Turbulent waves and strong currents on the Pacific coast can be dangerous to swimmers: so far this year at least eight people have died in Oaxaca alone.
According to state authorities, the majority of accidents occurred after the victims ignored red flags on the beaches, which indicate that it is unsafe to swim.
Esteban Vázquez, Civil Protection officer on the Oaxaca coast, detailed the fatalities.“We believe eight people have died so far in 2021, two in the Huatulco area, two in the Zipolite area, two more recently in the San Agustinillo area recently and finally two more in the Puerto Escondido area … [at least half] these drownings have been due to recklessness,” he said.
Puerto Escondido resident Teresa Rivera said she was aware of the danger. “At Puerto Escondido … the swell is very strong. It is not suitable right now for the little ones, in fact, I’ve brought a 5-year-old along and we are just going to walk on the shore,” she said.
Lifeguard operations have been stepped up to prevent further fatalities, but Godofredo Vázquez, head of Puerto Escondido’s lifeguards, advised swimmers against entering the sea unattended. “Where there are no lifeguard booths, it is a little risky to be entering the sea,” he said.
At least 10 more people have been rescued this year on Oaxaca’s coast. Meanwhile, in Mazatlán, Sinaloa, three people, two of them minors, were rescued from the sea at about 3:30 p.m. on Sunday.
Mauricio, 20, Alma, 15, and Diego, 13, all from Durango, were aided by lifeguards at Playa Cerritos beach after they had tired when trying to return to shore.
Later on Sunday, Xóchitl, 16, was assisted by lifeguards after injuring herself by falling from a banana boat and was transferred to hospital.
Microdosing is the practice of consuming very small amounts of certain recreational drugs like LSD or psilocybin as a therapeutic. Microgen/Shutterstock
Microdosing, using micro amounts of recreational drugs, often LSD or psilocybin, has reached Mexico, and one of its epicenters is San Miguel de Allende, a popular destination for American and Canadian expats living abroad.
“We had a client that had been on antidepressants for 30 years. When Covid started, she was super anxious, and then she started with the protocol,” says a psilocybin provider in San Miguel de Allende who asked that his name not be used because the drug is illegal in Mexico. “After one month, she picked up a paintbrush — she was a painter and hadn’t held a brush in her hands in five years. In a few months, she had 10 finished pieces. And there are so many stories like that.”
When asked why most people seek him out, he said older people are microdosing to prevent degenerative mental disease. “Some people just want to experiment with psilocybin in microdosing, and some people want to use it to deal with depression and moderate anxiety,” he says.
According to this provider, around two years ago there were murmurings of microdosing (using a tenth or twentieth of a typical recreational dose on a regular basis) in Mexico City. San Miguel clients began asking about acquiring the drugs locally.
San Miguel de Allende has become an epicenter for microdosing in Mexico. Depositphotos.com
He and his partner, after some extensive research, developed what they believe to be a balanced regime (called a protocol) that includes other legal fungi and some vitamins for maximum benefit. The results, he says, have been unbelievable.
Another client, with Lyme disease, says her brain fog has lifted, her depression is gone and even her tremors were reduced in just a few months.
Hard science behind psychedelics is historically patchy. There was excitement in the 1950s and 60s that these drugs might mean solutions to PTSD, depression and a whole range of mental illnesses.
While research sprung up all over the world, it was hindered by very public incidents like Timothy Leary’s Harvard study and reports that started to filter out to the general public about users’ bad trips, suicide attempts and psychotic episodes (even though, as Michael Pollan notes in his book How to Change Your Mind, “It is virtually impossible to die from an overdose of LSD or psilocybin, … and neither drug is addictive”).
By 1970, the U.S. government had categorized both LSD and psilocybin as Category 1 drugs. Scientific research on them became impossibly bogged down in bureaucracy and restrictions.
But studies and experiments with psychedelics never really went away, mind you. There were dozens of them (both academic and not) around the world that continued into the 1970s and 1980s, some even government supported and funded by grants — until money ran out and restrictions kicked in.
María Sabina, the Oaxaca healer whose appearance in Life magazine sparked a 1950s interest in psychedelics that bloomed in the 1960s.
During that time, advocates and scientists explored psychedelics on the sidelines in a world that wasn’t quite ready to embrace them … yet.
In 2000, a Johns Hopkins University psychedelic research group was the first to get regulatory approval again in the U.S. to research them on healthy patients who had never used them before. Their 2006 psilocybin study got the world excited about researching these drugs again.
