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A little about Playa Zipolite, The Beach of the Dead . . .

Playa Zipolite, Oaxaca, Southern Mexico, on the Pacific Ocean. A little bit about my favorite little get-away on this small world of ours.

Zipolite, a sweaty 30-minute walk west from Puerto Angel, brings you to Playa Zipolite and another world. The feeling here is 1970's - Led Zep, Marley, and scruffy gringos.

A long, long time ago, Zipolite beach was usually visited by the Zapotecans...who made it a magical place. They came to visit Zipolite to meditate, or just to rest.

Recently, this beach has begun to receive day-trippers from Puerto Angel and Puerto Escondido, giving it a more TOURISTY feel than before.

Most people come here for the novelty of the nude beach, yoga, turtles, seafood, surf, meditation, vegetarians, discos, party, to get burnt by the sun, or to see how long they can stretch their skinny budget.

I post WWW Oaxaca, Mexico, Zipolite and areas nearby information. Also general budget, backpacker, surfer, off the beaten path, Mexico and beyond, information.

REMEMBER: Everyone is welcome at Zipolite.

ivan

Tuesday, February 2, 2021

Mexico News Today Monday, February 1, 2021

 

MONDAY, FEBRUARY 1, 2021

Vaccination falls short of January objective

The government said 1.1 million doses would be administered by January 31. But as of Sunday night, only 673,327 doses had been given, 40% less than planned. FULL STORY

Canada flight ban could cost Mexico US $782 million

Tourism Minister Miguel Torruco is predicting up to 791,000 fewer visitors in the country as a result of the three months of coronavirus prevention measures announced by the Canadian government, including a suspension of flights from the country to Mexico. FULL STORY

13 states are now red on the coronavirus risk map; the only green state goes yellow

For the first time since September, no state will be at the safest level on the stoplight map after Campeche loses its low-risk status. FULL STORY

AMLO pledges 18m Covid vaccine doses by March

Mexico will receive 6 million in February and an additional 12 million in March, President López Obrador said. FULL STORY

Government warns of ‘economic crisis’ due to suspension of flights

Federal officials have warned that Canada's new three-month ban on flights to Mexico could cause profound financial issues in the North American region. FULL STORY

A Mexican variant? Covid mutant strain currently being studied in Jalisco

Authorities are investigating whether a strain of the coronavirus detected in four people is a variant of SARS-CoV-2. FULL STORY

OPINION

In Mexico, cartels and trash move pesos through a ‘trickle-down’ economy

Money does actually circulate here from more well-off residents to poorer ones, but not quite in the way that you might at first assume, Bodie Kellogg writes. FULL STORY

MEXICO LIFE

A single mother’s need to survive spawned decades of Otomí industry

Today's version of Tenango folk embroidery was born in the 1960s, when drought forced subsistence farmers to find a new form of income, Leigh Thelmadatter writes. FULL STORY

MEXICO LIFE

Discover the humble radish’s delectable appeal

Far from just a bitter veggie to be shunned at the salad bar, this tuber can be prepared in many delicious ways — raw, roasted or sautéed, Janet Blaser writes in The Tropical Table. FULL STORY

Officials seize chameleons, turtles and 39 baby crocodiles and caimans

Saturday was a busy day for the movement of protected species: in three states, authorities found animals being transported illegally. FULL STORY

Solar farm stalls; residents 10 years without electricity 

In 2018, the federal government promised the inhabitants of a village in Oaxaca a photovoltaic generating station to supply them with power, but it has yet to be finished. FULL STORY

Sweeping electricity market overhaul deals blow to renewable energy firms

A bill in Congress would change the order in which electricity is dispatched into the national grid, with alternative energy providers at the back of the queue. FULL STORY

First of 1,870 sustainable homes delivered to low-income families in Puebla

The state government took the first steps toward delivering nearly 1,900 environmentally and economically friendly housing units. FULL STORY
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Chichén Itzá to open new site, new experience in 2022

Called Chichén Viejo, or Old Chichén, the new section is set deep in jungle in an area 900 meters south of the towering pyramid El Castillo. FULL STORY

THE MND POLL

THE STORY:
Goodbye, Chester. Cheetos has new look as rules ban use of personalities. 
FULL STORY
THE QUESTION: 
Will banning the use of personalities in marketing be effective in reducing the consumption of unhealthy foods?
VOTE HERE
LAST POLL:
Is censorship by social media serious enough to justify the creation of a publicly-owned network in Mexico?
58% said it isn't.
FULL RESULTS

Camping en Zipolite frente al mar 4 - Tents for Rent in Zipolite, Oaxaca, Mexico - Airbnb Airbnb Camping en Zipolite frente al mar 4. 󰀃Superhost·Zipolite, Oaxaca, Mexico. Private room in tent. hosted by Israel. Israel is a superhost. Learn more ...

 Camping en Zipolite frente al mar 4 - Tents for Rent in Zipolite, Oaxaca, Mexico - Airbnb

Camping en Zipolite frente al mar 4. 󰀃Superhost·Zipolite, Oaxaca, Mexico. Private room in tent. hosted by Israel. Israel is a superhost. Learn more ...

