By KELIN DILLON Just three and a half years into his six-year term, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) and his administration are on track to have the most violent presidency in Mexico’s recent history, already surpassing that of former President Felipe Calderón Hinojosa as of May’s homicide figures, and he is anticipated to surpass that of his immediate
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By KELIN DILLON Though Mexico’s Secretariat of Security and Citizen Protection may have detailed the country’s year-to-year homicide rate reduction during a press conference on Monday, May 24, continued reports of rampant violence throughout the country have put the veracity of the government’s purported lower rates into question. According to data from the Executive Secretariat of the National Security System
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OPINION By JESSICA GUERRERO MORELIA, Michoacán — In recent weeks in Mexico, the national news headlines have pointed to the same issue: the growing numbers of missing and murdered women throughout the country. This social phenomenon is on the rise, with 969 gender-based murders of women last year alone. The first cases of mass femicide in Mexico that captured the
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OPINION By MEREL HAENEN After a 13-day nationwide manhunt, the lifeless body of missing Mexican teenager Debanhi Escobar was finally discovered on Thursday, April 21, in Monterrey, Nuevo León, inside an abandoned cistern just a few hundred meters from where she was last seen on the morning of her disappearance, in the early hours of Saturday, April 9. That much
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By JESSICA GUERRERO MORELIA, Michoacán — The cultural diversity of Mexico today is the result of the syncretism of the native indigenous peoples and the Western culture, brought from Spain by the colonizers to the territory in 1521 that produced what we now know as the Mexican culture. Every aspect of the country’s indigenous cultures — includings language, religion, art
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By JESSICA GUERRERO MORELIA, Michoacán — The democratic political life of Mexico, as in many other Latin American nations, is relatively young. In the last decade, a new chapter began in the construction of Mexican politics after the sudden arrival to the presidency of a newly created party. Breaking through and eventually displacing the parties that historically held political hegemony
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By JESSICA GUERRERO Mexico’s independent life as a republic began in 1821, 200 years ago. But the first hundred years of the country’s autonomy were dizzying and plagued with numerous internal conflicts. These events and circumstances unleashed the Mexican Revolution that broke out in 1910, and consisted of a civil war between several regional revolutionary forces against the authoritarian regime of
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By JESSICA GUERRERO The leftist faction is relatively new in modern Mexican politics. It was not until after almost 70 years of hegemony of the centralist Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) in the 20th century, that the left began to take shape as the first citizen counterweights appeared. The Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) saw the light of day in
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By KELIN DILLON Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO), incensed by District Judge Juan Pablo Gómez Fierro’s suspension of his controversial reform to Mexico’s electricity sector the previous day, launched a public tirade against anyone and everyone he deemed his enemies, ranging from foreign countries to his own presidential predecessors, during his daily press conference on the morning of
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By RICARDO CASTILLO Voting for a Rigmarole The 11-member Mexican Supreme Court vote to allow a referendum to be held to decide whether to bring to trial past presidents for crimes allegedly committed while in they were in power past last week in two stages. The first stage was to decide if the public referendum is constitutional. The referendum’s constitutionality
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