By RICARDO CASTILLO The countervailing duty the U.S. government slapped on Mexican tomatoes as of Tuesday, May 7, means different things to everyone involved in this agribusiness, politicians included. Definitely, the new duty came as a big surprise for the Mexican government, where opinions vary from Economy Secretary Graciela Márquez Colin saying “We’ll sell them somewhere else” to President Andrés Manuel
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By RICARDO CASTILLO Is there anything left for Mexico’s Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) and Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) to celebrate now that they have been diagnosed as last-stage, end-of-life patients? Maybe not, other than the fact that in their deathbeds they are still desperately clinging to life. The stories of the two parties is extremely different, although their
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By RICARDO CASTILLO The organized Cinco de Mayo marches in different cities across Mexico on Sunday, May 5, were the first organized protests against the administration of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO). There was one in Mexico City that garnered about 15,000 participants, according to figures released by the Mexico City government, and less meaningful ones in Guadalajara and
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By RICARDO CASTILLO It was an odd but politically meaningful meeting at the National Palace on Wednesday, May 1 (International Labor Day), when Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) offered an official lunch to the country’s most important union leaders. Odd because many of the leaders belong to a kind of club that is nicknamed in political circles the
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By RICARDO CASTILLO Both houses of the Mexican Congress folded on Tuesday, April 30, ending the first part of formal sessions for this year of 2019. There was one surprise as the Senate sent back to the Chamber of Deputies President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s (AMLO) much-touted new law abrogating former President Enrique Peña Nieto’s ill-fated Education Reform. The bill didn’t
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By RICARDO CASTILLO In tandem with the announcement on Monday, April 29, of the additional construction of the Santa Lucía military airport — now renamed the Felipe Ángeles Airport — just northwest of the Teotihuacán Pyramids, Communications and Transportation Secretary Javier Jiménez Espriú surreptitiously released to the handpicked newspaper El Universal as well as to journalist Jorge Zepeda, copies of
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By RICARDO CASTILLO What’s new in Mexican news? Most definitely not President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s (AMLO) “new” program that he touted over the weekend of April 27 and 28 as the “Development Curtain” to be built along the Isthmus of Tehuantepec – the narrowest land space in southeastern Mexico, between the Pacific and the Atlantic. This same project has
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By RICARDO CASTILLO After a long and weary debate on the night of Wednesday, April 24, that extended into the wee hours of Thursday, April 25, Mexico’s Chamber of Deputies voted to abolish the Education Reform “imposed” by former President Enrique Peña Nieto in 2013. President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) celebrated the backing he received from this house of Congress
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By RICARDO CASTILLO How the press views the Mexican presidency has definitely changed in more than few ways since Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) was sworn into office last December. To begin with, AMLO established from the very beginning of his term his Monday-through-Friday press conferences, which start at 7 a.m. and end when they’re over, ranging in length from
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By RICARDO CASTILLO The outraged protests against a memorandum issued on April 16 by Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) that eliminated the country’s ill-fated Education Reform has been massive, to put it mildly. Critics have called the memorandum “unconstitutional” and claim that AMLO stepped out of bounds and has entered the country into the first stages of a
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