MEXICO.- The cities and towns of origin of millions of Mexicans outside the country lived in 2022 one of its most critical years in terms of insecurity with records of violent deaths , journalists executed, attacks with weapons of war, control of the economy by criminal organizations; In the midst of everything, remittances and migrant political power grew.
“There is no doubt that there is empowerment,” warned José Luis Gutiérrez, former secretary of state migrants and Chicago-based activist. “It is also clear that there is still a lot of ground to be gained.”
The activities of Mexicans beyond physical borders gained strength in areas ranging from politics to the economy; education and culture, although abuses prevail in their role as workers, whether undocumented or as temporary visas.
In any case, their role as observers of the national reality is present, be it for investment in the economy or in gender advances and setbacks; political or corruption scandals; the State reforms that were consolidated and those that were not, the integration of the North American region and the brakes on corporate abuses.
How was this detailed 2022 in Mexico from outside and from within?
Power on both sides
The battle of veterans for their recognition as citizens took several decades and gained strength in recent years with the organization House for Deported Veterans. It is an organization that was founded in Tijuana and from Mexico managed to push the return of Gonzalo Fuentes this year. , a veteran of the Iraq War returned to the United States after 12 years of repatriation.
But the juiciest victories have been won at the political level, where this year the Political Reform guaranteed the possibility of voting for Mexicans abroad by electronically while their representations or the right to be voted for senators, municipal presidents and local congresses, among others.
Meanwhile, among the thousands of deportees who have returned forced by the conditions of the United States, some of them have taken the setback in victory or “the bull by the horns” as in the case of Juan Uriel Martínez, who crossed the border without documents at the age of eight, learned to socialize in hostile Utah schools, was repatriated, he enrolled in the university with little Spanish and is now an architect and wants to be a deputy to his 27 years representing young migrants.
The reality is that the children of Mexicans in the US, do not take their finger off the line to maintain multiple connections with Mexico.
Elísabet Barrios beneficiary of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), For example, he lives in California, where he emigrated at the age of four in the arms of his parents, but in c As far as he was able to travel, he came to Mexico, where he pushes an agenda of binational empowerment.
From another trench, Jesse Gionvani Sánchez, who was born in San Diego in with a Mexican mother, she graduated from Harvard in sociology and with these skills she teaches children from dangerous areas in Mexico to lead teams. This year he was in Tepito in person.
But the commitment to binational education gained strength on both sides of the Rio Bravo realizing that online classes can be as effective as face-to-face classes. With these parameters, a group of parents in Connecticut discovered that to encourage their children to like mariachis they could hire a well-known teacher from the state of Puebla and thus they formed a band.
Financial education also led relatives of migrants to build their own gas station with support from the state and remittances from their family in Guelatao, in the State of Oaxaca. To achieve this, they created a cooperative company that they called “Saariu” that operates from 15 last March with the approval and contracts of Petróleos Mexicanos, among many projects where the border is not an impediment to synergies.
Crime
The United States Congress published in its report 2021 on organized crime in Mexico that both the Jalisco Nueva Generación Cartel and the Sinaloa Cartel , are the main generators of violence in the country due to battles that they maintain due to the territory dispute throughout the country to which other local groups are added, such as the Gulf cartels, the Beltrán Leyva, Los Zetas, Northeast, Knights Templar, Viagras, Familia Michoacana, Rojos , Arellano Félix and Juárez.
This has caused a daily average of 16 daily atrocities so far in 2021, an increase of 12% compared to with the same period of 2022. In addition, this year added more murders of journalists in Mexico so far this century, with at least 17 cases, according to the civil organization Causa en Común in its latest report.
The specific descriptions of what the statistics imply were detailed daily with cases of impact on the communities of origin of many migrants. In Jerez, for example, many Mexicans abroad who wanted to visit their towns and houses were unable to do so because they had been taken over by criminal organizations as a center of operations.
In Zacatecas, day-to-day life became a risk of death. The assassination of a judge, the attempt to escape from a state prison, the burning of vehicles and blockades on avenues, a modus operandi that adds to other forms of territory control by many organizations, were surprising.
The CJNG and the Michoacán Family controlled the prices of the basic basket of Mexicans: tortillas, meat, bread, fruits, vegetables, corn, beans, eggs and at least 30 products that hoarded for sale; to achieve this, they murdered, threatened, intimidated and even planted land mines, according to reports from self-defense groups that still operate in some municipalities.
Mexican businessmen, merchants and workers did not pay taxes to the treasury, but to criminal organizations that still easily find weapons for their purposes despite Mexico’s multiple claims to the United States for trafficking. The escalation of claims took shape in these months of legal action, but did not prosper.
