MEXICO.- Mexico lived in 2021 one of the most complicated times in the last decade. A roller coaster with peaks of good news and abrupt bites due to the pandemic, forced displacements, political elections and waves of migrants.
Challenges between crusades for health and education, for the historical vindication and against corruption.
“ This year we Mexicans had much less uncertainty on the health issue than the previous one because there was already a vaccine against COVID – , policies and labor that the pandemic left plus the accumulated ”, observed Juan Estrella, sociologist and professor at the National Autonomous University of Mexico.
“Mexicans were stunned by the coronavirus and when we woke up we saw that we had not advanced much, that we had regressed a lot on some issues and that we still had a lot of problems above to be solved. ”
What happened during the year that concludes with politics and economics; security and migration; in social affairs and health?
Far from home
The Mexican migrants living in the United States rose as one of the economic forces and support of Mexico by breaking records in the sending of remittances in the middle of the pandemic. In 2021 the nationals sent more money to their families than in any of the last 18 years.
Among the main causes of this increase are the job opportunities that the economic reactivation gave and the stimulus checks for unemployment that led residents and citizens to stay at home.
Thousands of undocumented people took the opportunity in the vacant positions. “I multiplied my income by two,” said Juan Manuel Rosas, based in Georgia.
Despite the good run, the Mexican community faced some problems related to the lack of of attention in some consulates and bad migratory agreements. Testimonials from some affected pointed to dating trafficking in small diplomatic headquarters such as Atlanta, Raleigh and Indiana. The authorities affirmed that they were outside intermediaries.
There were also difficulties among those who arrived in the United States with H2A and H2B temporary work visas. One of the cases led to the first complaint before the renewed Trade Agreement between Mexico, the United States and Canada (T-MEC) for abuses against two Mexican female migrants for gender discrimination.
Activists defending the rights of binational workers throughout the year denounced arbitrariness by thousands of companies that depend on this workforce. Breaches of payment or contract conditions, unpaid overtime, collection of fees, poor conditions at work sites and recruitment fraud.
From the south side, immigrants without papers also overflowed through the sky, sea and land, as soon as the year started.
Thousands of Central Americans and Haitians embarked on journeys north Encouraged by the pro-migrant speech of the incoming president of the United States, Democrat Joe Biden.
Thus, Mexico remained a springboard country for small flows of undocumented immigrants and massive organized caravans.
With legal strategies, about 4, 000 Haitians obtained an amparo to prevent their detention on Mexican soil and slowly advanced towards the border to join the exodus seeking asylum in the United States, although the bilateral agreement “Remain in Mexico” obliges them to wait for a response from the Mexican side.
Last March, two planes of the Viva Aerobús airline were surprised with 95 immigrants without documentation . Seventy-two said they were traveling as a family and 15 more were lonely adults from Honduras El Salvador, Cuba and Guatemala and Cuba, according to information from the National Institute of Migration (INM). All were repatriated.
In any case, the influx of immigrants continued and it is expected that more foreigners will stay to live in Mexico due to the tightening of immigration policies in the United States.
The Mexican government recognized that until the beginning of December it had asylum applications of almost 97, 000 people from 90 countries and who has the challenge of giving them attention.
Security
The 2021 was marked due to the increase in violent murders. According to data from the Secretariat of the National Public Security System (SESNSP), from December 1, 2018 to the past 29 September were posted 100, 344 violent deaths : 95, 532 intentional homicides and 2, 812 femicides.
A quarter of them were registered in the first nine months of this year, with emphasis on some regions. The worst hit were: Guanajuato, Baja California, Michoacán, the State of Mexico, Chihuahua, Jalisco and Guerrero.
The federal government attributed it to the fight between cartels for the control of places for drug trafficking and extortion.
At the end of the year, thousands of Michoacanos and Guerrero had to flee from their small rural communities to the United States to seek refuge and save their lives.
In a daily count, victims of torture and murders accumulated on the streets, in private homes, in restaurants, roads, bars. Curled up abandoned anywhere, at bus stops, hanged, dismembered. At the national level, civil organizations assure that there are 38, 000 Unrecognized bodies.
President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said that crime control is in process and will uphold his policy of not directly confronting criminal organizations.
Between September 2020 and June 2021, the Financial Intelligence Unit —Subordinated to the Ministry of Finance— blocked bank accounts for just over 7.5 million dollars and 15, 000 euros for alleged direct and indirect links with money laundering, as reported in the document of the Third Government Report of the president.
Meanwhile, the Army continues in a work primarily of surveillance, retention of migrants and other areas such as the administration of banks, health, education, public works and social policy; construction distribution of gasoline, textbooks, fertilizers and medicines for which it has received some criticism for social fear of “militarization”.
Pandemic
By the end of 2021 Mexico accounted for almost 140 million vaccines applied that favored more than 80 million Mexicans, three-quarters of the total population, according to official data.
