Mexico.

[Swordsmyth]

The former director of Mexico’s state oil company, Petroleos Mexicanos (PEMEX) has been was arrested Friday on corruption and bribery charges

[Swordsmyth]

The mexican peso is sliding fast this morning following the surprise resignation of finance minister Carlos Urzua.
Urzua tweeted his resignation letter: "I appreciate the opportunity to have been able to serve Mexico."

Agradezco la oportunidad de haber podido servir a México. pic.twitter.com/aaa2cIa9uI
— Carlos Urzúa (@CarlosUrzuaSHCP) July 9, 2019

And the immediate reaction is selling pesos on uncertainty (back above 19/USD again)...

Mexican stocks are also fading.

Urzua proclaimed that "administration decisions were made without sufficient backing" and added that "some government officials held conflicts of interest," and criticized "the imposition of officials with no experience."


More at: https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-...licts-interest

[PAF]

Always get gas at Oxxo. Always.

[Swordsmyth]

Mexico's federal police officers have reached an agreement with government officials to end their strike, El Sol de Mexico reported July 9. The Mexican government has agreed not to fire or force the resignations of any officers and agreed to respect their seniority and benefits.

More at: https://worldview.stratfor.com/situa...ce-strike-ends

[Swordsmyth]

Mexico's Arturo Herrera looks grim in a viral video in which President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador names him finance minister, a job Herrera's predecessor left in a huff at a time when Latin America's second largest economy is signaling weakness.With Herrera at his side, Lopez Obrador for nearly six minutes plays down former Finance Minister Carlos Urzua's fiery and unexpected resignation letter accusing the government of formulating economic policy without sufficient foundation.
The well-regarded Herrera looks so downcast in the video as to garner far more online attention than Lopez Obrador's Tuesday remarks.
Internet users interpreted Herrera's thought process with such lines as, "What if I resigned right now?" "I should have studied childcare" and the ironic "best day ever!"
Body language and behavioral analyst Jesus Enrique Rosas at the Knesix Institute said Herrera's avoidance of eye contact and rapid blinking - some 60 blinks per minute versus a normal rate of 15 per minute - might reflect heightened nervousness.
As Lopez Obrador repeats his trademark promises, Herrera's blinking increases; he gulps and displays other signs of uneasiness, Rosas said.
Apparent critics of Lopez Obrador's leftward policy shift branded Herrera's stare as the "face of Mexico."

More at: https://news.yahoo.com/best-day-ever...211219001.html

[Swordsmyth]

A judge in Mexico on Wednesday ordered a prominent attorney linked to former presidents to stand trial on charges of organized crime and money laundering.A federal official who was not authorized to be quoted by name confirmed the case involves allegations that lawyer Juan Ramon Collado created front companies to handle money from questionable land deals.
Collado has reportedly represented the brother of ex-President Carlos Salinas and other prominent politicians.
Collado was arrested Tuesday in an upscale Mexico City neighborhood. The judge in the case ruled there was enough evidence to hold him pending trial.

President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said the case was filed two or three years ago but had been ignored by the previous administration of President Enrique Pena Nieto, which also reportedly had ties to Collado.

More at: https://news.yahoo.com/attorney-ex-p...173336226.html

[Swordsmyth]

Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, under pressure after the resignation of his finance minister, warned other officials may quit his government as part of the deep policy changes he is leading.“In a democratic government there are always differences and disagreements,” Lopez Obrador said Wednesday at his daily press conference. “You have to get used to the changes and there could even be other resignations.”

AMLO, as the Mexican leader is known, said the resignation of Carlos Urzua on Tuesday stems from disagreements over the country’s national development plan. Urzua also disagreed about the management of Mexico’s state-owned banks, the president said, adding that the former finance minister had clashed with his Chief of Staff Alfonso Romo and with the head of Mexico’s tax collection agency.

More at: https://news.yahoo.com/mexican-presi...131532482.html

[Swordsmyth]

https://twitter.com/realJeffreyP/sta...55085127864326

More at the thread.

[Swordsmyth]

President Andrés Manuel López Obrador presented the Business Plan of Petróleos Mexicanos (Pemex) this morning for 2019-2023, stating that the Plan he is supporting he has acted in Pemex's best interests and in those of the Mexican oil industry, and that "sowing oil" is the only strategy to save Pemex.
He explained that this plan advocates supporting Pemex in the first three years of his government, with a budget and tax reduction so that Pemex has resources and can invest, and that in the last three years, with more production and surpluses, the oil company will return to being a profitable company and that it will contribute to the development of Mexico.


