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 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.

In the last year, 15 out of 31 states have passed amendments that recognize embryos as people and grant them full constitutional rights. The state of Chihuahua, hardly a paragon of progress for women, was the first to pass this species of law back in 1994, bringing the current total to 16, or just a hair past half the country.

More than anything these amendments derive from paranoia. Mexico has no federal Roe v. Wade-type mandate. Even though the fourth article of the constitution says that citizens have the right to determine “the number and spacing” of their children, the states are basically free to legislate as they please on the issue. The standard rule has long been to outlaw abortion except for the rare instance of forced sex or possibly the endangered health of the mother. But that all changed when Mexico City decriminalized first-trimester abortions in 2007. The Supreme Court voted down a challenge to the law’s constitutionality a year later, in August 2008. Even though the ruling didn’t affect state law, that’s when the preventive “right to life” reforms began to pass.

Not only are they paranoid, the amendments are also contradictory. How can a state constitutionally guarantee a person rights from the moment of conception but also allow abortions for rape? Lawmakers are still working on that, though they say their motives are pure. They don’t want women going to prison; they just want to ensure that what happened in Mexico City doesn’t happen again. But it doesn’t seem far off for prosecutors to get into the anti-abortion spirit. Take the recent investigation into another 20-year-old woman in Puebla. It’s the first of its kind since the state passed the pro-life reform last March.

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.)

The senate approved the appointment in a 75-27 vote yesterday. Chavez hails from the same party as Calderon, who has seen his political powers diminish since recent congressional elections left his National Action Party with less than a third of the seats in the lower house. To give you a sense of what the climate is like for Calderon right now, yesterday the head of the public security office, Genaro Garcia Luna, delivered to congress a proposal to dismantle the country’s municipal police forces. As he laid out his plan to integrate them into 32 state corporations, opposition lawmakers hung signs in the shape of crucifixes around the room (one read “Calderon wants blood”) and repeatedly told him to resign. One called him an “assasin.”

Replacing the attorney general is meant to put a fresh face on the drug war, which only seems to get bloodier. At this point I know as much about Chavez as I’ve learned from reading the papers here over the last few days. But it strikes me that someone isn’t thinking clearly over at Los Pinos if the administration’s best bet for revamping the war is putting in charge the former prosecutor of the country’s most violent state. Also, angering the international human rights community seems especially ill-timed given the recent dustup over Mexico’s failure to meet human rights requirements tied to the release of the Plan Merida money.

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.

Still, there are other points to consider. What does the legislation signal to the rest of the world, particularly the United States? Does it herald a broader shift toward relaxed drug laws in Latin America? Or possibly in all of the Americas? And what does it really mean for Mexico?
I asked David Shirk, the director of the University of San Diego’s Trans-Border Institute and an expert on Mexico’s justice system, to weigh in:

The new law is really an expanded version of earlier exemptions for habitual drug use, in that it fully eliminates penalties for all minor drug use and possession, and recommends treatment for the first and second offenses. By the third offense, authorities are obligated to remand a user to treatment, though the law is not clear on how this will be enforced. …

Like the United States, Mexico also believes that focusing less on small time violators will enable the concentration of law enforcement resources [sic] more serious crime problems. An added benefit is that corrupt law enforcement officials may find it more difficult to extract bribes from drug addicts. Yet, the main issue is that the Mexican government views decriminalization as a means to improve access to treatment for drug users.

In this sense, the decriminalization of drugs is an important step to recognizing that drug abuse is more of a public health problem than a public security problem. However, given a significant increase in drug use among Mexicans in recent years, the real test is to evaluate what efforts Mexico’s government ultimately makes to reduce use and addiction. Unfortunately, the current legislation does not provide for dramatic increases in support for treatment.

In the end, as long as production and distribution of drugs remains illegal, decriminalization is a half measure that is likely to make law enforcement’s job more difficult. While most current drug users do so regardless of prohibitionist policies, the new law will create a sense of impunity that encourages others to use drugs. Hence, the ultimate beneficiaries of decriminalization will be the criminal drug trafficking organizations, who will have an expanded market in which to purvey and profit from illicit drugs.

I highlighted two points I find especially interesting. The second reflects the slow normalization of the legalization concept that we’re seeing on editorial pages, in pop culture, and even hearing from the mouths of Latin American ex-presidents. But the first point I came across, argued from another side, at Room for Debate. There Jorge Castañeda says the drug law is actually conservative legislation in a liberal guise. Castañeda served as foreign minister under President Fox and is known for his blunt insights that often run counter to the mainstream. (He is the only prominent writer I’m aware of who says Mexico’s domestic drug consumption isn’t on the rise.) He writes:

The recently approved new “drug” law in Mexico is in fact not a step toward decriminalization, but rather toward mandatory sentencing. Until last month, possession of small (unspecified) amounts of drugs was not a criminal offense in Mexico; only the sale or purchase was. The new law establishes a minuscule limit on legal possession, meaning that today, almost anyone caught carrying any drug is subject to arrest, prosecution and jail.

If anything, the new law criminalizes drug use much more radically than before, and it is probably for this reason that President Calderón signed it, and that the Obama administration has looked the other way. It will almost certainly not attract US “drug tourists” to Mexico, since the risk of being arrested for possession has grown considerably with the new law, whereas before, the real risk was just a shake-down by the authorities.

