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      Mexico’s Women Are Speaking. Will a Female President Listen?

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      My mother was born in 1943 in a country where she was not allowed to vote. The Mexican government did not grant women the right to vote in national elections — or the right to hold public office on a national level — until Oct. 17, 1953. Now, almost 71 years later, for the first time two women are leading the race to be Mexico’s next president: Claudia Sheinbaum, who is the front-runner, and Xóchitl Gálvez. It is no small feat for a country with a longstanding and complex relationship with machismo, and where every day some 10 women or girls are killed on average.And yet this accomplishment has often felt like an afterthought during this historic election. Ms. Sheinbaum, a scientist running on the ticket of the ruling Morena party, and Ms. Gálvez, a businesswoman representing a mix of parties from the political establishment, have nodded at the achievements of feminism and its influence on Mexico’s public life. But they have been cautious about lingering too long on women’s issues in their campaigns, conspicuously tiptoeing around abortion and reproductive rights, seemingly out of deference to conservative voters. Neither candidate has put forth a strong agenda to serve the women who put them where they are today.For as Mexico descended into its nightmare of generalized violence, from the U.S.-backed war on drugs to the government of Felipe Calderón and the administration of outgoing President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, it has been women — their tireless work, infinite rage and deepening sorrow — who have provided a moral compass to this nation. Women’s mobilizations have grown stronger and louder in the face of government indifference and repression, mounting the only serious opposition against the status quo and making women’s issues and gender justice central to any discussion of our shared future.To be fair, male candidates have not historically been required to present their agenda for women either. They are seldom even asked about it. But women constitute a little over half of the Mexican electorate; it is imperative that Ms. Sheinbaum and Ms. Gálvez discuss their views and positions on issues that will affect women’s bodies, security and everyday life — not because they are women, but because they are presidential candidates, striving to represent all of us in the highest political office in the country.On June 2, a woman will almost certainly be given a mandate to govern all of us. She will preside over an electorate that is deeply concerned about insecurity and corruption. The security policy of the current administration — known as “Hugs Not Bullets” — has failed to meaningfully de-escalate the violence unleashed by America’s failed drug policy, a fact painfully brought home by the ever-growing number of disappearances and high rates of gender-related violence. A staggering number of victims’ collectives, made up mostly of the mothers, wives, sisters and daughters of the disappeared, travel the nation with little to no funding or institutional support, sometimes unearthing the remains of their loved ones.Women marched to celebrate International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women in Mexico City on Nov. 25, 2023.Aurea Del Rosario/Associated PressWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Un escenario colapsa en mitin de Álvarez Máynez en México

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      El fuerte viento provocó el colapso en el norte del país mientras un aspirante presidencial hacía campaña por una candidata local, según las autoridades. Decenas de personas resultaron heridas.Footage widely shared on social media shows strong winds buffeting the stage as it collapses.Daniel Becerril/ReutersUn escenario en el norte de México, donde un aspirante presidencial estaba haciendo campaña para una candidata local, se derrumbó después de una ráfaga de viento que sopló en la noche del miércoles, dejando al menos nueve personas muertas y al menos otras 60 heridas, dijo un gobernador del estado.El escenario se derrumbó en San Pedro Garza García, un municipio de Monterrey, en el estado de Nuevo León, durante un acto al que asistían el candidato progresista Jorge Álvarez Máynez y otros miembros del partido Movimiento Ciudadano. El derrumbe fue provocado por el fuerte viento, según informó el presidente de México, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, en las redes sociales.El viento se levantó repentinamente cuando los candidatos estaban cantando eslóganes de campaña en el escenario, según muestran los videos publicados en las redes sociales. Cuando la iluminación del escenario se estrelló contra el suelo, la gente se precipitó fuera del escenario para evitar ser aplastada. Otros entre la multitud huyeron gritando, algunos sujetándose unos a otros por el intenso viento. More

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      At the US’s latest border hotspot, aid workers brace for volatility