‘’We have done well in rescuing the industry and we are optimistic despite the fact that the adversaries would like us to perform badly in this and other things, but they will be left with that desire," the President said at his press conference, this morning at the National Palace.
During the next three years, the Ministry of Finance will allocate 141,000 million pesos ($7.4 billion) to support the finances of Petróleos Mexicanos (Pemex), until 2022 (previously it was 2021).
In a morning conference, the Head of Pemex, Octavio Romero Oropeza, explained that by 2020, the government contribution to Pemex will be 66,000 million pesos ($3.44 billion), an amount that will decrease to 38,000 million pesos ($1.99 billion) in 2021 and 37,000 million pesos ($1.93 billion) in 2022.
In the following three years, the government contribution will be 12% of the accumulated budget of the company and will be added the reduction of a tax burden that will save 128,000 million pesos ($6.7 billion) for Pemex.


The reduction of this tax charge, which represents more than 85% of the direct load on oil production and is currently at 65%, will be added to the 30,000 million pesos ($1.57 billion) that will be reduced in 2019.

In this way, with adding the government contribution and the reduction of tax, over the next three years Pemex will have additional resources for 111,000 million pesos ($5.81 billion) in 2020, approximately 31% of the total resources available to the company next year, which according to the Business Plan will amount to total of 347,000 million pesos ($18.16 billion), an amount that is lower than the budget of 464,601 million pesos ($24.32 billion) in 2019.
By 2021, the government contribution and the reduction of the tax burden will be equivalent to 29% of the total finances available to the company, a total budget of 411,000 million pesos ($21.51 billion). By 2022, the tax burden will no longer be covered by the government but the government will still contribute will be 9% of the company's resources, so that by 2024 the company will have financial resources by own revenues of 392,000 million pesos ($20.52 billion).
Octavio Romero Oropeza, Head of Pemex, added that the Plan contemplates public-private engagement through long-term service contracts for oil production. Romero Oropeza added that Pemex will seek business opportunities with the private sector but any contract signed will be based on "fair and transparent agreements."
The strategy of the state company, Romero Oropeza mentioned is different to the one Pemex has deployed over recent years. Pemex had traditionally invested in extracting deep sea oil reserves but Pemex's new plan will now focus on shallow water reserves.
A surprise exclusion from the morning presentation was the newly elected Secretary of the Treasury, Arturo Herrera, days after his senior, Carlos Urzua, resigned from his post.

More at: https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-G...For-PEMEX.html

[Swordsmyth]

The Mexican Olympic Committee said Wednesday it will no longer be able to offer food, lodging and medical services at its main sports training complex, the latest casualty in a round of deep budget cuts by President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador.Seldom has a leftist been so obsessively austerity-minded as Lopez Obrador. In his first seven months in office, he has cut government posts and salaries, and drastically reduced spending on perks and benefits.
He also has cut his own salary and plans to sell off the presidential jet, saying: "We cannot have a rich government with the people poor."
Lopez Obrador describes his financial plan as "republican austerity."
But his cuts have begun to seriously hit everyone from athletes to archaeologists, who worry they won't have enough money to carry out essential tasks. Critics say his government is spending the same amount of money, just reallocating it to different things.
The Mexican Olympic Committee said it lacks the $4.7 million needed to run the Olympic sports center in Mexico City with full services. The complex has track and pool facilities, as well as a gymnasium and velodrome. This year, government funding for sports is about 25% below 2018 levels.
Also this week, researchers and archaeologists at the National Institute of Anthropology and History said about 200 employees have been laid off since the start of the year, and more layoffs are feared.
"We have gone from republican austerity to Franciscan poverty," said Joel Santos, head of the researchers' union at the institute. Never well-paid, many experts are employed on temporary contracts.
Across the government, Lopez Obrador's administration has eliminated consultancy and management positions, and thousands more public servants have resigned.
Economist Valeria Moy says the government has plenty of fat to trim, but notes that this year's federal budget of $5.8 trillion pesos ($304 billion) is about the same size as the 2018 budget. Lopez Obrador took office in December, allowing him to craft the 2019 budget.

More at: https://news.yahoo.com/mexico-cuts-b...204510853.html

[Swordsmyth]

The Mexican attorney general's office said on Thursday it had arrested a retired general who was responsible for security at the state oil company Pemex during the previous administration for allegations of fuel theft.The office said in a statement that it had apprehended "Socrates H," whom a government source said is Brigadier General Socrates Herrera.

The office has also targeted former Pemex Chief Executive Officer Emilio Lozoya in a graft case involving Brazilian construction firm Odebrecht.
Earlier this month, the office said a judge issued arrest warrants for Lozoya, three of his family members and one other person.

