By THÉRÈSE MARGOLIS They currently number less than a dozen worldwide. But the little vaquita porpoise, the world’s rarest marine mammal, was once a common sight in the shallow, turbid waters along the shoreline of Mexico’s Sea of Cortez. The world’s smallest cetacean, the vaquita is native only to Mexico, and the upper Gulf of California is the only place
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By THÉRÈSE MARGOLIS When a then-30-year-old Rosario Hernández Jiménez first took a job as a biochemist for the Oaxaca branch of the Mexican Social Security Institute (IMSS) back in the early 1990s, she was impressed by the worker benefits her new position included. Not only did the IMSS provide her with full medical insurance (it is, after all, the nation’s
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By THÉRÈSE MARGOLIS Just 24 hours after Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) decried a report in Reforma noting that 56 human rights activists had been killed so far during his presidency as “false” and “a political conspiracy aimed at discrediting his administration,” the government’s own Secretariat of the Interior (Gobernación, or Segob) pointed out that the newspaper’s figures
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By THÉRÈSE MARGOLIS Among the myriad of self-ordained unofficial titles that Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) has acquired over his so-far two-and-a-half-year-term of office is that of clergy-in-chief. Indeed, it is not uncommon for the president to transition his daily political bully pulpit into a religious pulpit during his two-hour-long morning press conferences. And one of his favorite
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By THÉRÈSE MARGOLIS Mexican Labor Party Deputy Mauricio Toledo just can’t seem to dodge the bullets that keep being hurdled at him for alleged illicit enrichment and other criminal charges. Toledo, who took office in 2018 as part of the majority party National Regeneration Movement’s (Morena) leftist coalition, is currently being investigated by the Attorney General’s Office of Mexico City,
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By THE PULSE NEWS MEXICO STAFF The federal Attorney General’s Office (FGR) has issued an arrest warrant for grounded Interjet airlines founder and entrepreneur businessman Miguel Alemán Magnani for the alleged crime of tax evasion for the sum of 66.285 million pesos, judicial sources reported Thursday, July 8. Aléman Magnani — grandson of former Mexican President Miguel Alemán Valdés (1946-1952)
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By THÉRÈSE MARGOLIS Univision reporter Jorge Ramos — who two years ago was temporarily blackballed from attending Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s (AMLO) daily press conferences for daring to cite the government’s own figures on rising crimes during one of those pressers — once again challenged the president on Monday, July 5, on the failure of his “hugs, not
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By THÉRÈSE MARGOLIS A long-term drought has struck more than two-thirds of Mexico’s farmlands, and environmentalists are warning that the situation is only going to get worse in the weeks ahead due to soaring temperatures, severe crop damage and impending water supply shortages. But as experts desperately try to sound the alarm that climate change is already taking a toll
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By THÉRÈSE MARGOLIS The central western Mexican state of Michoacán is at war. For now, an eerie calm prevails, but the state’s 4.7 million residents know full well that that tenuous ceasefire can be broken at any moment Michoacán is ground zero for a turf war between the powerful Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG), formerly known as the Zetas, and
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By THÉRÈSE MARGOLIS In his self-aggrandizing address to the nation on Thursday, July 1, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) said that the country’s fight against organized crime was “well in hand” and that there were only three cartels currently operating in Mexico. That, it seems, is news to the cartels. In fact, according to the U.S. Drug Enforcement
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