Mexico City policemen. Image via Nataliallop

Mexico City has ordered 1,300 city police officers to go on a diet. They were weighed and measured in a public ceremony last week, where they also had their blood pressure checked and received dietary tips. “We’re teaching them how to eat,” explained the city’s public safety office.

Mexico, which loves to break records, is on pace to overtake the United States as the world’s fattest nation. Forty percent of the population is overweight and 30 percent obese, according to the health ministry. And Mexico City police officers are even bigger, percentage-wise. The government says seven out of 10 tend are obese.

In the wee hours* this morning President Felipe Calderon dissolved one of Mexico’s main electricity providers and sent police to guard the headquarters (pictured above). This followed days of negotiations between the federal government and the obscenely overpaid union that controls Luz y Fuerza del Centro. The state-run company thrived on the worst Mexican diet of graft and inefficiency, receiving billions of public pesos and providing crappy service (the electricity in my neighborhood goes out at least once a week for hours on end).

In deciding to shut it down Calderon declared that Luz y Fuerza wasn’t sustainable and handed over its operations to the Federal Electricity Commission. Luz y Fuerza, he said, lost a third of its energy to theft and mismanagement and recieved twice the money in subsidies that it brought in. The subsidies matched the funds earmarked for Oportunidades, Mexico’s wildly successful anti-poverty program that serves millions of families and has been adopted in 30 countries.

Now, if only they could do something about the state-run oil monopoly, Pemex.

[*Ed note: Police first showed up shortly before midnight Saturday.]

Pro-choice advocates marching for abortion rights

Up a winding road in the hills of Guanajuato, a small city in the central Mexican state of the same name, sits the headquarters of Las Libres, a pro-choice group. Last month I went there to interview a 20-year-old woman who is on probation for having an abortion. The details of that interview appear in an upcoming piece, so I won’t repeat them all here. The basic facts are that she had a clandestine abortion, got sick, went to the hospital, and hospital staff turned her in to authorities. A month later, some men pulled up to her house in a van and took her away in handcuffs. Her probation term is nine and a half months.

According to Las Libres, around 60 women have been prosecuted in similar ways in Guanajuato. The group also says dozens more have been charged with homicide and imprisoned (the state attorney’s office denies this, and I haven’t been able to confirm it either way yet). Like in all Mexican states, Guanajuato restricts abortion except in the case of rape (some states also have other exemptions). But for years it was pretty much alone in prosecuting women. Now things are different.
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Women in Juarez painting crosses in protest

Women’s rights groups (among others) are outraged over the appointment of Arturo Chavez as the new attorney general of Mexico.

Chavez is the former lead prosecutor of Chihuahua state. He held the post in the 1990s during the era of the Ciudad Juarez “femicides,” when investigations into the murders of hundreds of young women went nowhere. President Felipe Calderon named him to replace Eduardo Medina Mora earlier this month as part of a mid-term cabinet shakeup. This prompted protests from near and far. “It is like sending a wolf to protect the lambs,” one Spanish lawmaker said. (For more on the Juarez murders, read Alma Guillermoprieto’s “A Hundred Women” here and Max Blumenthal’s “Day of the Dead” here.)

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Today Mexico commemorates 199 years of independence from Spain. Festivities kicked off last night in little towns and big cities across the country with the “Grito de Dolores,” the traditional battle cry shouted by the Catholic priest Hidalgo in 1810 that incited the decade-long war of independence. This year, on the anniversary of the grenade attacks in Morelos that killed eight and wounded dozens, the mood was somber and security was tight. At the Zocalo, where the largest grito took place, under steady rainfall, 10,000 police rimmed the square. Thankfully, the celebrations were peaceful.