All posts tagged: Mexico

We have other options – POLITICO

We have other options – POLITICO

Published by Sam

4. BTW, we are still into this globalization thing. At a time when Trump is touting trade tariffs and “America First,” von der Leyen’s speech seemed designed to send the opposite signal: We’re open to doing business with anyone. Von der Leyen addressed potential trading partners directly, saying: “If there are mutual benefits in sight, we are ready to engage with you.” Indeed, a key message from the speech was that Europe wants to diversify its trading relationships away from America.  While Trump is declaring an emergency on America’s southern border and gearing up for tariffs against Mexico, von der Leyen gave special mention to EU trade relations with Latin America. At a time when Trump is touting trade tariffs and “America First,” von der Leyen’s speech seemed designed to send the opposite signal. | Morry Gash/AFP via Getty Images And while acknowledging the economic threat from unfair Chinese trading practices, she also said Europe had to “engage constructively” with Beijing. 5. America? Who? Tellingly, von der Leyen spoke about Africa, the Asia-Pacific region, China …

Trump Team Rebuffs Talks on Mass Deportations, Latin American Countries Say

Trump Team Rebuffs Talks on Mass Deportations, Latin American Countries Say

Published by Sam

Donald Trump has promised to pursue the largest deportation operation in American history as soon as he takes office. But the Mexican government and other regional allies have been unable to meet with the incoming Trump administration, according to officials in Latin America, leaving them in the dark about the president-elect’s plans to deport millions of illegal immigrants. The incoming administration rebuffed requests by Mexico for a formal meeting, insisting that detailed discussions would begin only after Mr. Trump is sworn in next Monday, according to a Mexican official and two people familiar with the exchanges who were not authorized to speak publicly. The Guatemalan and Honduran governments received similar messages, according to officials from those countries. “This is not the way things usually work,” said Eric L. Olson, a fellow at the Wilson Center’s Latin American program and Mexico Institute. “Usually there are more informal contacts and some level of discussion by now.” The incoming administration may want to limit confrontation before ramping up pressure by signing a flurry of executive orders on migration, …

Risky, Ephemeral, Revolutionary Prints | Claudio Lomnitz

Risky, Ephemeral, Revolutionary Prints | Claudio Lomnitz

Published by skeptic

The Metropolitan Museum of Art owes its extraordinary collection of Mexican prints to a single collector: the French (but also Mexican, but also American) artist and critic Jean Charlot. Born in Paris in 1898, Charlot arrived in Mexico as an up-and-coming painter in 1921. He quickly joined the muralist movement and was commissioned to paint on the walls of Mexico City’s most prestigious educational institution, the Escuela Nacional Preparatoria, in San Ildefonso, alongside Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco.  Charlot took a keen interest in Mexican art and popular culture. Within a year of his arrival in the country, he wrote an essay in French called “Mexico of the Poor.” In it, he described the daily life and arts of Mexico’s working classes as a kind of parallel to the classical world: This race has the wisdom of the philosophers who walked with naked feet in a stream while abstracting ideals. Its toys have the twist of Aesop’s fables, its bodies the patina of those antique athletes of whom Lucian states that they are like sun-baked …

Mexico Is Getting So Hot That Even Young People Are Dropping Dead

Mexico Is Getting So Hot That Even Young People Are Dropping Dead

Published by José

This doesn’t bode well. Killer Heat Scientists have found that it’s not just older adults succumbing to dangerous temperatures driven by climate change — even younger people may be more susceptible to extreme heat as well. As detailed in a new study published in the journal Science Advances, researchers found that three-fourths of heat-related deaths in Mexico between 1998 and 2019 were people under the age of 35. It’s a fascinating — and perhaps foreboding — new finding that suggests it’s not just the elderly who are at the highest risk of dying from heat. “These age groups are also quite vulnerable to heat in ways that we don’t expect even at temperatures that we don’t think of as particularly warm,” first author and Stanford University environmental social scientist Andrew Wilson told the New York Times. Wet Bulb Blues Since getting an accurate picture of how many people die due to heat exhaustion is difficult — death certificates often don’t list heat as a cause — the team turned to data relating to changes in …

Trump Announces 25% Tariff For Canada, Mexico; Ramps Up Promised Tariffs On “Drug-Pushing” China

Trump Announces 25% Tariff For Canada, Mexico; Ramps Up Promised Tariffs On “Drug-Pushing” China

Published by skeptic

Just when you thought his choice of Scott Bessent as Treasury Secretary had tamped down the market’s “tariff tensions”, President-Elect Trump reminded everyone who is in charge tonight with drugs and open borders as his main focus. In a statement on his Truth Social account, Trump swung the hammer against Mexico, Canada… “As everyone is aware, thousands of people are pouring through Mexico and Canada, bringing Crime and Drugs at levels never seen before. Right now a Caravan coming from Mexico, composed of thousands of people, seems to be unstoppable in its quest to come through our currently Open Border. On January 20th, as one of my many first Executive Orders, I will sign all necessary documents to charge Mexico and Canada a 25% Tariff on ALL products coming into the United States, and its ridiculous Open Borders. This Tariff will remain in effect until such time as Drugs, in particular Fentanyl, and all Illegal Aliens stop this Invasion of our Country! Both Mexico and Canada have the absolute right and power to easily solve …

