Nestora is Finally Free

FNS News: After spending two years and seven months behind bars, Mexican community police commander Nestora Salgado was freed on Friday, March 18. Surrounded by family members, community police comrades, parents of the 43 disappeared Ayotzinapa college students and other supporters, an elated and defiant Salgado emerged from the infirmary of the Tepepan women’s prison in Mexico City dressed in the uniform of Guerrero’s CRAC police force.

Suddenly holding up a rifle, Salgado proclaimed, “I am free and it is the freedom of the people. We are not going to allow them to continue stepping all over us, and so they don’t continue repressing us, we will use this if necessary.”

Parents of missing students end Mexico City protest camp

Washington Post: Parents of 43 students who disappeared in southern Mexico at the hands of police and a drug gang have lifted a protest camp in the capital.

They call it a show of faith in a new investigation after victims’ relatives, international experts and human rights advocates cast doubt on a previous probe. Read more.

Serving as a bloodhound to find your own son’s grave in Guerrero

El Daily Post (Originally in Spanish on Animal Political): Back in the ’70s, when he was younger, Guadalupe Contreras learned the profession he still practices today — tomb-building, grave-digging and the manufacturing and installation of headstones.

But starting about a year ago, Guadalupe has taken a day off from his graveside pursuits to become something else — related, but very different.

Every Sunday, Don Lupe, as his friends refer to him, grabs a machete, a hammer and a hat and goes out to the hills around Iguala to look for graves.

He’s not looking for the kinds of graves he normally works with — with headstones, crosses or the name of the deceased. The kind he’s hunting for are usually found in clandestine growing fields, in gaps in the terrain, in brushy areas or abandoned sites. They’re graves, in other words, where many of the disappeared victims of organized crime are buried. Read more.

Series of femicides cast a dark shadow over Mexico's 'sunshine state'

The Guardian: Quintana Roo is Mexico’s sunshine state, a booming tourists’ playground which draws record numbers of holiday-makers to its golden beaches, coral reefs, Mayan ruins and all-inclusive package deals.

But in recent weeks, the Caribbean region has been badly shaken by a string of brutal murders of women – which authorities have seemed keen to downplay. Read more.

Doctors from Cuba and Costa Rica Examine Comatose Mexican Student

Latin American Herald Tribune: Two foreign neurologists have examined Aldo Gutierrez, an education student who has been in a coma since he and several classmates were shot in Iguala, a city in the southern Mexican state of Guerrero, in September 2014, the Executive Commission for Assisting Victims, or CEAV, said Tuesday.

Calixto Machado, of the Cuban Neurology and Neurosurgery Institute, and Costa Rican neurologist Mauricio Chinchilla examined the comatose student last Friday, the CEAV said. Read more.

Q&A: Economist Gerardo Esquivel says full benefits of NAFTA elude Mexico

World News Report: Next week, the George W. Bush Institute, the public policy arm of the former president’s library in Dallas, will launch a North America Scorecard with an assessment that the North American Free Trade Agreement has been a boon to the United States, Canada and Mexico.

Gerardo Esquivel offers up a slightly different point of view, specifically that Mexico has not done as well as the other nations.

Mexican AG's office apologizes to parents for 12-year-old migrant's death

EFE: The Mexican Attorney General’s Office publicly apologized to an Ecuadorian couple for the March 2014 death of their 12-year-old daughter at a children’s shelter in the northern state of Chihuahua.

The deputy attorney general for human rights, crime prevention and community services, Eber Omar Betanzos Torres, “addressed some words to the parents,” who live in the United States, at the Consulate General of Ecuador in New York, the AG’s office said in a statement Tuesday.

A message to Mexico on abuses

mySA: The United States, in the interest of bilateral harmony, has been looking the other way too long when it comes to Mexico’s human rights abuses. That the State Department found it could do so no longer says something about our southern neighbor’s continuing slide into that morass under the presidency of Enrique Peña Nieto.