Author and longtime psychedelics advocate James Fadiman added the term microdosing into our daily lexicon. His 2011 book The Psychedelic Explorer’s Guide, offers first-person reports of microdosing from a range of users.
Instead of an ego-disintegrating trip, microdoses are said to provide daily benefits — clarity, creativity, an open mind, and open heart — without impairing your ability to function normally. This more mellow version of psychedelic use has been promoted in the past five years by Silicon Valley types looking to enhance their creativity and focus in the workplace.
Mexico has a long history with hallucinogens used by pre-colonial indigenous cultures. In fact, the spark that ignited the psychedelic craze in U.S. and other nations in the 50s was lit in Huautla de Jiménez, a small town in Oaxaca
Writer Robert Gordon Wasson convinced a local curandera to let him participate in a traditional hallucinogenic mushroom ceremony. His 1957 Life magazine article introduced “magic mushrooms” to a larger audience.
Apple founder Steve Jobs’ comments that taking LSD helped inspire his company’s design ethos, likely sparked the microdosing trend in Silicon Valley. Wikimedia Commons
But many I spoke to seem most interested in microdosing’s purported benefits for anxiety, depression and hopelessness — especially coming off a year and a half of isolation and pandemic chaos.
“I spent some years in the past on antidepressants,” says Ron Alexander, a retired writer now living in San Miguel. “I did Prozac and … I was really taken with it, but it kind of stopped working. A couple of years later … my doctor prescribed something else, and I did that for several years, and [then] it sort of stopped working … The depression didn’t really emerge again for me in a crippling way until Covid. ”
Alexander had researched how antidepressants diminish your frontal cortex and when a friend told him about microdosing, he believed psilocybin might be a more natural remedy.
“For me, the depression is putting a negative twist on too many things, catastrophizing things …” he says. “When I started microdosing, almost within days, all that lifted and I was happier. It had a bold impact.”
Other users are more interested in the possibility of opening and expanding consciousness and imbuing internal balance, as well as cultivating compassion.
Erika Haag, who has a regular yoga and meditation practice, was interested in what microdosing could do for her long-term emotional stability.
Many microdosers claim that in very small doses, psilocybin, the active ingredient in “magic mushrooms,” can help with symptoms of mental illness. Daniel Patrick Martin/Shutterstock
She and her husband had taken medicinal plants in larger doses and benefited a lot from the experience. “Once it helped us get through a really intense relationship crisis, and it’s allowed us to grow so much on so many different levels,” she says.
While Alexander’s approach to microdosing is more casual, Erika and her husband have followed stricter protocols.
Each protocol is a little different, with other substances to balance the psychedelic’s effects on the body. Haag says she enjoyed the experience but decided that microdosing was increasing her sensitivity too much and discontinued it after eight months.
“In theory, you are supposed to do it for one year, but right now I am trying to work without living by dogmas and instead listen to my body and what I need,” she says. “I felt really good stopping for now.”
For the hesitant microdoser, there is plenty of information online these days, including an entire Reddit subgroup. Both Fadiman’s and Pollan’s books have also spiked interest in this new form of self-medication. And as attitudes change about psychedelics, work to decriminalize psilocybin in both Mexico and the United States continues, with the hope that new research will find ways to use these drugs to benefit a larger population.
Like so many other ancient traditions, psychedelics may be a key to navigating life that the modern world is just starting to understand.
Lydia Carey is a regular contributor to Mexico News Daily.
A business that closed in El Paso, Texas, due to a decline in business from Mexicans in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua. al día dallas
The closure of the Mexico-United States border to nonessential traffic since early last year due to the coronavirus pandemic has caused big economic losses in U.S. border cities but some gains in their Mexican counterparts.
The economies of U.S. border communities have suffered losses of US $10 billion since March 2020 due to the inability of many Mexicans to cross the border to go shopping, eat in restaurants and fill up their cars, according to a study by José Iván Rodríguez Sanchez of the Baker Institute Center for the United States and Mexico at Rice University in Texas.
Meanwhile, Mexicans who would normally shop in the United States have spent an additional 45 billion pesos (US $2.24 billion) in Mexican border cities since the beginning of the pandemic, according to the Confederation of Chambers of Commerce, Services and Tourism (Concanaco).
