By JUAN DE JESÚS BREENE Mexico’s National Institute for Transparency, Access to Information and Data Protection (INAI) has been in the news quite a bit recently for political reasons.. But it is important to know the work this autonomous agency does and the amazing free resource is it for the general public. The INAI was created in 2002 by the
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By JUAN DE JESÚS BREENE If you live and work in Mexico, April 30 is your date with destiny, at least in terms of fiscal inevitability. That is the deadline Mexico’s federal law gives you to file your taxes if your yearly earnings inside the country amount to 400,000 pesos or more. For most people, ´preparing a tax return —
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By JUAN DE JESÚS BREENE Nobody wants to think about their own mortality, and sitting down to write a will is about a blatant a reminder of that fact as you can find. Which is why more than 75 percent of Mexicans die intestate. But as hard as it may be to confront the possibility of your own death, writing a
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By JUAN DE JESÚS BREENE Most people would agree that the most essential function of a government is to provide safety and security to its citizens. In Mexico, you would be hard pressed to find anyone who says the government is doing well when it comes to offering safety. Recent polls conducted by Mexico’s National Institute of Statistics and Geography
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By JUAN DE JESÚS BREENE If you were asked what values you think children should learn, you might come up with some variation of the typical four that come to mind after family: respect for others, appropriate leisure activities, belief (religion) and work ethics. However, those concepts could be considered more activities than values. What if you were given a
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OPINION By JUAN DE JESÚS BREEN Once again the U.S.-based Cato Institute thinktank — for the seventh year in a row — has published its yearly Human Freedom Index, known to political science students as the HFI. The index measures 165 countries on 12 freedoms: rule of law, security and safety, movement, religion, civil society, expression, relationships, government size, legal
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OPINION By JUAN DE JESÚS BREENE It is a question that is becoming more and more relavent among those considering traveling to Mexico for a vacation: Are tourists in danger from cartel violence at Mexican beach resorts? The answer is, yes and no, but mostly no. A recent Washington Post story, titled “Tourist Drug Demand Is Bringing Cartel Violence to
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By JUAN DE JESÚS BREENE What’s going on in Mexico City’s Colonia Juárez? How is it possible that so many new restaurants are opening in the midst of the covid-19 pandemic and in such close proximity to each other? Luís Peña’s story is one that many restaurant owners in the capital could tell. Mexico City, the fifth-largest city in the
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By JUAN DE JESÚS BREENE In Mexico, and likely most of Latin America, rather than the two-step, it is more like the 17-step. Think about purchasing a product or a service. In a developed country, you walk in, say what you need, pay and you most likely walk out with your product or service your purchased. Simple. And if it
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OPINION By JUAN DE JESÚS BREENE Like everything else with an uncertain future, predictions for the year ahead are just that: prognoses that could or could not come to pass. That said, and with no crystal ball in hand, here are four broad predictions that most likely could be agreed upon by most in the Western Hemisphere for 2022: emerging
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