More at: https://news.yahoo.com/mexico-arrest...000814111.html

[Swordsmyth]

Mexico City’s government has been under attack by critics who say violence has spun out of control since a new, left-leaning administration took over in late 2018.Run by Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum since December, the city now says that the previous administration extensively under-reported crime. As a result, while it appears that the crime rate has shot up in 2019 under new leadership, by some measures it’s actually fallen.
Reviews of tens of thousands of criminal files from 2018 show the city’s homicides haven’t risen this year by more than a third, as previously reported, but by only about 12%, said Ernestina Godoy, Mexico City’s chief prosecutor. Violent crimes as a whole have dropped by 8% this year, she said.
The new figures, which will be released as part of official federal data on Saturday, are bound to raise questions about how trustworthy any government’s crime statistics are in Mexico. President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador won election in a landslide a year ago on promises to crack down on rampant corruption and violence. Sheinbaum, Mexico City’s first elected female mayor, is a member of his party and a close ally.
Registry ‘Distorted’
Godoy says United Nations officials oversaw the process of reclassifying the criminal cases.
“The registry was distorted,” Godoy said in an interview at her office. “In cases of rape they were classified as sexual harassment or abuse, or just injuries.”
Out of 214,000 files reviewed from 2018, more than 24,000 so-called “high-impact” criminal cases had been doctored, she said. Rape last year had actually been double the number reported by the administration of Miguel Angel Mancera, mayor since 2012.

More at: https://news.yahoo.com/mexico-city-s...144746174.html

Leftists do this everywhere.

[Swordsmyth]

The assault force rolls through this small mountain town not long after dark. Traveling in a fleet of pick-ups with about 15 men in each truck, they are dressed in pixelated camouflage uniforms and ballistic vests and at first glance they look like official army units, but their weapons give them away. Many of these commandos carry AK-47 model assault rifles, which aren’t used by the Mexican armed forces.The logo stamped on the doors of the trucks shows a figure from the Mexican Revolution wearing a sombrero and brandishing a rifle astride a charging horse. Below that are the words Policia Comunitaria, or community police, and a phrase which, roughly translated from Spanish, reads: “Death before surrender or humiliation.”
The men in the trucks are members of the United Front of Community Police of Guerrero State, better known by its Spanish acronym of FUPCEG. Tonight FUPCEG’s shock troops are on their way to assault the nearby town of El Naranjo, which is currently held by the forces of an organized crime group called the Cartel del Sur.
“We fight to free communities that have been isolated by the criminals,” says a squad leader who asks to be identified only as “El Burro” in an interview with The Daily Beast. “Everyone has a right to security. And to economic freedom. Campesinos [small farmers] and their children shouldn’t suffer under the rule of bandits,” Burro says. “The people of this town have asked us for help, and so that’s what we’re going to do.”


FUPCEG is an alliance of civilian autodefensas, or self-defense groups, that boasts about 11,700 fighters across 39 municipalities in Guerrero, meaning they’re now present in about half the state. Similar communitario movements have sprung up across Mexico over the last decade, but FUPCEG is by far the largest of its kind.
The spike in vigilante militias has polarized public opinion. Some observers see them as noble freedom fighters who succeed where traditional law enforcement has failed. Critics claim the autodefensas and comunitarios (the words are often used interchangeably in Mexico) are at best undisciplined mobs and at worst cartel patsies who do the criminals’ grunt work for them.
Either way, their power is growing. A new study by Mexico’s National Human Rights Commission suggests vigilante activity is up by more than 300 percent since the start of 2018, and blames the increase on “insecurity, violence, and impunity.”


