Mexico accuses Zara and Anthropologie of cultural appropriation

Ministry of culture claims Zara used a pattern distinctive to the indigenous Mixteca community

Mexico has accused the international fashion brands Zara, Anthropologie and Patowl of cultural appropriation, claiming they used patterns from indigenous groups in their designs without any benefit to the communities.

The culture ministry said in a statement that it had sent letters signed by the culture minister, Alejandra Frausto, to the three companies, asking each for a “public explanation on what basis it could privatise collective property”.

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‘Huge incentives to kill’: Mexico crime groups target election candidates

At least 34 candidates have been murdered since campaigning began in April, with the assassination clear-up rate close to zero

Tuesday started off like any other day on the campaign trail for José Alberto Alonso, a union leader running for mayor in the Mexican beach resort of Acapulco: he kissed his family goodbye, boarded his Nissan Extreme SUV and headed off to start knocking on doors.

But barely 200m from his home, a motorcycle closed in and the pillion passenger pulled a handgun, peppering the car with bullets. Alonso’s bodyguard returned fire, and the attackers fled. The candidate had escaped injury, but was later sent to hospital suffering from stress.

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Is that a surrealist masterpiece by the draining board? Inside Leonora Carrington’s sculpture-filled home

The great British artist’s home in Mexico has been turned into a wonderful museum, full of her sculptures, books, diaries and unsmoked cigarettes. Our writer, Carrington’s cousin, takes an emotional tour

In October 2010, a few months before her death, I said my last goodbye to my cousin Leonora Carrington. As I left her home in Mexico City, she stood waving on the doorstep. Today, I’m back for the first time – to see Leonora’s house recreated as a visitor attraction. It feels surreal, but the surreal has become the everyday since I set off to find Leonora in 2006, almost 70 years after she checked out of our family and Britain. She travelled first to Paris to be with her lover, the German artist Max Ernst, before moving on to Mexico with a diplomat she met after she and Ernst were separated by the second world war.

This house, 194 Calle Chihuahua, is where she was anchored for more than 60 years. Here, she painted some of her best-known works, including The Juggler, which sold at auction in 2005 for £436,000; And Then We Saw the Daughter of the Minotaur, now at MoMA in New York; and her mural The Magical World of the Mayans, now at the National Anthropological Museum in Mexico City.

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Mexico’s doctors protest as vaccines denied to frontline health workers

Doctors’ pleas receive little sympathy from government as critics say President Amlo favoring teachers – for political reasons

Ana Sofía is radiologist at a state-run hospital in the Mexican city of Monterrey, not far from the Texas border. Her work often brings her into close contact with patients, but says she was denied a coronavirus vaccination as her superiors did not consider her to be a frontline worker.

In despair, she attended a rural vaccination event for the elderly and asked for a leftover dose of the Sinovac jab – but she was again rebuffed, this time by political operatives who told her: “Wait your turn.”

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No Man’s Land review – well-meaning drama about US-Mexico relations

This contemporary western about a young Texan fugitive who flees south of the border is handsomely shot but didactic

Just north of the border between the United States and Mexico, the Greer family – patriarch Bill (Frank Grillo), mom Monica (Andie MacDowell), and grown sons Lucas (Alex MacNicoll) and Jackson (Jake Allyn) – work the land as ranchers. They raise cattle, ride horses and, being red-blooded Texan types, play sports – in Jackson’s case well enough that he’s got a chance to go pro as a baseball player. They also spend the odd evening riding the range with a vigilante militia group, rounding up immigrants who may have crossed the border illegally, to “help” the border patrols. On one such night, Jackson joins his dad and big brother, even though they try to keep him out of this sort of thing so he can get out of Dodge and become a sports hero – and what do you know, the dumb lug ends up shooting and killing a boy (Alessio Valentini) just a little younger than himself. In the back no less.