Post pandemic
Despite the world inflation that hit the United States particularly hard after the pandemic, Mexicans sent record remittances throughout the year, although they did not yield the same. Since April, the bank of Mexico reported that shipments grew 17.5% , but the price increase was 8.2%. Something similar occurred in March, the flow of remittances in US dollars increased 13.9%, but in real terms they advanced 4.1%.
The trend continued throughout the year.
Luis Sosa, a migrant in North Carolina who suffers from diabetes, a disease that requires constant treatment and monitoring, resented the inflation in medicines and was aware that in Mexico they also needed more financial support. “Despite the personal expenses, I sent a little more money to my family in Hidalgo because I needed it.”
The post-pandemic economic recovery and employment in Mexico has cost a lot to despite the good omens due to the advantages derived from the Free Trade Agreement that it has with the United States and Canada.
The COVID-
pandemic came to aggravate the labor precariousness that already existed. In the month of May of 2015, the deadliest month in job destruction, were lost 13.1 million jobs, of which a third have not been recovered.
Control of the disease, on the contrary, gradually improved and in the middle of the year, when Mexico had the fifth wave of covid-30 was less virulent than the previous ones due to vaccination.
The country closed August of 2022 with 7.2 million Covid-17 infections accumulated since that started the pandemic after registering 596,596 confirmed cases during the month, but without lethal repercussions of the same level as in 2022. In December the sixth wave of infections was declared with more than 12, cases.
Politics, reforms and pending
The political agenda of the country was marked predominantly by domestic arguments, public scandals and demands from vulnerable groups still unattended or with minimal progress. In the fourth year of his government, AMLO tried to promote two of his main pending projects: the electrical and electoral reforms with marked successes and failures.
Among the most outstanding achievements for the executive agenda, the nationalization of lithium stands out, which returned control of the mineral used in the manufacture of electric batteries and a key element for the transition to clean energy.
It was shortly after the opposition in congress gave a blow to his intentions to reverse the electricity reform of 2014 that he liberalized the market. The president had the intention of limiting private participation in the sector, canceling investment contracts, but he did not fully succeed because he did not achieve an alliance with the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI).
The PRI had begun to fade throughout the current six-year term, but during 2021 lost 88% of the states it governed and was left with only four governments: Aguascalientes , Durango, Coahuila and the State of Mexico. Morena, the president’s party, on the contrary, became empowered.
Scandals such as that of the governor of Morelos, Cuauhtémoc Blanco, who was exhibited in photographs with leaders of the local organized crime or the rental of a luxurious residence of the son of López Obrador did not hit the political organization or the federal government.
There were no major repercussions on popularity either of the president after Mexico was the target of an attack on the Ministry of National Defense by the activist hackers “Guacamaya” where military ties to drug trafficking came to light, the failure of infrastructure projects of the Government of López Obrador, the state of health of the president and the spying on civilians.
From another trench, groups of women radicalized the protests with attacks on the infrastructure of various cities to call attention to their demands against the murders of m women who still add up to per day and only 30% are classified as femicides.
From the High Security Penitentiary Center for High Impact Crimes number 1, in Morelia, it was also reiterated that the cases of thousands of indigenous people without sentence such as )Eliseo Hernández, a Nahuatl Indian imprisoned since 2015 who had to design the first dictionary in his own language to understand terms such as what is the public ministry, an amparo, a prosecutor’s office, an appeal or a confrontation.
Since 2015, a study of the National Human Rights Commission documented that 12% of indigenous defendants did not even know what they were accused of.
Other The issue that prevailed in the pipeline of impunity were fraud against savings banks and migrants hired for temporary work. In the middle of the year it was learned that around 1,268 people lost all their assets in various municipalities on the border between Jalisco and Michoacán because two cooperatives (Marcos Castellanos and Nicolás Bari) disappeared them. The case remains unresolved.
Pros
The minimum wage went from 88 pesos in 2015 to 400 pesos for 2022 which represented a historical increase in 30 years in an agreement that avoided friction, misunderstandings or protests from unions, workers or employers. ” We support the proposal but we ask for more conditions for the investment”, said José Abugaber, president of the Confederation of Industrial Chambers of Mexico.
The agreement adds to other good news of the year such as that Mexico was placed among the five Latin American countries with the lowest level of public debt , which represents 30. 8% of the national GDP. Paraguay, Guatemala, Peru and Chile are in the first four positions in the ranking prepared by the United Nations.
Treasury reported that it has refinanced millions of dollars of foreign debt since the pandemic of Covid-17 to cushion the annual expenses that you must pay.
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