In fact, violence in Mexico has reached historic levels this year, with the country averaging an all-time high of 94 killings a day through the first half of 2019. Both 2017 and 2018 also broke previous murder records. As one autodefensa fighter put it, repeating what has become a kind of mantra, "If the government can't protect us, then we have no choice left but to protect ourselves."
FUPCEG’s founder and leader is 40-year-old Salvador Alanis. A Guerrero native, Alanis is something of a polymath. An economist by training, he’s also worked as an electrical engineer in North Carolina, and at one time owned several successful fruit and cattle ranches in his home state. Those ranches are gone now. Some were sold off to help fund Alanis’s crime-fighting endeavors, while others have been seized by the mafia groups he opposes.
“I spent 12 years working in the U.S.,” Alanis says during an interview in the FUPCEG base in the strategically vital town of Filo de Caballos, high in the sierra of central Guerrero. “In the States I came to know a better life, a better world. I came to take safety for granted,” he says, “but there’s no security like that in Mexico.”
The lack of security is even more pronounced in Guerrero, which is Mexico’s leading exporter of opium and heroin, and perennially listed as one of the country’s most dangerous and politically corrupt regions. It doesn’t help that government law enforcement here is undermanned.
“We have an insufficient number of police officers to go around,” says Roberto Álvarez Heredia, the state’s security spokesperson. “We need about three times as many cops and public prosecutors as we have,” he says, “and the ones we do have need better salaries.”
Recently elected President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, known as AMLO, has touted his newly created Guardia Nacional as a solution to peacekeeping efforts in places like Guerrero, but Alanis remains unimpressed:
“So they just sent 3,500 Guardias to Guerrero,” he says, when asked about the new policing initiative. “The last president sent 5,000 soldiers and they couldn’t do anything against the cartels, because the criminals just paid them off. Everyone has a price,” he adds.
Still, Alanis is willing to give the Guardia a chance.
“We’re going to let them in [to our territory] and see if they behave themselves. See if they’re corrupt, or if they abuse their power. In the past the soldiers used to enter and search any house they pleased, and that’s why we had to run them out. We’re glad to be friends [with the Guardia], but we won’t be their slaves.”


As protection against a cartel counter thrust, FUPCEG troops man fortified checkpoints at regular intervals all along State Road 196. Here in Filo, Alanis and his command crew are headquartered in what used to be the largest hotel in town. The long, two-story building was abandoned when FUPCEG occupied Filo after a prolonged firefight back in November of 2018. Pocked by bullet holes inside and out, the building no longer has running water, and electricity is intermittent, but the community kitchen in the lobby is always full of gossip and the smell of spicy cooking.
During this interview, Alanis sits in what was once the hotel’s main office. He’s stockily built, dressed in a sky-blue Oxford shirt left open at the throat and wearing square-rimmed photochromic glasses. Clear mountain sunshine drifts in through the shot-up windows. In one corner of the room stands a derelict arcade game titled, coincidentally enough, Streetfighter II.
When he came back in 2010, Alanis says he found his home town of Ocotito overrun by organized crime.
“Murder, kidnapping, extortion, theft. The cartels ruled the state and they’d packed the government and police forces with corrupt officials, so there was no one to challenge them,” he says. After surviving two kidnapping attempts, Alanis decided to take matters into his own hands to “restore justice” to Guerrero.
At first it was just himself and a handful of other ranchers, but slowly the movement gathered support. By 2015 their forces numbered several hundred comunitarios operating out of a string of liberated communities around the state capital of Chilpancingo. But he’d made a number of powerful enemies in the process, including capos from the Rojos, Tequileros, and Guerreros Unidos cartels. When those crime groups launched a series of counter-attacks aimed at taking back the newly freed townships, Alanis’ civilian militias were quickly overwhelmed.
“We had an army of shop owners and farm workers,” he says in the office of the ramshackle hotel. He unholsters a chrome-plated 10 mm pistol to make himself more comfortable and sets it on the desk before him.
“Many of our men didn’t really know how to use their weapons. Meanwhile, we were facing off against experienced and well-armed sicarios, and we couldn’t beat them in battle. It was a question of war, and we weren’t up to the task. We were weak and lacking strategy.”
Those factors—along with the defection of some of his most trusted officers, one of whom ran off with his wife—combined to spell defeat for Alanis. His forces scattered and, still hunted by the cartels, he fled to the mountains and went into hiding.
“They took everything from him,” says Jackie Pérez, an independent journalist based in Chilpancingo, and an expert on the state’s autodefensa groups. “Salvador lost his livestock, his farmland, even his wife,” she says. “But he’s very intelligent and very patient. He was able to persevere, and come back stronger than ever.”
Pérez goes on to compare Alanis to Mexican freedom fighters of the past like Emiliano Zapata and Pancho Villa, at least in terms of tactics. “He doesn’t want to overthrow the government,” she says. “But he is willing to go outside the system to fight for the people’s right to freedom from certain forms of oppression.”
In order to continue that fight after being drubbed by the contras, Alanis knew he’d have to change his game plan.
“We’d been outnumbered and defeated,” he says. “Now it was time to change strategies.” Part of that strategic shift involved developing a broad network of spies and informants, many of them women, to keep him informed of his enemies’ movements and activities.
“Know your enemy as you know yourself,” he quotes Sun Tzu from memory, “and in a hundred battles you will never be defeated.”
Controlling The Sierra
Alanis isn’t the first comunitario leader forced to revamp his approach after an initial setback. Many other grassroots vigilante groups have cropped up in Mexico to oppose organized crime, only to find they lack the manpower and budget to keep up the fight over time. Unfortunately, that often leads to alliances with well-heeled drug lords, who then use the militias as proxy groups to wage war on their rivals.
Guerrero expert Chris Kyle, a professor of anthropology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, says that pattern has been in play for years.
“Since 2013 there’s been an explosion of community policing groups in Guerrero,” says Kyle in a phone interview with The Daily Beast. While villages with native indigenous populations that pre-date the Spanish conquest are legally allowed to form such units under Mexico’s constitution, the proliferation of non-indigenous figures “claiming to be community police has baffled authorities.”
The swift spread of the comunitarios is related directly to a lack of effective security measures, according to Kyle.
“If the state would provide security, many of these groups would likely stand down,” he says. In the absence of state power, however, and due to a lack of sufficient resources to operate long-term on their own, many vigilante squads become co-opted.
“The drug trafficking organizations take advantage of them,” Kyle says, because the community police provide the cartels with “a semi-legitimate wing that extends their reach.”
Alanis’s FUPCEG umbrella group includes both indigenous and mestizo, or mixed race, cells from all over the state, including the Regional Coordinator for Community Authorities (CRAC), the oldest and most respected such organization in Mexico.
Even so, Alanis admits that part of his revised strategy involved aligning with certain deep-pocketed backers. He claims that instead of working on behalf of a crime syndicate, he’s merely defending free enterprise.
This may strike drug enforcement authorities in the United States as a distinction without a difference, but here in Guerrero such distinctions matter.
Alanis says that in fact he is not opposed to campesinos growing poppies, since that's the only crop that pays enough to support many families in the sierra. What he's opposed to, as he puts it, is how the Cartel del Sur seeks to drive out competitors, keep prices low, and control poppy farmers through violence and intimidation.
"The people should be able to grow [poppies] if they want to. Or not, as they see fit. That's up to them. But nobody should be forced to sell [opium gum] at an unfair price to a single buyer. Nobody should be threatened or forced to worry about their family’s safety. All we want is for the people to live in peace,” he says, back in his bullet-riddled HQ.
“The Cartel del Sur wants to control the whole sierra,” he adds. “They want to own a monopoly on poppy gum and heroin production, and also extort from shop owners, taxi drivers, you name it. Other businessmen I know want an open market for poppies up here, and they understand that requires healthy local economies. So that’s why they help us fight the contras.”
To launch a full-scale assault like the one that liberated Filo would be impossible without outside financial support, according to Alanis. The Filo battle involved some 3,000 comunitarios and hundreds of trucks to ferry them, he explains. When the cost of ammunition, gas, and fighters’ salaries are factored in, a single campaign can cost about 300,000 pesos [about $15,700] per hour. And the Filo firefight alone last for more than seven hours.
“We need their help,” he says, referring to those independent opium gum buyers who help fund FUPCEG’s efforts, “but they need us too. If part of the money to liberate the people must come from opium, I’m willing to accept that equation,” the economist by training says.