Ashamed, distraught and worried that his father will try to take the rap for him, Jackson confesses to local Texas Ranger Ramirez (venerable character actor George Lopez), but then bolts across the border to Mexico on his trusty horse Sundance. Soon, the fugitive is learning some life lessons and about what Mexico is really like, and he becomes a hired hand for a nice middle-class family. A flirtatious friendship blooms between him and the family’s pretty daughter, Victoria (Esmeralda Pimentel), while he tries not to get caught by the dead kid’s dad Gustavo (Jorge A Jimenez) and a skeevy people-trafficking “coyote” (Andres Delgado), who are out to get him.

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Valeria Luiselli wins €100,000 Dublin literary award for Lost Children Archive

Novel, which weaves together the stories of Mexican migrants with those of a US family on a road trip south, was picked for the prize by a Barcelona library

Earlier this year, a library in Barcelona submitted a nomination for its favourite book of the year: Mexican author Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive. On Thursday, thanks to Biblioteca Vila De Gràcia, Luiselli was named winner of the world’s richest prize for a novel published in English, the €100,000 (£86,000) Dublin literary award.

“It’s a beautiful, relatively small library in Barcelona who nominated me,” said Luiselli. “I’m going to kiss its rocks one day, because I probably won’t be able to kiss its librarians because of Covid.”

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‘We went to the dark side’: horror film shows reality of Mexico’s migrant trail

Mystical realism conveys real-life stories of brutal cartel violence in Fernanda Valadez’s chilling directorial debut

Two teenage boys wave goodbye to their mothers across a field in rural Mexico, leaving home in search of the American dream. The opening moments of the Mexican film-maker Fernanda Valadez’s Identifying Features, available to stream from this week, reflects scenes played out every day across Mexico and Central America, as men, women and children journey north in search of safety and job opportunities.

Valadez, 39, starts her directorial debut film in her home state of Guanajuato – a picturesque, once tranquil state in the centre of the country. In recent years Guanajuato has fallen victim to the evolving geography and relentless nature of Mexico’s humanitarian crisis; it is now one of the most dangerous places in the country for those who live there and for people travelling through on the migrant trail.

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Mexico faces up to uneasy anniversary of Chinese massacre

President Andrés Manuel López Obrador will mark the killings of 303 Chinese people during the revolution that the city of Torreón has tried to forget

The first to die were Chinese agricultural workers, who were killed in the orchards and gardens surrounding the Mexican city of Torreón by advancing revolutionary forces in the early hours of 13 May 1911.

After skirmishes at the outskirts of the city, the outnumbered federal garrison abandoned their positions and slipped away under the cover of darkness.

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Violence against women ‘a pandemic’, warns UN envoy

A decade after Istanbul convention was drawn up to end gender-based violence, activists report decline in women’s rights and safety

A decade after the launch of the Istanbul convention, the landmark human rights treaty to stop gender-based violence, women are facing a global assault on their rights and safety, according to campaigners.

This week marked 10 years since the first 13 countries signed up to the convention, seen as a turning point in efforts to address violence against women.

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Mexican president accuses US of interference over funding for NGOs

  • Diplomatic note sent ahead of meeting with Kamala Harris
  • Anti-corruption and press freedom groups draw official ire

Mexico’s populist president has accused the United States of undue interference in the country’s internal affairs just before a virtual meeting with the US vice-president, Kamala Harris, which was expected to focus on slowing Central American migration.

Related: Amlo calls decision to disqualify candidates ‘a blow to democracy’

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At least 24 dead as Mexico City metro overpass collapses

Officials say at least 65 injured as videos on TV and social media showed the overpass falling on to cars below

A partially collapsed metro overpass has claimed at least 24 lives in Mexico City, where rescuers worked through the night to free trapped passengers and search for victims.

Mexico City’s mayor, Claudia Sheinbaum, said via Twitter that at least 65 people had been taken to hospital after the collapse near the Los Olivos metro station, which occurred at about 10.30pm on Monday.