If mandatory sentencing was Calderon’s goal, it’s a strange one. He has justified the law precisely as a means to free up resources for his real war against traffickers. The country is slashing budgets left and right, and its prisons are horribly overcrowded. Plus, the law is murky on treatment options for offenders. Like the Obama administration promised to do, I guess Mexicans will just have to wait and see how this plays out.

Jose Flores is accused of hijacking an AeroMexico plane

UPDATE 10:15 P.M.:  Now that the presumed mastermind of today’s hijacking has been revealed as this smiling Bolivian “religious fanatic,” gospel singer, former drug addict, and self-proclaimed expert marksman who says he seized the plane wielding only a pair of juice cans disguised as a bomb on a heavenly mission to warn of a coming earthquake, Mexicans are feeling, well, relieved. The country is a week shy of the year anniversary of the grenade attack against Sept. 16 Independence Day revelers, and two recent bombings have put some in Mexico City slightly on edge. It may be obvious to state, but after months of unrelenting drug-war violence, swine flu and economic misfortune, the last thing Mexico needed was a cartel-led assault against Cancun beachgoers.

–

UPDATE 6:50 P.M.: Mexican media are reporting that the plane was hijacked by a Bolivian pastor and gospel singer who has at least a couple of videos up on YouTube. His rationale for the hijacking was apparently divinely inspired. More on this a little later.

–

Just to add the latest to Marcelo’s post, the government has now arrested detained nine suspects in today’s hijacking. For anyone wanting up-to-minute news, El Universal’s Twitter page (in Spanish) is a good place to start.

As Marcelo points out, the situation is basically resolved. No one was harmed, the presumed hijackers have been detained, and the whole ordeal took place in a few hours. Remaining questions are who was behind this and to what aim and how is this going to affect Mexico’s tourism industry, which was  just starting to recover post-swine flu. The fact that the plane departed from Cancun, the most popular resort destination in the country, could be significant or mean nothing at all.

I will update this post later tonight as the story unfolds….

Mexico actually has a lot to offer in the way of medical care. Along with other Latin American countries, it’s long been a destination for cheap orthodontics and cosmetic boosts. And now highly-regarded, internationally accredited hospitals like the one above are promoting more invasive procedures like knee replacements (for about a third the regular price) to Americans, including and especially Hispanic Americans. At last Census count, Hispanics represented 15 percent of the American demographic rainbow, clustered heavily along the southern border, where driving a few miles south for safe but cheap surgery makes a lot of sense. But Latinos aren’t the only ones crossing borders.

In 2007, 750,000 Americans of all stripes sought medical treatment abroad, according to a 2008 study by Deloitte & Touche. The Deloitte study predicted that number to explode in coming years, reaching as many as six million by next year. There’s no evidence that I’ve seen to suggest the care Americans receive at home for two or three times the price in Mexico is two or three times better. So why not travel?

I have a short piece about Mexico’s medical tourism ambitions in the forthcoming issue of The New Republic. Though Monterrey leads the pack, the economic development ministries of about a half-dozen other cities, including hellish Ciudad Juarez, are in step behind them. Acknowledging the surging drug violence, these promoters have a long-range vision. And tellingly, they don’t seem fazed one bit by coming reforms to the U.S. healthcare system. As far as they’re concerned, global healthcare is the future–period.

When I asked Renee Stephano, the president of the Florida-based Medical Tourism Association, recently what an overhaul might do to her industry–and Mexico’s plans–she practically laughed at me. “The number of hip and knee replacements, the number of diagnostics that the baby boomers alone will require far exceeds our capacity,” she said. “As long as it’s inefficient and overpriced, it doesn’t matter who pays for it or how it’s paid for. It’s still gonna be unaffordable. …I’m not too concerned that I’m gonna be out of a job. Let’s just put it that way.”

Mexican President Felipe Calderon has enacted a law decriminalizing possession of small amounts of drugs for personal use, including heroin and meth.

Mexico has never been in the habit of jailing users and addicts the way we do in the States, so practically speaking the new law isn’t expected to change all that much for most people (with the possible exception of beat cops losing a source of bribes). Still, it’s considered controversial largely because of the way the United States has reacted to similar legislation in the past.

In 2006, President Fox proposed and Congress passed a legalization bill but then chucked it when Washington complained. This time around, Gil Kerlikowske has said the administration will take a “wait-and-see” approach.

The new law allows Mexicans to carry up to five grams of marijuana, half a gram of cocaine, 50 milligrams of heroin, 40 milligrams of meth, and, for good measure, a little LSD.

It’s finally here, everyone! The world’s first (and, I’m going to take a big journalistic leap into the future here, only) swine flu statue. In effigy is young Edgar Hernandez, aka “Patient Zero,” the boy from La Gloria, Veracruz, who was one of the first in Mexico to get the A/H1N1 virus. The governor of Veracruz decided to memorialize him after swine flu became the most exciting tourist attraction in La Gloria’s history.

The photo shows little bronze Edgar holding a frog in his right hand. Water pours from the frog’s mouth, somehow representing the virus that combines flu genes found in pigs and birds. “The Boy from La Gloria” is modeled after the famous peeing boy statue the Mannekin-Pis in Belgium. Governor Fidel Herrera Beltran explained the connection: “Edgar Hernandez is healthier than ever, and even when he goes to the bathroom people follow him because they want to cure themselves [with his urine].”