he had actually won the presidential election.
My students were mad about it. They weren’t so mad about the ideological issues but rather about the increased traffic problems from the ongoing protest that they encountered on their regular trips to Mexico City.
While there were a few sympathetic students (“To what length would you go if you believed that I had unfairly failed you and the administration refused to do anything about it,” I asked them), most made clear that they were not happy with the situation. Still, they were teenagers, a group in any social class not known for thinking of the greater good over their own convenience.
I taught mostly social science classes, so social class and stratification were topics we discussed quite a bit. To my surprise, many students told me that they considered themselves “middle class” when asked.
They were young, of course, and I suppose that if you were just basing it off American TV, then maybe they could see themselves living like some of those upper-middle-class families popular in sitcoms who are somehow always magically rich. They’d squint in puzzlement at charts that showed them to be in the top 5% richest families in Mexico.
Though the students were, for the most part, polite, intelligent and very decent people, teaching there was hard for me. In addition to realizing that I was simply too sensitive to be a teacher in the first place (one kid saying “this is boring” could ruin my day and send me home in tears), it was hard to see a kid who was rude and disrespectful in class and could barely write his own name drive up to school in a Jaguar day after day.
If that was rough for me, what might it have been like for the janitorial staff, the guards, the food service workers — who all got up extra early to catch the bus for their long shifts at the school?
It’s no surprise to me that AMLO and his party have become, and stayed, so popular as the distance between the types of incomes my students’ families were used to and those that the workers who served them earned have expanded even more in recent years.
And the president constantly saying things like “No, we’re not going to help them; they don’t need any help, they’re the exploiters!” has yet to get old for most of his followers. While AMLO’s appeal isn’t just about “sticking it” to the rich guys, I do think that’s part of it.
The president speaks to the disconnect between the economic expectations and the realities of the majority of Mexicans.
Do you easily pay a 300-peso cover to go into a bar and then run an open tab — or do you know exactly the price of a kilo of tomatoes, of rice and of tortillas because every peso counts? For most Mexicans, the latter is the reality, and those are “his people.”
So whether the increasing number of poor are prospering under AMLO or not is almost irrelevant. The coronavirus has caused many formerly lower-middle-class Mexicans to fall downward into their ranks, but that is not part of the divisive conversation — you know, the one that the president controls via his “good vs. bad” rosters presented in his mañaneras (morning press conferences) every day.
For those struggling, it must just feel good to have someone say, “I’m not on the side of the people that you have to watch win over and over and over again; I’m on your side.”
So, while Morena lost its supermajority in Congress, which would have allowed López Obrador to change the constitution without consulting the opposition (thank goodness), the party’s popularity on the more local level has increased. Morena’s candidates won the majority of governorships up for grabs this election.
“The other Mexico” can certainly continue to ignore the plight of the increasing number of those left behind as inequality grows here, but unless they offer an alternative, they will do so at their own peril.