Private room in tent hosted by Israel




Sunday, January 31, 2021

AMLO Hasn’t Done Enough to Address Mexico’s Gender-Based Violence Epidemic BY BELÉN FERNÁNDEZ Violence against women in Mexico, including femicides, has skyrocketed in recent years. And despite presiding over a gender-equal government and decrying machismo, AMLO has done little to address the growing epidemic.

 

AMLO Hasn’t Done Enough to Address Mexico’s Gender-Based Violence Epidemic

Violence against women in Mexico, including femicides, has skyrocketed in recent years. And despite presiding over a gender-equal government and decrying machismo, AMLO has done little to address the growing epidemic.



On a recent morning in the coastal village of Zipolite in Mexico’s Oaxaca State, I went for a jog on the beach with a fourteen-year-old — we’ll call her Alejandra — from Tapachula on the Mexican-Guatemalan border. Alejandra had come to Zipolite with her mother to work in a restaurant for the couple of months that constitute the high season here, and told me matter-of-factly that her older sister had traditionally accompanied her mom — but that her sister had recently been murdered by a jealous militar. Recounting how the man had beaten and strangled her sister in a Tapachula motel room, Alejandra went on to describe her mother’s barrio-permeating screams upon hearing the news. Her sister left behind a four-year-old son.

The killer, Alejandra told me, was ultimately tried and incarcerated — a relatively rare occurrence in a country where both femicides and impunity abound. An average of ten women are murdered each day in Mexico, with femicides skyrocketing 137 percent between 2015 and 2020. Given the underreporting of such crimes and the tendency to categorize femicides as ordinary homicides, the actual numbers are likely much higher. Last year, Mexico’s El Universal newspaper reported that between 2015 and 2018, a mere 7 percent of crimes against women had been investigated, and that only 5 to 7 percent of alleged criminals in these cases appeared before a judge. Nearly 80 percent of Mexican women report feeling unsafe.

The initial spike in femicides took place on the watch of right-wing president Enrique Peña Nieto, who governed Mexico from 2012 until 2018. However, the trend has continued under the left-wing rule of Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO), who despite presiding over a gender-equal government and decrying machismo, has reacted to femicides and violence against women in a manner that is at best odd and at worst horrifying.

In February, shortly after twenty-five-year-old Ingrid Escamilla was stabbed, skinned, and disemboweled in her Mexico City apartment, AMLO expressed resentment during a press conference that the femicide issue should distract from the raffle of Mexico’s presidential airplane.

The same week, also in Mexico City, seven-year-old Fátima Aldrighett was abducted, tortured, sexually abused, and murdered. The moral of the story, according to AMLO, was that the neoliberalism of previous governments had triggered societal decay and a loss of values — and that growing feminist protests in Mexico were part of a right-wing plot against his administration.

There’s no denying that neoliberalism fosters violence and subordinates women. But telling aggrieved Mexican women that they can’t think for themselves and are simply victims of right-wing manipulation is no way to go about dismantling the patriarchy. (Nor, it bears mentioning, is AMLO’s anti-neoliberal rhetoric easily reconcilable with all of his actions, which have included celebrating with Donald Trump the new iteration of the North American Free Trade Agreement, which destroyed countless Mexican lives and was linked to a surge in lethal violence against women.) Similarly, AMLO’s condescending comments about minor acts of vandalism committed by feminist protesters implies that he’s more concerned about the destruction of private property than the destruction of women’s bodies.

The coronavirus pandemic and stay-at-home measures have further exacerbated the problem. In July, UN Women in Mexico calculated a 60 percent increase in domestic violence against women based on phone calls placed to the organization’s help-lines. In the first four months of 2020, 987 women and girls were murdered, including 267 in April, the deadliest month yet on record.

Here, too, AMLO hasn’t been helpful — arguing that 90 percent of domestic violence calls made to emergency hotlines are false and releasing a public service video with advice on how to avoid violence in the home, such as taking a deep breath and counting to ten.

In an April article for the Indypendent, Mexico City–based director of the Americas Program, Laura Carlsen, noted that, while the AMLO government was defunding women’s shelters and declining to offer much-needed compensation for caregiving work during the pandemic — the brunt of which falls to women — some $190 million in additional funds had been allotted to the Mexican armed forces to “confront the virus.”

The military is regularly accused of “human rights violations, including rape and sexual violence,” Carlsen emphasized. It doesn’t take much imagination, then, to ponder the potential implications for Mexico’s female population of the ever-expanding role of such a comprehensively “patriarchal institution.”

Which brings us back to my jogging partner Alejandra, whose sister was murdered in Tapachula by the jealous militar. Alejandra’s absentee father, himself a retired Marine, had blamed Alejandra’s mother for the murder. When he then came down with coronavirus and moved back into the family house to be cared for — thereby infecting Alejandra, her nephew, and her mom — domestic discord had reached such levels that Alejandra had jumped at the chance to work in Zipolite, she told me. Now, as the pandemic rages and compounds Mexico’s femicide epidemic, there’s really no time to stop and count to ten.