In shopping districts located near border crossing points in towns and cities in Texas, the lack of Mexican visitors has forced many stores to close, reported the news website Al Día Dallas. A large number of the shuttered businesses – many of which sell items such as clothes, shoes, perfume, wedding dresses and 15th birthday dresses – had depended on Mexican customers for years, if not decades.
“To walk around and see businesses closed is very sad,” said Teclo García, director of economic development for the city of Laredo, Texas, located across the border from Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas.
“That’s the most painful thing, we don’t know whether they will open again or not.”
The estimated US $10 billion in losses is set to rise as the border between remains closed to nonessential traffic, although there is an expectation that it will open relatively soon as the priority vaccination of young people in Mexican border communities continues.
“Border businesses are facing an unprecedented crisis because thousands of people are no longer crossing to consume and that deals a direct blow to the heart of these border communities,” Rodríguez told Al Día Dallas.
“And the Mexicans are also losing because they used to cross [the border] to buy goods they got more cheaply in the United States and now they have to buy them in Mexico at a higher price,” he said.
His remarks are backed up by United States Department of Transportation data that shows that vehicular traffic from Mexico to the U.S. declined 50% annually to March 2021, while cross-border foot traffic was down almost 61%.
The silver lining for Mexico is that the inability of many Mexicans to cross into the United States has benefited businesses in Mexican border cities from Tijuana in the west to Matamoros in the east, according to Julio Almanza, a Concanaco vice president in the northern border region.
He said the economies of Mexican border cities have also benefited from visiting U.S. citizens, who have routinely been let into Mexico despite the border ostensibly being closed to nonessential travel for most of the pandemic before restrictions on southbound travel were recently eased.
Many Americans first came to Mexico to look for essential items they couldn’t find at home, such as toilet paper, and they have continued to come, Almanza said.
Sales in Mexican border city businesses “have increased 40% permanently,” he said, adding that the flow of U.S. visitors increased further as vaccines were rolled out rapidly north of the border.
The owner of Blue Propane says Gas Bienestar will be good for Mexico.
The owner of a Sonora-based gas company has thrown his support behind the federal government’s plan to create a new state-owned LP gas distribution company, saying it will help lower prices and break a monopoly in Baja California.
President López Obrador announced last week that the state oil company Pemex would establish the new utility within three months. Gas Bienestar (Well-Being Gas), as the new company will be called, is needed to create additional competition in the LP gas market because it is dominated by five large companies and gas prices have been rising “unjustifiably” above inflation, he said last Wednesday.
Jorge Alberto Elías Retes, owner and president of Blue Propane, said he approved of the president’s proposal, saying the entry of the new company into the market will help drive LP gas prices down in cities across Mexico.
He also said Gas Bienestar’s arrival in Baja California will put an end to an effective monopoly in the northern border state.
Companies owned by members of the Zaragoza Fuentes family have long controlled the gas market in the state, Elías said, adding that the family has created new firms in order to give the impression there is competition when in fact there is not.
“For more than 20 years in Baja California, 12 members of the Zaragoza Fuentes family have controlled 58 permits for the storage, sale, distribution and transport of liquefied petroleum gas,” he said, adding that federal and state authorities have failed to “sanction them for the control they maintain over the market.”
Putting an end to such monopolies is urgent because they affect the nation’s poorest families the most, Elías said.
“… LP gas monsters across the country and particularly in Baja California have distorted the market to benefit themselves at the expense of the most humble families,” he said.
Grupo Tomza, owned by the Zaragoza family, is one of the five large companies López Obrador was referring to last week, the news website Forbes México reported.
Blue Propane’s attempt to enter the market in Tijuana – where gas prices are among the highest in the country – was stymied by a series of legal impediments that prevented the opening of 10 LP gas distribution points, Elías said.
“… We’ve been victims of this gas cartel that has paid off authorities of the three levels of government,” he said, claiming that the Zaragoza family has financed political campaigns in Baja California for decades.
Ramírez: Government will end up creating a substandard company.
Lawyers for Blue Propane say that Zaragoza companies have co-opted officials to create a network of institutional support that makes it practically impossible for a new firm to enter the market in Baja California.
The president of the LP gas industry association Amexgas also said that the creation of a state-owned gas distribution company is a good thing, provided it enters the market on a level playing field.
Carlos Serrano told the newspaper Milenio that Gas Bienestar must compete under the same rules that govern private gas companies and if that is the case its competition is welcome.