The Mexican State managed to make agreements with laboratories such as Pfizer, AstraZeneca, SinoVac, “Sputnik V”, Cansino and Johnson & Johnson which were gradually implemented.
The policy of the Mexican State (as in the rest of the world) was to vaccinate first the health personnel, then the elderly and so on, depending on the urgency of the older age groups after two waves that hit the population hard.
At the beginning of the year the Mexican capital, with more than 20 million inhabitants, concentrated a fifth of the cases of deaths and infections with the coronavirus that took Mexico to third place in the world for the number of deaths. On a single day in January, there were 1, 498 deaths.
The biggest challenge was to achieve inoculation without cheating, nepotism, cronyism … Doctors and nurses denounced the heads of hospitals because they privileged their own vaccination and that of his closest people even though they were not in contact with COVID patients.
Nurses from the National Rehabilitation Institute revealed to this newspaper that the director and his family were inoculated first than anyone else and had relegated to more than 460 people who treated daily people infected with the coronavirus. Shortly after the case was made public, they were vaccinated.
In the race to achieve vaccination, those who had a US visa and in a great hurry traveled to be inoculated.
By the news it was known that excess vaccines in some areas where they did not require residency or citizenship to get them. Among them, Texas, California and Florida. Last February, airlines reported an unusual booking of 90, 000 flights to major cities in those states.
Meanwhile, some towns were fighting against the anti-vaccine movement that claimed several deaths due to lack of protection.
It happened in binational communities such as the town of El Mogote, Guerrero, where many travelers between Mexico and the United States were infected and caused many deaths. “Only then were they convinced that they had to be vaccinated” , recalls Mardonio Reyna, who led the campaigns to convince the population to get vaccinated.
In the month of December In contrast to the Omicrón variant, the Mexican government started the vaccination of the third dose for the elderly population as well as the opening of new dates for the “laggards” who have not received any dose.
Politics
The election day in the middle of the year gave one of the greatest satisfactions to the migrants in the United States. After several decades of fighting for the political rights of Mexicans abroad, they were allowed for the first time to be voted to be federal legislators.
It was not through direct voting as was the original requirement, but through the proportional representations of the parties. Political institutions had to include them on multi-member lists. According to the number of voters and the place where they were placed, they could be elected.
There were many traps from the parties that placed false migrants on these lists , but they were unmasked with legal complaints from civil organizations. After the mid-year voting, they finally remained 10 migrant deputies, the first in the history of the federal congress.
“The challenge from now on is for them to legislate in favor of our communities,” said Jaime Lucero, president of Fuerza Migrante, one of the organizations that fought for that right before the courts.
Another of the vulnerable groups that took colossal steps in their political rights was that of women.
They reaped the fruit of the previous reforms that forced political parties to put 50% of nominations by gender. It was after 68 years since the approval of the female vote in the country and 42 since the first governor-elect in the state of Colima, in 1979.
Thus, María del Pilar Avila, in Baja California, came to power; Layda Sansores in Campeche; Indira Vizcaino in Colima; Mariana Campos, in Chihuahua; Evelyn Salgado in Guerrero and Lorena Cuéllar in Tlaxcala.
Despite the democratic advances, the electoral day was overshadowed for the blood of 102 murdered politicians, 36 aspirants and candidates for different positions, according to the count of the political consultancy Etellekt. Of the total, 87 were men (29 were applicants and candidates) and 15 women (seven applicants and candidates).
Crimes continue to be marked by impunity, just like the rest of the crimes. Mexico maintains figures of two sentences for every 100 crimes.
Corruption and society
The strategies to dismantle structures of corruption entrenched in the Mexican political and social system focused on removing control from civil public officials in the most sensitive areas such as subsidies and trusts.
The president’s promise to “sweep the stairs up and down” was still pending. The trial of the former director of Pemex Emilio Lozoya is still unfinished and other politicians pointed out from the days of previous government campaigns and many active ones have not fallen.
In the international journalistic investigation known as Pandora Papers documented the participation of officials close to President Andrés Manuel López Obrador and some of the most powerful businessmen in the country in tax evasion schemes and tax havens and none of them was opened a official research folder.
In the list of problems to be solved was the debate over water; contamination by methamphetamine laboratories, the legalization of marijuana; the demands of the indigenous people to have their own governors and the recovery of pre-Hispanic pieces illegally extracted from the country.
In each of these issues, the year had high points such as the battle of the Yaquis to prevent the cities of Hermosillo and Obregón in Sonora from keeping the water from the river that supplies them or the complaints from environmental organizations against the dumping of chemicals in the production of methamphetamine.
Laws that tried to help opium and marijuana producers to get out of hiding were stuck in Congress, among the many reforms of the Mexican State.
In the most positive cases, social advances were registered with laws that managed to decriminalize abortion at the national level that had doctors and women in prison.
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