The U.S. is withholding only a fraction — $5 million — of the $195 million in Merida Initiative funding to aid in the fight against vicious drug cartels. This is meant to send a message that the United States will no longer take Mexico’s assurances on human rights at face value. Read more.

Remittances to Mexico Rise More Than 6% in First 8 Months of 2015

Latin American Herald Tribune: Remittances sent to Mexico by emigrants totaled $16.6 billion in the first eight months of 2015, up 6.07 percent compared to the same period last year, when they came in at $15.6 billion, the Bank of Mexico said.

The average remittance was $296 in the January-August period, slightly higher than the $294 average registered in the same period last year, the central bank said in a statement on Thursday. 

Brazil And Mexico Vie for Cash From Oil Explorers in Price Rout

Bloomberg: Brazil and Mexico are preparing to compete for investments from some of the same oil majors when they hold auctions that are only a week apart at a time the price rout is prompting spending cuts.

Royal Dutch Shell Plc, Statoil ASA and Cnooc Ltd. have registered to compete for the next auctions in both Mexico and Brazil, scheduled for Sept. 30 and Oct. 7, respectively. Mexico has already sweetened terms for producers after the country’s first-ever auction on July 15 only drew bids for two of the 14 blocks for sale. Read more. 

The 5 Wealthiest People in Mexico

Yahoo: You probably already know that Carlos Slim is the wealthiest person in Mexico, and by a wide margin. However, you likely don’t know the other four people on this list and how they managed to get there. Some of them made wise business decisions. Others were in the right place in the right time. Currently, four of them are suffering declines in their net worth. Why is this happening? And why is one of these moguls seeing their net worth consistently increase? Let’s find out. Read more. 

Monarch Butterflies Will Be Considered for Endangered Species List

NewsWeek: There was a time, not long ago, when monarch butterflies were widespread enough that it would’ve been crazy to think about listing them as endangered. In 1996, for example, 1 billion of these regal orange-and-black insects were estimated to have arrived at their wintering grounds in Mexico. Last year that number reached a record low of 33 million.

Due to this precipitous decline, several conservation groups petitioned the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in August to list the monarch butterfly as threatened under the Endangered Species Act. And on Monday the federal agency announced that it would indeed look into whether the monarch should be listed, saying in a release that the petition “presents substantial information indicating that listing may be warranted.” Read more. 

Few believe Mexico’s first lady made enough as TV star to pay for mansion

McClatchyDC: Mexico’s first lady, soap opera star Angelica Rivera, is back in the spotlight. But rather than receiving public adulation, she’s the subject of ridicule.

A poll released over the weekend found that three-quarters of Mexicans think Rivera isn’t telling the truth about how much she earned during her television career and how she paid for a $7 million mansion that’s at the heart of a political scandal enveloping her husband, President Enrique Pena Nieto.  Read more. 

Mexico opens debate over low minimum wage

AP: National attention in Mexico has focused on the country's shockingly low minimum wage after the Mexico City government suggested it could act to increase the local minimum.

The debate has highlighted widespread dissatisfaction with the minimum wage of 67.29 pesos per day, or about $5. But suggestions that it be raised have drawn howls of protest from business chambers, who say raising it would only spur inflation.  Read more. 

Guatemala-Mexico Agreement on Migrants in Baja Signed

Frontera NorteSur: Guatemalan and Mexican authorities have signed an agreement to provide greater assistance to Guatemalan migrants in Baja California, Mexico.

Alejandra Gordillo, executive director of the National Council for Assistance to Guatemalan Migrants (Conamigua), estimated that upwards of 3,500 Guatemalan migrants are residing in the northern Mexican border city of Tijuana alone, virtually stranded without work or adequate economic support.

“We are interested in making the problem visible, because we’ve seen the efforts of Mexico on the southern border,” Gordillo said during a visit to Tijuana this week. “Now we want to know the problem on the northern border so we can take actions.”