Víctor Ramírez, spokesman for the Mexico Climate and Energy Platform, a renewable energy advocacy group, raised concerns about the cost of creating a new company from scratch.
“I don’t see it being a good strategy, it’s going to be very expensive,” he said in an interview, asserting that buying delivery trucks and purchasing and setting up storage terminals alone will cost about 11 billion pesos (US $548.9 million) at a “very conservative” estimate.
Ramírez also said it’s doubtful that a new company will be ready to enter the market within three months, as López Obrador claimed would occur.
“Having this in three months and having a subsidy to reduce the price of gas is very complicated,” he said, adding that creating Gas Bienestar will cause Pemex’s debt – already above US $100 billion – to grow.
In addition, Ramírez predicted that the government will end up creating a substandard company.
“…They won’t achieve something important but what they will achieve is to raise Pemex’s costs,” he said.
Beatriz Marcelino, head of energy consultancy firm Grupo Ciita, agreed that it is unlikely that the government will have a new company ready to go in three months. Obtaining the necessary permits, provided there are no delays, will take at least eight months, she said.
“We doubt that it can be done in three months,” Marcelino said, noting that the Energy Regulatory Commission (CRE) can take more than a year to grant gas distribution plant permits. Environmental impact assessments can take up to six months to complete, she said.
Serrano said that more than 2,000 permit applications, including ones filed two years ago, are awaiting approval by the CRE.
Marcelino said the government won’t want to wait for more than a year to obtain the necessary permits to allow Gas Bienestar to begin operations and expressed concern that it could seek favorable treatment from the CRE, whose governing body is conveniently stacked with people hand picked by López Obrador, a situation that experts warned could cause the regulator to lose autonomy.
Cubans gesture during a protest against the Cuban government in front of the offices of the International Organization for Migration (IOM) in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, on Monday. REUTERS/Jose Luis Gonzalez
President López Obrador offered his own remedy to Cuba’s largest protest in recent memory when he replied to a journalist at Monday morning’s news conference: end the U.S. trade embargo.
Hundreds of Cubans began protesting late last week against extended electricity blackouts and to demand Covid-19 vaccines. The gatherings spread throughout the country and escalated into demands for “freedom” and political change. Protesters shouted “Down with dictatorship” and “Homeland and life” – a play on the communist revolutionary slogan “Homeland or death,” posing a rare challenge to the regime of President Miguel Díaz-Canel, the successor of Fidel and Raúl Castro.
“The truth is that if [the international community] really wanted to help Cuba, the first thing to do is suspend the blockade … as the majority of the world’s countries are demanding … That would be a truly humanitarian gesture,” López Obrador said.
“No country in the world should be surrounded, blocked: that is absolutely contrary to human rights. You cannot create a fence and isolate an entire people for political reasons,” he added.
Mexico is prepared to provide the island’s population with medication, vaccines and food if requested, the president stated, before tasking Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard with establishing a link to provide aid.
AMLO, as the president is commonly known, said it was a matter for the people of Cuba to resolve, without addressing their lack of democratic recourse to help mediate the dispute. “The issue must not be politicized and humanitarian support must not be used as a banner to interfere in matters that only correspond to the Cubans to resolve … They must respect the self-determination of the Cuban people,” he said.
“I believe a resolution should be sought through dialogue, without the use of force, without confrontation, without violence.”
President Díaz-Canel repeated AMLO’s demand later on Monday, blaming the United States for the protests and promising to “confront and defeat” the trade embargo, which intensified during the presidency of Donald Trump.
However, he did not replicate his Mexican counterpart’s peaceful rhetoric: the protests were designed to “fracture the unity of the people,” he said, adding that the demonstrators “got what they deserved,” in allusion to police repression. Díaz-Canel had warned on Sunday that “provocations will not be allowed” and repeated Fidel Castro’s mantra: “The street belongs to the revolutionaries.”
Daniel, a Cuban studying in Mexico who declined to give his last name, said the blockade was too often a convenient excuse for the island’s leadership. “I don’t think in the short term raising the blockade is the solution to the protests in Cuba. The thousands of Cubans that are protesting in the street are there because of the poor administration which hasn’t been able to overcome economic inefficiency in the country for more than 60 years … The Cuban government is always blaming the blockade … they haven’t known how to develop the country from the inside. It’s an agricultural country that can produce from the Earth, which can produce food … but it’s easier to blame the blockade,” he said.