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Mexico City metro overpass carrying train carriages collapses – video

A rescue operation was under way after a Mexico City metro overpass partially collapsed on Monday night. More than a dozen people died in the incident and about 70 were injured, civil protection authorities in Mexico said.

Videos on Mexican television and social media showed train cars hanging in mid-air as sirens blared nearby after the overpass fell on to cars on a road below. Emergency medical crews and firefighters were at the scene of the accident combing through wreckage looking for survivors

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Mexico expects US to send 5m more Covid vaccine doses, president says

  • Mexican production of AstraZeneca jab suffers setbacks
  • López Obrador: “it’s probable that they’ll help us with a loan’

Mexica’s president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, said on Friday the US will probably send his country 5m more doses of AstraZeneca’s Covid-19 vaccine, as the company admitted production in Central and South America had suffered multiple setbacks.

Related: US cites Indian variant in implementing travel ban from Tuesday

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Amlo calls decision to disqualify candidates ‘a blow to democracy’

Mexico’s electoral tribunal upheld ruling barring two candidates, including one accused of rape, for failing to file expense reports

Mexico’s president has blasted a decision to disqualify two of his party’s gubernatorial candidates – including one accused of rape – describing the decision by Mexico’s electoral tribunal as “a blow to democracy”.

“Democracy is respecting the will of the people,” said Andrés Manuel López Obrador, known as Amlo, at his morning press conference on Wednesday. “In a democracy, it’s the people who decide. It’s the people who give orders.”

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Identifying Features review – horror and heartbreak in Mexico’s borderlands

First-time director Fernanda Valadez conjures up a vision of real evil in her story of the terrors faced by migrants into the US

There is unbearable heartbreak in this migrant drama from first-time Mexican film-maker Fernanda Valadez – and also a vision of real evil. At times, it looks something like social-realist folk horror. Mercedes Hernández plays Magdalena, a middle-aged woman from Guanajuato in central Mexico whose teenage son Jesús left home three years before, with a friend, on a bus bound for the border, where he’d hoped to take his chances on disappearing into the US as an illegal. But the body of Jesús’s friend has been found on Mexican territory, in an unspeakably grim holding area where the corpses of teen runaways are routinely kept in container boxes awaiting identification – though there is still no proof that Jesús himself is dead.

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Yemen, Myanmar and George Floyd: human rights this fortnight in pictures

A roundup of the coverage on struggles for human rights and freedoms, from Cambodia to Peru

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Trump-era policy forces families to make life-altering decisions at US-Mexico border

Families with older children are turned around under Title 42, invoked last year by Trump due to supposed health risk from Covid

Dazed and dejected, Mimi was sitting on a park bench in the Mexican city of Reynosa, Mexico, not far from the border with Texas. Clinging to her side was her six-year-old daughter.

The young Honduran mother seemed shocked by how close they had come to their American dream – and the realization that her own words had pushed it out of reach.

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Violence erupts as Mexico’s deadly gangs aim to cement power in largest ever elections

Clashes have sparked political assassinations and the forced displacement of thousands ahead of crunch 6 June polls

Violent clashes between rival Mexican criminal groups – and their alleged allies in the security forces – are escalating ahead of mid-term elections in June, triggering a string of political assassinations and the forced displacement of thousands.

State and federal security forces have actively colluded with – and even fought alongside – the warring factions, according to local civilians, civil society activists and gunmen from various factions.

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US-made guns are ripping Central America apart and driving migration north | Ioan Grillo

An iron river of illegal guns flows from the US to Mexico, Central America, and across the hemisphere

The stray bullet from the gang fight struck Katery Ramos when she was 12 years old, playing on the dirt street in the poor Planeta neighbourhood of San Pedro Sula, Honduras. “I was standing up for a moment, afterwards I fell,” she told me, sitting with her mother in a scrubby field near her home.

Related: Biden strikes international deal in bid to stop migrants reaching US border

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