Category Archives: Mexico

At least 24 dead as Mexico City metro overpass collapses

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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

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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

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  • 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’

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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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The Mexican women who kicked out the cartels – video

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Adelaida Sánchez is a member of the community police force in Cherán, a Purépecha indigenous town in Michoacán, Mexico, which declared itself autonomous in 2011. When the town was under siege from illegal logging, cartel criminals, and corrupt authorities and the men of the town stood by and did nothing, it was left to women to lead the fightback. On the tenth anniversary of the uprising, Adelaida patrols the town and its forests, providing an oasis amidst the murder, kidnap and extortion across the state

  • Photograph credit:  Andrea Murcia 
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Mexico’s high Covid death toll blamed on populist government

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New report points finger at nation’s penny-pinching policies and failure to act on scientific advice

Mexico’s unwillingness to spend money, do more testing, change course or react to new scientific evidence contributed to the country being one of the worst-hit by the coronavirus pandemic, a report has concluded.

Mexico would have had a significantly lower death toll if it had reacted as satisfactorily as the average government, according to the Institute for Global Health Sciences, at the University of California, San Francisco, which also released a report sharply critical of the US response to Covid-19.

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Mexico’s vow to tighten border fails to deter US-bound migrants

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As the Biden administration enlists its neighbours in attempts to slow the flow of people, families seeking a future free from hunger and violence journey on

Groups of men, women and children stepped off small boats and on to Mexican soil without showing their documents to anyone.

Drivers quickly bundled them into taxis which sped past an immigration office to a nearby crossroad, where the travelers climbed into a vans for the next leg of their journey toward the US border.

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‘Kill the bill’ and trans visibility: human rights this fortnight in pictures

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A round-up of the coverage on struggles for human rights and freedoms, from Mexico to China

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A Mexican tragedy: country’s crippling Covid crisis comes into sharp focus

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Adriana Mejía lost half her family in just 83 days – now a huge death toll of 294,000 is being quietly acknowledged

It took just 83 days for Adriana Mejía to lose half her family, as Covid unleashed a Mexican tragedy whose full impact is only now becoming clear.

First to depart was her father, Juan, a 90-year-old carpenter who died at the family home in Mexico City last July after summoning his eight children to say goodbye. Two weeks later Mejía’s 55-year-old sister, Cecilia, who began feeling unwell as they buried their father, also lost her life. Two days later, on 3 August, Mejía lost her brother, Juan Carlos, then, 13 days after that, her brother-in-law, Germán.

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‘An atmosphere of terror’: the bloody rise of Mexico’s top cartel

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The Jalisco cartel’s violence has taken a horrific toll on the state and experts say it poses a threat to Mexico’s government

It was mid-spring when residents of the wasteland behind Guadalajara’s international airport noticed a dog roaming their community with a strange object in its mouth: a human forearm.

Search teams in the ramshackle neighbourhood of La Piedrera entered a roofless red brick shack flanked by trees decked with bright orange mistletoe. Under several layers of dusky earth they made an even more grotesque discovery.

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Mexican press freedom dispute erupts as Amlo attacks US and domestic critics

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President hits back over critical US human rights report but also singles out Mexican press freedom group Article 19 for censure

A growing row over press freedom has engulfed Mexico after the country’s nationalist president maligned a routine US human rights report which highlighted his government’s failure to protect journalists – and the behaviour of some officials against media members.

Andrés Manuel López Obrador, commonly called Amlo, condemned Mexico’s mention in the state department’s annual human rights report as an unwelcome intervention in Mexican matters.

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The death truck: how a solution to Mexico’s morgue crisis created a new horror

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How did a lorry carrying 273 dead bodies end up stranded on the outskirts of Guadalajara?

On the southern outskirts of Guadalajara, early in the morning of 15 September 2018, a large container, the type normally attached to a lorry, sank into the soupy ground beside a rutted country road. The refrigerated container could store up to 18 tonnes of material, cooled to -40C. Across its white exterior, a cartoon polar bear in a blue work shirt smiled and gave a thumbs up.

A container like this was a common enough sight in the neighbourhood of Tlajomulco de Zúñiga. What attracted attention was the smell. Sitting there, slumped between cornfields on one side and dilapidated concrete houses on the other, it gave off a thick, cloying odour. Some said it reeked of rotting cabbage and fish, others mentioned putrid meat. But they all agreed: the container exuded death.

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Mexican troops seized by villagers after Guatemalan man killed at a checkpoint

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Soldiers, three vehicles and 17 guns released after Mexican officials agreed to economic reparations and legal proceedings

Fifteen Mexican troops were held for hours by angry villagers in a remote border zone and held captive for hours after one of the soldiers shot and killed a Guatemalan citizen at a checkpoint.

The Mexican defense secretary, Luis Cresencio Sandoval, said on Tuesday that the events stemmed from “an erroneous reaction on the part of military personnel” who fired on a vehicle reversing away from a checkpoint on Monday.

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