At the United Nations General Assembly on June 23, 184 countries voted in favor of a resolution to demand the end of the U.S. economic blockade for the 29th year in a row.
A relative of a victim reacts as members of the marines offer an apology to family members of victims for their role in the 2018 forced disappearances. REUTERS/Daniel Becerril
The navy offered a rare public apology on Tuesday for its potential role in the abductions of dozens of people who went missing from a northern border town in 2018 during operations against drug cartels.
As many as 40 people disappeared between February and May in Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas, across from Texas, which has long been a flashpoint in turf wars between drug cartels.
In April, Mexican authorities charged 30 marines for allegedly participating in the forced disappearances there and said they would carry out the investigations within six months.
About two dozen family members of victims of the missing attended an outdoor ceremony in a small park in the center of Nuevo Laredo.
“This institution of the Mexican state deeply regrets the situation,” Navy Rear Admiral Ramiro Lobato told the ceremony. He added that the navy would keep collaborating with officials to seek justice for the victims.
During the event, family members called out the names of their disappeared loved ones and responded in unison, “Present.”
Along with the army, the navy for years assumed a central role in the government’s military-led crackdown on drug cartels, which was launched in 2006.
Their deployment led to frequent complaints of rights abuses by the armed forces, including forced disappearances.
“We are asking the marines for justice,” said Leticia Martínez Borjas at the ceremony. Her husband, Gabriel Gasper Vazquez, disappeared on March 26, 2018.
“No one deserves to live with this uncertainty of whether their loved one is alive or whether he’s no longer in this world,” she said.
The charges against the marines marked the first high-profile move against military personnel by President López Obrador.
The U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights had denounced the disappearances, including those of at least five minors, as “horrific.”
Julie Metz, author of the besteller Perfection, will discuss writing from family history with author Danielle Trussoni in an online event on July 18.
“Go with what you know” is a writer’s maxim that inspires many hopeful authors to begin penning a memoir or novel based on their family history. Nothing could be easier, right?
But in reality, the art of researching and writing about one’s family history — and especially family secrets — is actually one of the biggest challenges a writer can take on: family stories are notoriously complex and at times told among members in an unreliable fashion. Not every member may be happy to assist their relative in unearthing painful or awkward family histories. Often, family stories span continents, making research difficult.
On July 18, the San Miguel Literary Sala’s Distinguished Speakers Series will help aspiring writers by bringing authors Julie Metz and Danielle Trussoni to a live Zoom discussion on the art of researching and writing about family secrets and the challenges of condensing it onto the page — be it fiction or memoir.
Ever since the pandemic forced the San Miguel de Allende, Guanajuato, literary organization to go virtual in 2020, it has been offering its annual diverse fare of author readings, writing workshops, interviews and panel discussions with major authors — including the well-known San Miguel Writers’ Conference — online each month, with events spread out over 2020 and 2021.
Known for its small, intimate workshops and author appearances that give audience members the opportunity for a brief one-on-one encounter with the guest speakers, the organization has strived to continue that tradition as it moved online. Events have been conducted via videoconferencing software that allows viewers to ask questions and interact with the guest. This casual discussion between the two authors will be no exception.
Danielle Trussoni is the author of the Angelology series of novels.
Julie Metz is the author of Eva and Eve: A Search for My Mother’s Lost Childhood and What a War Left Behind. Interweaving personal memoir and family history, the book is a heartfelt ode to her mother, who escaped the Nazis as a child in Vienna in 1940. Metz is the New York Times bestselling author of Perfection. She has written for numerous publications, including The New York Times, Salon, Dame, Redbook and Glamour.
Danielle Trussoni, the bestselling author of the Angelology series of novels, has recently released a new work, The Ancestor, in which a woman unravels the truth about her family and learns that her true inheritance is not the castle in the Italian Alps or the family’s noble title but rather her genes and the choices her family has made.
The author currently writes a horror column for the New York Times Book Review and recently served as a fiction jurist for the Pulitzer Prizes. She holds an MFA in fiction from the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she won the Michener-Copernicus Society of America Award.
The two authors will conduct this event as an engaging and interactive conversation, with viewers allowed to “come up on stage” via videoconferencing and ask questions of the writers.
One of the mountain roads included in the public works project.
The “Connecting Querétaro” highway project has upgraded 226 kilometers of road for an investment of 1 billion pesos (about US $50 million), improving transportation among 300 communities in the sierra, the state government reported on Sunday.