Mexico overtakes Brazil as top car manufacturer in Latin America

El País: Asian and European car brands are investing heavily in Mexican-based assembly plants, catapulting the country’s auto industry to unknown heights.

A few days ago, Mexico became Latin America’s leading car maker, ahead of Brazil. In the first half of 2014, the country’s plants produced1.59 million automobiles, a 7.4-percent rise from the same period in 2013. Meanwhile, Brazil’s production in the first six months of this year fell back to 1.57 million units. Read more. 

A traditionalist shines through Mexico's fresh new face

Los Angeles Times

By Richard Fausset

March 10, 2013

MEXICO CITY — They elected a youthful president, a self-styled defender of democratic principles who promised to bring the country up to 21st century standards.

But many Mexicans suspected that an old-fashioned dinosaur heart was beating beneath Enrique Peña Nieto's smartly tailored suits, an inheritance from his Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, whose top-down, quasi-authoritarian rule defined much of Mexico's 20th century history.

On Sunday, after 100 days of living under Peña Nieto's rule, the Mexican people have a better idea of the ways in which their 46-year-old president, and his vintage political party, plan to manage the future of the United States' southern neighbor, a country rife with promise and peril. They are also discovering that Peña Nieto may be a kind of hybrid political creature, intent on effecting change while hewing to some of his party's older ways.  Read more. 

Undocumented migrants back in Mexico hope to some day return to US

The Guardian 
by Amanda Holpuch in Guadalajara
February 4, 2013

For millions of undocumented migrants who have spent years in the US legal shadows, the rupture of the political deadlock on immigration was the realisation of what once seemed a forlorn hope.

But even if the moves to fix America's broken immigration system result in a deal that once seemed so elusive, for many others it will come too late. Those are the people for whom the pressure of living without proper legal status bore down too hard, and they returned home.

Most of them will never be allowed back: anyone who has lived illegally in the US for more than a year is permanently barred from ever re-entering the country, unless they can argue for an exemption on the grounds of "extreme or unusual hardship". And there are no plans to change that particularly harsh provision in America's notoriously tough immigration regime.

Many former undocumented migrants return to Guadalajara in Mexico. It's been dubbed "Mexico's Silicon Valley" and those who return from the US with bilingual skills can easily find a high-paying job at call centers in multinational corporations. Here, there is a ready-made support system for people trying to find their footing in the country they were raised, but barely know.  Read more. 

Newfound aquifer may ease Mexico City's water woes

Los Angeles Times
By Richard Fausset
January 21, 2013

MEXICO CITY — It turns out a partial solution to this unwieldy megacity's vexing water problem may have been under residents' feet all along — albeit a long way down.

Mexico City government officials Monday announced the discovery of an aquifer more than a mile below ground that could provide enough water for at least some of the metropolitan area's 20 million residents. Officials say the aquifer could reduce the city's dependence on water pumped from outlying areas and reduce the strain on the region's shallower aquifers — the over-pumping of which is causing the city to sink precipitously, in some cases more than a foot each year. Read more.

Mexico Name Change: Felipe Calderon Tries To Change Country Name From United Mexican States

HuffPost By E. Eduardo Castillo 11/22/12 

Mexico City - Mexico's president is making one last attempt to get the "United States" out of Mexico – at least as far as the country's name is concerned.

The name "United Mexican States," or "Estados Unidos Mexicanos," was adopted in 1824 after independence from Spain in imitation of Mexico's democratic northern neighbor, but it is rarely used except on official documents, money and other government material.

Still, President Felipe Calderon called a news conference Thursday to announce that he wants to make the name simply "Mexico." His country doesn't need to copy anyone, he said.

Calderon first proposed the name change as a congressman in 2003 but the bill did not make it to a vote. The new constitutional reform he proposed would have to be approved by both houses of Congress and a majority of Mexico's 31 state legislatures.

However, Calderon leaves office on Dec. 1, raising the question of whether his proposal is a largely symbolic gesture. His proposal was widely mocked on Twitter as a ridiculous parting shot from a lame-duck president. Read more.