How a PhD Student Discovered a Lost Mayan City From Hundreds of Miles Away

How a PhD Student Discovered a Lost Mayan City From Hundreds of Miles Away

Published by skeptic

A new Mayan city, lost in the dense jungle of southern Mexico for centuries, has been discovered from the computer of a PhD student hundreds of miles away. This is the story of how he did it. The settlement, named Valeriana after a nearby freshwater lagoon, has all the characteristics of a classic Maya political capital: enclosed plazas, pyramids, a ball court, a reservoir, and an architectural layout that suggests a foundation prior to 150 AD, according to a newly published study in the journal Antiquity. And how did Tulane University graduate student Luke Auld-Thomas find it? The answer lies in lasers. Until recently, archaeology was limited to what a researcher could observe from the ground and with their eyes. However, the technology of detecting and measuring distances with light, known as lidar, has revolutionized the field, allowing us to scan entire regions in search of archaeological sites hidden under dense vegetation or concrete. Let’s travel back in time. It is 1848 and the governor of Petén, Guatemala, Modesto Méndez, together with Ambrosio Tut, an …

How the U.S. Election Matters for the Rest of the World

How the U.S. Election Matters for the Rest of the World

Published by Sam

Israel and Gaza Patrick Kingsley is The Times’s Jerusalem bureau chief. Israelis, if they could, would vote by a large margin for Trump — the polls show that very clearly. But whoever wins, the long-term impact will probably be limited. Israeli society, not to mention the government, is more opposed to Palestinian statehood and a two-state solution than it has been in decades. No U.S. president is likely to change that. President Harris would probably put more pressure on Israel to reach a cease-fire and open up talks with the Palestinians. But she would be unlikely to, say, cut off military support to Israel. President Trump would perhaps be less bothered about Israel allowing Jewish settlers back into Gaza, as part of the Israeli government would like to do. He also talks a much more aggressive line on Iran than Harris, which pleases many Israelis. But you don’t quite know which side of the bed he’s going to wake up on. You get the sense he’s more risk averse than he sounds, and he recently …

Top Gun: Maverick flight instructor dies in small plane crash during air show in New Mexico | US News

Top Gun: Maverick flight instructor dies in small plane crash during air show in New Mexico | US News

Published by skeptic

The​​​​​ flight instructor who trained actors in the 2022 Top Gun: Maverick movie has died in a small plane crash during an air show in New Mexico. Charles Thomas “Chuck” Coleman was the only person on board the two-seat Extra Flugzeugbau EA300 monoplane when it went down around 2:30pm local time on Sunday. Mr Coleman was performing aerobatics when the plane crashed during the Las Cruces Air and Space Expo at Las Cruces International Airport, city officials said. The air show was called off after the crash, which happened about half a mile west of the airport. Mr Coleman’s website said he was based out of California and was an engineer, aerobatic and test pilot with more than 10,000 hours of flight time. He performed at hundreds of air shows and had provided more than 3,000 rides in aerobatic aircraft, according to his website. As the instructor for actors in Top Gun, which stars Tom Cruise, he flew more than 100 flights to prepare the cast for flight in US Navy F-18 Hornets. Image: Chuck …

Gregor Samsa in Mexico | Claudio Lomnitz

Gregor Samsa in Mexico | Claudio Lomnitz

Published by skeptic

In our September 19, 2024, issue, Claudio Lomnitz reviews Marcela Turati’s San Fernando, Last Stop, “arguably the most thorough and absorbing piece of investigative journalism yet produced about Mexico’s brutal political economy.” In the spring of 2011 Turati traveled to the northeastern city of San Fernando—where eight months earlier, Lomnitz writes, “the Zetas cartel had wantonly murdered seventy-two Central American migrants”—after authorities discovered almost two hundred corpses from another, even larger massacre there. When local and federal governments neglected to bring the killers to justice or even identify all the victims, Turati resolved to accomplish “what the country’s criminal justice system failed to do: explain how and why hundreds of young men traveling north by bus to the border cities of Reynosa and Matamoros were abducted and murdered.” Over the course of his four-decade career as an anthropologist of Mexican politics and culture, Lomnitz has returned again and again to the country’s histories of violence, migration, and state crisis. In Death and the Idea of Mexico (2005), he traced a genealogy of “Mexican death totemism” …

Mexico: Anatomy of a Mass Murder | Claudio Lomnitz

Mexico: Anatomy of a Mass Murder | Claudio Lomnitz

Published by skeptic

In April 2011 Mexican soldiers discovered mass graves in San Fernando, a city of some 30,000 people in the northeastern state of Tamaulipas. One hundred and ninety-three corpses were exhumed and moved to the border city of Matamoros. Soon the local morgue was swamped with people trying to discover whether their disappeared family members were among the bodies. To cover the story, the news magazine Proceso sent a journalist named Marcela Turati. She was shaken not only by the crowd of families seeking information about their relatives but also by the behavior of the local, state, and federal governments, all scrambling to avoid any bad publicity that might dissuade tourists from visiting Matamoros over the approaching Easter vacation. To reduce media attention, forensic services moved the bodies again, this time to faraway Mexico City, permanently dispersing the mobs of desperate family members, most of whom could not afford an extended stay in the capital. No government body conducted a serious criminological investigation or made an effective attempt to bring the mass murderers to justice. Turati, …