Before the project, roads were in poor condition, some only providing one lane and others being unusable in heavy rain.
The hydraulic concrete highways have transformed residents’ lives by connecting communities, providing access to hospitals and schools, improving public transport, and enabling products to be transported and emergency services to reach people in need, the government said in a prepared statement.
The project provided social benefit too: local labor was sought which helped boost the local economy, and female workers were encouraged to join the workforce in a new precedent for public works in the state.
In one case, 40% of the workers employed in the modernization of roads in the Landa de Matamoros municipality were female.
Querétaro officials say other states have looked to follow suit and replicate the model of female participation. They have signed an agreement to produce a public works manual from a gender perspective, which seeks to ensure that contractors employ women.
Querétaro is one of the country’s safest and most affluent states. From January through May, Querétaro only recorded 92 homicides, compared to neighboring Guanajuato, the country’s most violent, which registered 1,545.
Querétaro’s namesake capital city placed fifth in the Financial Times’ Latin American Cities of the Future 2021/22. The only city in the country that ranked higher was Mexico City, which came first.
A fence is erected around Puebla's famous hole in the ground.
The first study into the origins of the huge sinkhole in the state of Puebla discounted overexploitation of groundwater sources. Now a second study has turned that theory on its head, only for its author to muddy the waters further by denying its own participation.
Water exploitation, soil erosion and recent intense rain caused the ground to part in Santa María Zacatepec and leave a massive sinkhole, said Beatriz Manrique Guevara, head of the state Environment Ministry.
She was quoting from a study that analyzed 25 hectares around the sinkhole, finding a number of illegal wells among 47 others that were registered for water extraction. Three years of drought followed by intense rain this year were also named as factors.
The study was credited to the National Polytechnic Institute (IPN). However, in an unusual turn of events, the IPN looked to distance itself from the study and denied having “any official connection” to it on Friday, raising questions over its findings.
Guevara assured that there is an agreement between the government and the IPN, but that the organization had failed to process documentation to make the relationship official. It is not immediately clear why the IPN looked to distance itself further on Friday.
The giant chasm measures 126 meters across, having first emerged as a 10-meter hole on May 29 in Zacatepec, 20 kilometers northwest of Puebla city.
Guevara highlighted the findings of the latest study: the use of illicit wells amounted to a “massive exploitation of water” and in the last eight years the water level in the area had dropped by eight meters, due in part to the intensification of exploitation.
“[Overexploitation] has dragged away silt or clay, which is the element that binds the earth,” she said.
It revealed that 80% of wells in the area were used for agriculture, 15% for domestic use and 5% for industrial purposes.
The turbulent climate has also played a role: a lack of rain in the region had caused water levels to drop 35% below the average. In contrast, this year intense rainfall left the area with levels 85% above average.
The study pointed to the combination of factors. “The natural erosion of the soil through human activities and natural erosion, and the natural phenomenon of intense rain has caused the collapse of the soil, which has no resistance,” it read.
Authorities began Monday to extend the perimeter line around the sinkhole and erect a fence to prevent people from accessing the site, given the discovery of unregistered wells and the conclusion that the ground is unstable. An area of 25 hectares is being cordoned off, a move that comes just days after two men entered the secured area and walked to the edge of the hole where one of the two urinated in it, an event they captured on video.
Meanwhile, Puebla Governor Miguel Barbosa was keen to point out that the investigations not final, and that opinions from other scientific institutions remain welcome. He added that determining the precise cause could take all the rest of the 21st century: it could be “79 or 78 years from now,” he said.
Ebrard speaks at one of the president's morning press conferences.
Foreign Affairs Minister Marcelo Ebrard confirmed Tuesday that he intends to seek the candidacy of the ruling Morena party to contest the 2024 presidential election.
His announcement follows the publication of media reports stating that he made his plans known at a lunch with colleagues and close associates on Saturday.
It also comes a week after President López Obrador named six possible successors to his position: Ebrard, Mexico City Mayor Claudia Sheinbuam, Economy Minister Tatiana Clouthier, Energy Minister Rocío Nahle, ambassador to the United States Esteban Moctezuma and Juan Ramón de la Fuente, Mexico’s permanent representative to the United Nations.
Speaking at López Obrador’s regular news conference on Tuesday, Ebrard thanked the president for considering him as a possible successor and confirmed that he will participate in the Morena party selection process to find a candidate to contest the 2024 election.