More at: https://www.yahoo.com/news/vigilante...092721490.html

[Swordsmyth]

Petroleos Mexicanos imported less gasoline and diesel in the second quarter as its refineries produced more fuel and the government cracked down on fuel theft. Gasoline and diesel imports totaled 734,000 barrels a day, down 8.5% from the same period in 2018, according to a company presentation.Crude output dropped 10% compared with the same period a year ago to 1.66 million barrels a day, Petroleos Mexicanos said in its earnings report Friday. Crude processing fell 16% while the company’s operating loss narrowed to 52.8 billion pesos ($2.77 billion). Pemex’s financial debt totaled 2 trillion pesos ($104.4 billion) at the end of June, compared to 2.06 trillion pesos in the previous three-month period, its results presentation showed.
Yields on Pemex bonds maturing in 2027 rose 7.2 basis points after the earnings release to 6.81%.

More at: https://news.yahoo.com/mexico-pemex-...110000954.html

[Swordsmyth]

Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said on Tuesday that he will propose a constitutional change to Congress to eliminate tax write-offs, as he attempts to strengthen the country's finances without imposing new taxes.Speaking during his regular morning news conference, Lopez Obrador said he would share the proposal before the next legislative period begins in September.
"I will send ... an initiative to reform article 28 of the Constitution so that the right to write off taxes is eliminated," he told reporters.

More at: https://news.yahoo.com/mexican-presi...142110273.html

[Swordsmyth]

https://twitter.com/realJeffreyP/sta...80271852609536

https://twitter.com/realJeffreyP/sta...87313979953152

More at the links.

[Pauls' Revere]

https://news.yahoo.com/three-journal...000122731.html

Mexico City (AFP) - Two journalists were shot dead in Mexico Friday, bringing to three the number of journalists killed in the country this week, officials say.

