By RICARDO CASTILLO Pandemic Traffic Lights On Monday, May 11, the federal government will hold an analytical meeting to establish, perhaps as early as Sunday, May 17, what Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) called “a sort of traffic light” to start reopening the nation’s economy back to business as usual. AMLO said that municipalities where there are no
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By RICARDO CASTILLO Jacobson’s Hearsay Interview Former U.S. Ambassador to Mexico Roberta Jacobson probably regrets giving an interview to reporter J. Jesús Esquivel that ran on Sunday, May 3, in Mexico’s weekly magazine Proceso. Esquivel mangled the information so badly that Jacobson had to send a set of tweets to claim that she didn’t say what Esquivel said she said.
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By RICARDO CASTILLO This is the brief story of a tempest in a teapot, along with a brief analysis of what the political situation in Mexico is in the times of covid-19, at least for the day. The latest political snafu is a lot of fun, but it was also meaty enough to make for 24 more hours of political
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XINHUA U.S. President Donald J. Trump said late Monday, April 20, that he would sign an executive order to temporarily suspend immigration to the United States. The decision was made in light of the Covid-19 pandemic and “the need to protect the jobs” of Americans, Trump tweeted. It was not immediately clear when the suspension would go into effect or
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By RICARDO CASTILLO A Call to Civil Disobedience TVAzteca anchorman Javier Alatorre in the station’s nightly newscast “Hechos” (“Facts”)created a humongous scandal on Friday, April 17, after claiming the following: “As every night, Health Undersecretary Hugo López-Gatell led the (press) conference on Covid-19 in Mexico. But his figures and his conferences have become irrelevant. Furthermore, and to put it plainly,
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By RICARDO CASTILLO Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) has called on his opponents to agree to a political “truce” in order to abate an anti-AMLO tidal wave of fake and not-so-fake news that has recently been unleashed on Twitter and which AMLO claims is being fed by troll farms. As an example, AMLO pointed to one tweet out
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By RICARDO CASTILLO Corona “Beerus” Brewery Nixed at Border A poll carried out by Mexico’s Interior Secretariat (SeGob) over the past weekend (Saturday, March 21, and Sunday, March 22) resulted in an overwhelming vote against the establishment of Corona beer manufacturer Constellation Brands mega-brewery in the Mexican border city of Mexicali, on the Mexican side of Calexico and Imperial Valley,
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By RICARDO CASTILLO The good news is that thus far in these coronavirus adventurous times, Mexico has registered only about 120 confirmed cases of the Covid-19 syndrome, and only one death. But in the eyes of Mexican Public Health Undersecretary Hugo López-Gatell, now the official government spokesman on the pandemic, the ordeal is just getting started and the projected worse
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By RICARDO CASTILLO A Divided Women’s Movement On the eve of Mexico’s March 9 feminist work stoppage by all the women who want to participate, the cadre of invisible “collectives” have been joined by an apparent “fifth column,” the anti-abortionists, who now claim that this movement “underrates” women. (In military terminology, a fifth column is an infiltration of enemy troops
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By RICARDO CASTILLO Has inner peace finally enlightened Mexico’s previously brawling National Regeneration Movement political party, best known as Morena? At least Morena’s new interim president, Alfonso Ramírez Cuéllar, said it has, but two very rowdy ladies don’t think so. (Note: For background on the topic, please read my previous article in Pulse News Mexico, “Orphaned Morena’s Democratic Schism.”) On
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