That process is still 2 1/2 years away, the foreign minister said, adding that he will continue to focus on his current role in the meantime. He encouraged other possible successors to do the same.
“… Let’s not lose our concentration on what we are doing. Let’s be consistent, perseverant and loyal. And of course when [the selection process] arrives we’ll be ready to participate,” Ebrard said.
At a lunch at a private residence in Toluca, México state, on Saturday that was attended by more than 100 guests including Foreign Ministry officials, federal lawmakers, Morena party insiders and some of Ebrard’s longterm political collaborators, the foreign minister emphatically declared his presidential ambitions, according to people present who subsequently spoke with reporters.
“We’re going to take the president at his word, … yes, we are going to compete [in the candidate selection process],” Ebrard declared to rapturous applause during a 20-minute speech.
According to some attendees who spoke with Reforma, the foreign minister railed against a group of people within Morena’s ranks that he claimed has launched a campaign to kill off his future political prospects by using the May 3 Mexico City Metro disaster against him.
Ebrard was mayor of the capital when Line 12 of the Metro system – part of which collapsed and caused an accident that claimed the lives of 26 people – was built and there have been reports that the project was rushed to ensure it was finished while he was in office in order to boost his chances during a possible tilt at the presidency in 2012. (He didn’t end up running.)
But Ebrard evidently believes he is still alive in a political sense and a good chance of not only securing the Morena party candidacy but also subsequently succeeding López Obrador, as he did in Mexico City after winning the 2006 mayoral election. (AMLO, as the president is commonly known, was Mexico City mayor from 2000 to 2005.)
“… They think that I’m dead but they’ve killed me politically many times,” Ebrard told guests as they ate carne asada (grilled meat) washed down with red wine and beer, according to Reforma.
“… They took me for dead but here we are. We’re going to participate [in the candidate selection process] respecting the rules of the game.”
About a dozen of Ebrard’s colleagues and close associates also delivered speeches at the lunch, reported Reforma, and one of them declared that the foreign minister is the sole person who can offer “proven continuity” of Obradorismo – the López Obrador political doctrine.
Several of the attendees subsequently took to social media to offer their support to Ebrard and post selfies they took with the would-be candidate, even though mobile telephones were ostensibly banned at the event.
“I had the pleasure to speak with Foreign Affairs Minister Marcelo Ebrard. I believe he would be an excellent president of the republic. There is no doubt that he will … provide continuity to the project of the fourth transformation,” wrote Morena party Baja California delegate Ismael Burgueño.
Another strong contender is Mayor Sheinbaum, who was greeted by cheering supporters as “Presidenta” — or Madam President — during Sunday’s inauguration of Mexico City’s new cable car system.
Two days after Ebrard’s lunch, the president broadened his list of possible successors, asserting that there are “many” men and women who could replace him.
“Everyone in [the federal] cabinet, [Morena party] governors, parliamentary leaders, all of them have the possibility [of becoming the candidate for president],” López Obrador told reporters at his regular news conference, held Monday at a military base in Villahermosa, Tabasco.
The Morena candidate will be the person who receives the most support from “the people” in a democratic selection process, he added.
“… That’s the rule, the people will decide … in a free and democratic way who should represent us – … the progressive, liberal movement with a social dimension,” López Obrador said.
The next presidential election will be held on June 2, 2024, four months before AMLO is scheduled to leave office.
The main opposition parties – the National Action Party (PAN), the Institutional Revolutionary Party and the Democratic Revolution Party – appear likely to field a joint candidate as they did in many of the recent gubernatorial elections.
A poll earlier this year found that Ricardo Anaya, the PAN candidate in the 2018 presidential election and a former lawmaker and PAN national president, was the most popular choice to run against Morena in 2024.
Four other choices were offered to those polled: Jalisco Governor Enrique Alfaro; Senator Miguel Ángel Osorio Chong, a longtime politician and interior minister in the 2012-2018 federal government; Chihuahua Governor Javier Corral; and businessman and prominent government critic Claudio X. González.
Another possible contender is Yucatán Governor Mauricio Vila, who PAN national president Marko Cortés praised last week, saying he didn’t have “the slightest doubt” he would be a good choice to contest the race for the opposition.
“… Mauricio Vila has been a good governor, he’s achieved good results, he’s very well evaluated and part of the strength of the National Action Party is that we will have … good options on the path to 2024,” he said.