Jorge Celestino Ruiz, who worked for the newspaper El Grafico de Xalapa, was killed on Friday night in the violence-plagued state of Veracruz, the mayor of the state's capital Paulino Dominguez told AFP.

Ruiz's house was shot at in October and bullets were also "fired at his vehicle to intimidate him," said a police source, who asked for anonymity, and did not give further details.

Ruiz had stopped putting his name to his articles to keep a low profile, the reporter's colleagues also said.

State interior secretary Hugo Gutierrez "strongly condemned" the killing on Twitter and said it was an attack on freedom of expression.

The shooting occurred less than 24 hours after the director of online news website La Verdad de Zihuatanejo, Edgar Alberto Nava, was gunned down in the southern state of Guerrero, according to the local prosecutors office.

And on Tuesday, the body of Rogelio Barragan -- head of news website Guerrero Al Instante -- was discovered in an abandoned car's trunk in the State of Morelos.

Reporters Without Borders said eight journalists had been killed in Mexico this year up until Thursday.

Since 2000, around 100 reporters have been killed in the country. Violence linked to drug trafficking and political corruption is rampant, and most crimes go unpunished.

[Swordsmyth]

Mexico is considering a ban on the use of cash for purchasing gasoline and to pay for tolls as a way to fight tax evasion and money laundering, according to people with direct knowledge of the discussions.The plan, which has been discussed between the banking industry and the government, hasn’t been fully approved. A final decision may not be taken until after the central bank rolls out its digital payments platform known as CoDi next month which is part of a broader government program to push more Mexicans into the banking system and cut down on cash, said the people who asked not to be named, since the plan isn’t public.
Mexico is awash in cash from the informal economy of street merchants and the illicit drug trade. Cash is used for between 80% to 90% of transactions in Mexico, Finance Minister Arturo Herrera said in March, when he was still deputy minister. At a time of a slowing economy, the plan could also help widen Mexico’s tax base.
Mexico’s Finance Ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The country’s banking association declined to comment.
In addition, the move will help identify gas stations that are buying stolen fuel by tracking their sales electronically, both people said. President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador has made a crackdown on fuel theft from state-owned oil company Petroleos Mexicanos a cornerstone of his drive to root out widespread corruption.
For banks, the plan to push for more cashless transactions -- albeit without fees -- could be a boon for expanding their client base and open opportunities to provide more Mexicans with cards, loans and mortgages. The CoDi system -- which relies on QR codes with mobile phones -- and a ban on gasoline and tolls, could increase digital payments tenfold, one of the people said.
Only around two-fifths of Mexicans have bank accounts, World Bank data shows, and Mexico has the lowest tax take as a share of its economy among members of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development.
AMLO, as the leftist president is known, surprised Mexico’s bankers by embracing a cashless strategy which his predecessors had previously shunned. The ambitious project gels with his anti-graft campaign as well as a wish to to achieve greater financial inclusion in remote parts of the country of 125 million. To be sure, challenges abound to weaning Mexicans off cash, including poor connectivity for both mobile networks and internet service outside of major urban areas.

More at: https://news.yahoo.com/mexico-consid...180311328.html

[Swordsmyth]

We try to stay in touch with Mexico. This week, we saw a couple of articles that should worry the Mexican middle class.
First, Presidente López-Obrador is making investors a bit weary, according to Richard Castillo via Pulse News Mexico:

Fear does not ride on a burro; it flies at the speed of sound!
And spreading fear of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador's (AMLO) economic policies seems to be the leading reason that Mexico's Gross Domestic Product (GDP) has slumped markedly to the point of reaching a minimal growth of 0.1 percent for the next quarter of 2019.

Based on the article, it appears that some major corporations are having second thoughts about investing or following up with their promises to invest.
Why? Can you say AMLO, or the initials for Mexico's president?
It appears that AMLO's chief of staff is picking up on the message. He just tweeted that AMLO's team understands the role of investment in the nation's economy.
The business community is not staying quiet. Gustavo de Hoyos, leader of COPARMEX, or a leading group of businessmen and industrialsts, is promising to launch an "alternate plan" to defend investors from the "populist" AMLO.
Well done Mr. de Hoyos!
Maybe my memory is bad, but I don't recall seeing that before, or a major industrial leader challenging the president's populism.
The other story is about Mexico's public schools and the growing influence of leftist teachers' union. This is from Mamela Fiallo Flor, a fellow Cuban who has seen this movie before:

The National Coordination of Education Workers (CNTE) will provide textbooks to hundreds of thousands of Mexican children in 6,000 schools and indoctrinate them with communist propaganda. The material ranges from Karl Marx to the link between Mexico and Cuban communism since the yacht called Granma that transported Che Guevara, and the Castro brothers sailed from its shores.

The new curriculum will attack the Spanish conquest and praise the Sandinista revolution.

More at: https://www.americanthinker.com/blog...in_mexico.html

[Pauls' Revere]

[/INDENT]The new curriculum will attack the Spanish conquest and praise the Sandinista revolution.

More at: https://www.americanthinker.com/blog...in_mexico.html

https://www.peoplesworld.org/article...lonial-abuses/

Spain refuses to apologize for colonial abuses.

He explained he would also offer an apology to Mexico’s indigenous “because the repression of indigenous peoples continued after the colonial period.”

However, Madrid moved quickly to “firmly reject” AMLO’s request.

“The arrival, 500 years ago, of Spaniards to present Mexican territory cannot be judged in the light of contemporary considerations,” the government said in a statement.

“Our two brother nations have always known how to read our shared past without anger and with a constructive perspective.”



Bravo Espana! Vivo yo!

[Swordsmyth]

The internal leadership election for Mexico's old ruling party was apparently won Sunday by the governor of the southern state of Campeche, who is seen as close to current President Andres Manuel López Obrador.An exit poll by the polling firm Consulta Mitofsky pointed to a wide victory for Gov. Alejandro Moreno in the vote to lead the Institutional Revolutionary Party.
The party known as the PRI ruled Mexico from 1929 to 2000, then regained the presidency in 2012-2018. López Obrador's crushing victory last year stunned the PRI.
Moreno's apparent victory suggests the PRI may become a sort of loyal opposition or satellite party for López Obrador. The president's own Morena party lacks the PRI's experience, discipline and political machinery.

More at: https://news.yahoo.com/mexicos-old-r...023053162.html

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Mexico's President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said on Monday that his administration will not cancel any current mining concessions, but added that no new mining concessions will be handed out either.

More at: https://news.yahoo.com/mexican-presi...135943969.html

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A judge ordered a former Mexican Cabinet minister to be detained pending a trial over suspected losses to taxpayers, her lawyer said on Tuesday, opening a new front in President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador's campaign to eradicate corruption.The detention of former social development minister Rosario Robles is likely to ramp up scrutiny of the administration of Lopez Obrador's predecessor, Enrique Pena Nieto, whose 2012-2018 presidency was plagued by graft scandals.

More at: https://news.yahoo.com/judge-orders-...125340695.html

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Argentine authorities and Interpol detained on Friday a businessman who was at the center of a Mexican corruption scandal in 2004 that hurt the reputation of Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, who at the time was Mexico City's mayor and is now the nation's president.The detained Argentine businessman Carlos Ahumada was filmed in 2004 giving bundles of money to Lopez Obrador's main ally in the City Council, Rene Bejarano. Support for Lopez Obrador at the time was battered by the graft scandal.
Ahumada was detained at the request of Mexican authorities and a process to extradite him to Mexico will begin immediately, the Mexican attorney general's office (FGR) said in a statement.

More at: https://news.yahoo.com/argentina-det...034053361.html

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Mexican lynching’s triple, as citizens take the law into their own hands in the face of kidnappings

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Mexico's government appears to be split about whether it should talk to armed vigilante groups, or treat them as criminals.President Andres Manuel López Obrador said Thursday he disagreed with his assistant interior secretary's decision to attend a ceremony with vigilantes, who often call themselves "self-defense" groups.
"We cannot have illegal groups performing law enforcement duties. That cannot be allowed," Lopez Obrador said.
Though they formed starting in 2013 to fight drug cartels, the vigilante groups have often been found to be infiltrated by criminal gangs themselves.
The debate came to a head Wednesday when Ricardo Peralta, an assistant secretary of the interior, attended the groundbreaking of an agricultural processing plant in the vigilante-dominated community of La Huacana in the western state of Michoacan. He did so in the company of vigilante leaders.
"He decided to attend because they invited him," Lopez Obrador said. "I do not agree."
"We talked about this issue in the security Cabinet, and I have asked them to obey the mandates of the constitution and the laws," Lopez Obrador said, suggesting Peralta and his colleagues at the interior department got a dressing down.
The interior department has been given the responsibility for implementing some of Lopez Obrador's most controversial initiatives, such as an amnesty program supposedly aimed at "political prisoners," some of whom had also been vigilantes.
Peralta had earlier drawn criticism for meeting with a similar vigilante group in the violence-plagued northern border state of Tamaulipas. The group he met with at an event there has been described as having ties to the Gulf drug cartel.


On Wednesday, the Michoacan state governor claimed the federal government was giving money to people he called criminals.
"It hurts that they are rewarding people who humiliated, harassed and mistreated Mexican soldiers," Michoacan Gov. Silvano Aureoles said. "What did the assistant secretary come to do? To give money to criminals," Aureoles said. "Are we going them money so they will stop being criminals? That will only embolden them."
In fact, it is often hard to tell the difference between true self-defense groups — some of which exist legally in indigenous communities, where normal police are absent — and criminal-infiltrated vigilantes. Because they formed to fight a local drug cartel that was extorting and kidnapping residents, the groups often received weapons, money and recruits from a rival drug cartel.
It would not be the first time the Interior Department — which is the country's top domestic security agency — has appeared to differ with the president over the issue.
Interior Secretary Olga Sánchez Cordero kicked up a scandal earlier this week when she said, "We are in talks with many (armed) groups, and they have told us they do not want to continue with this violence." Her office was quickly forced to clarify that she was talking about vigilantes rather than drug cartels.
The Interior Department said Tuesday that "the federal government does not have and will not hold talks with any organized crime group."
Lopez Obrador is particularly vulnerable on the issue, because he has publicly announced he will no longer continue the strategy of targeting drug capos for arrest, leading to speculation he might be seeking a sort of truce with the gangs.

More at: https://news.yahoo.com/mexico-strugg...190157160.html

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Oil and gas companies hoping to get a piece of the action in Mexico’s oil industry will have to make good on existing contracts first, Mexico’s president Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said on Friday, according to Reuters.
Populist left-wing Obrador said on Friday there would be no new contracts for companies who are not investing and producing their other contracts in the country.
“If there’s no production, if they don’t invest, we can’t hand out contracts,” Obrador said at a news conference.
The hardline stance against oil and gas companies who have not yet acted on their current projects in the country is just the latest in a string of comments from the new president that have given analysts an unfavorable outlook on Mexico’s oil industry.

More at: https://oilprice.com/Latest-Energy-N...Producers.html

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Mexico registered zero economic growth in the second quarter, according to revised data released Friday, meaning that Latin America's second-biggest economy dodged a recession even more narrowly than previously thought.
"Gross domestic product (GDP)... registered no change in real terms in the second quarter of 2019," Mexico's official statistics institute, INEGI, said in a statement.
INEGI had initially said in July that GDP expanded by 0.1 percent in the period from April to June.
That puny-but-positive figure at least indicated the economy had returned to growth, after shrinking in the first quarter of the year.
Friday's revised figure, on the other hand, is a fresh bit of bad news for Mexico and President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, an anti-establishment leftist who took office in December promising to kick-start the economy, among other things.
He has not gotten off to an encouraging start: the economy shrank by 0.2 percent in the first quarter, raising the specter of a recession -- two or more consecutive quarters of economic contraction -- just months into Lopez Obrador's term.

More at: https://www.france24.com/en/20190823...o-growth-in-q2

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Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez-Obrador said his administration has reached a deal ending a $3 billion controversy over contracts for seven natural gas pipelines that were built by four companies south of the border.
During a Tuesday morning press conference, Lopez-Obrador announced that Mexico's federal government had reached a deal on Monday night with Canadian pipeline operator TC Energy, a Mexican subsidiary of San Diego utility company Sempra Energy and Mexican construction firms Grupo Carso and Fermaca.
"We'd like to thank the companies for reaching an agreement that advances both natural interests and business interests," Lopez-Obrador said.


Seeking to undo $3 billion in payments and to dispute force majeure clauses on the pipeline contracts, Lopez-Obrador launched a public review of the projects and requested international arbitration proceedings.


Either idle or incomplete, the pipelines are not delivering gas, but the clauses allowed the companies to collect payments due to delays and circumstances beyond their control, which included various delays ranging from the weather and landowner issues to hostility from indigenous groups — and even alleged acts of extortion at the hands of local government officials.
Mexico consumes more than 8 billion cubic feet of natural gas per day, but only produces 2.6 billion cubic feet per day — meaning that the rest needs to be imported. During the press conference, Lopez-Obrador said the agreement with the companies will allow the Mexican government to save $4.5 billion long-term.
Under the agreement with the pipeline companies, Mexican officials expect 63 percent of the natural gas from the seven pipeline projects will be used by government-owned power plants while the remaining 37 percent will be consumed by industrial customers.
"This guarantees a supply of gas for the electricity industry and national industry," Lopez-Obrador said. "We won't have blackouts in future years."

More at: https://www.chron.com/business/energ...r-14381313.php

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