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      Jacqueline Arellano is driving up and down the 15 freeway in southern San Diego county on a recent morning in mid-April, boxes of donated clothing and safety gloves in her trunk.She stops in a Home Depot parking lot and hands a man the spare stroller she grabbed from her house. He’d mentioned to her earlier that day how tiring it was to move around the city with his toddler in his arms.Arellano is director of US programs for Border Kindness, a non-profit migrant relief organization that runs weekly Day Laborer Outreach programs in San Diego and Imperial counties. Organizers hand out donations in spots where migrants congregate, and while doing so listen to people’s stories and answer their questions, as best as they can.The needs at the US-Mexico border here in California are larger than ever. In April, San Diego was the busiest sector for arrivals of the entire US-Mexico border. Meanwhile, immigration has risen to the top of voters’ concerns in the November presidential election, with Joe Biden facing bipartisan calls to stem the flow of people crossing the border and Donald Trump vowing an aggressive crackdown.The eight years she’s spent doing this work have given Arellano a window into the ever-shifting dynamics of immigration at the San Diego-Tijuana border. Back in 2016, when she first started to make these outreach runs, the people she met at the various Home Depot parking lots were primarily day laborers, waiting to be picked up by contractors working across the region. Many were undocumented, originally from Mexico, and had been based in the US for some time.After Trump moved into the White House the following year, the workers’ prevalent fear was being picked up by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) and facing deportation, she said. So while handing out donations, volunteers would also pass on red printed cards that informed workers of their rights when faced with Ice.View image in fullscreenGradually, Arellano and other aid workers realized that the information they were sharing was no longer relevant to the day laborers they were meeting. “Within the last couple of years, we’ve seen global migration reflected in the community,” she said. First they saw an increase in people arriving from Haiti, then people from all over the world. The people arriving now speak languages other than Spanish, she said, and they have more recently arrived on US soil. Crucially, they are not trying to avoid immigration enforcement authorities. Rather, they have filed for asylum and want to see their cases work their way through the system.Of the 43 men who lined up to receive work gloves that day in mid-April, most are from Mexico and Haiti, but there are people from Venezuela, Bolivia, Guatemala, Brazil and Ecuador. After handing out supplies, Arellano spends an hour talking one-on-one with some of them. A few ask about basic necessities, like where to buy food.One man from Ecuador shows her paperwork saying he is expected at immigration court in Chicago. “So he’s over here in San Diego with a court date in Chicago – has no idea what to do. He doesn’t have an attorney. He doesn’t know how to get an attorney. He has no money. He was asking me literally: ‘How do I get a phone? What is a Western Union? Where do I go?’”Newly arrived migrants often don’t know how to navigate the immigration system even as they’re relying on it to secure legal status in the US, Arellano said. She connects them with partner organizations that can help provide legal services, shelter and other assistance, like Al Otro Lado, a non-profit providing legal and humanitarian aid to people.These connections with other aid workers on the ground have become increasingly essential as the needs of people at the border keep changing and expanding. “This is being held down by groups of ordinary people, by groups of friends, in large part,” she said about the support system for newly arrived groups. “It shouldn’t be like that. It shouldn’t be just groups of friends coming together to plug our fingers in a sinking ship.”Part of the breakdown in resources for asylum seekers, according to Dara Lind, senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, a non-profit immigration advocacy group, is inaction at the federal level. “All the civil society help in the world isn’t sufficient to actually make sure that people know where they’re supposed to go,” Lind said.Because Congress hasn’t made meaningful updates to the immigration system in 34 years, Lind explained, the system is coming apart at the seams, affecting both border enforcement and legal immigration.In the California desert, migrants, including children, have been detained in open-air border camps before their asylum requests can be registered. Most receive a court date to appear for an immigration hearing more than a year away – that’s just how backlogged the immigration court system is.Still, Lind said, “it hasn’t created sufficient urgency for Congress to fix it. And instead, it’s become a way that presidents of both parties have justified taking aggressive, proactive executive action because someone needs to do something, and Congress isn’t doing its job.”Lind said despite years of border crises, no one is holding the federal government accountable for both the human suffering and the overall inefficiency that aid workers like Arellano see day-to-day at the border.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionErika Pinheiro is the executive director of Al Otro Lado. Among many services, her organization provides life-saving supplies at the open-air detention sites on the California-Mexico border. Providing supplies in the desert is becoming more perilous as border patrol moves these sites into more remote areas, Pinheiro said.“It’s a very hostile environment to work in,” she said, listing armed robbers, rattlesnakes, mountain lions, rising temperatures, concertina wire – and hostility from border patrol agents. “We’ve had our staff followed, pulled over multiple times, harassed, told to leave,” she said.Al Otro Lado is one of several organizations seeking to address immediate emergencies at the US-Mexico border. Volunteers with another arm of Border Kindness, for example, hike into the desert to place water bottles, tinned food and weather-appropriate clothing for people crossing the border in remote locations.View image in fullscreenFinancial support for humanitarian aid is waning, Pinheiro noted. “The philanthropic funding, I think due to a lot of the anti-immigrant rhetoric coming from both sides of the aisle, has really dried up,” she said. California has also cut state funding, particularly affecting the shelter system for individuals waiting for their day in immigration court, and Pinheiro said donations from individuals were also down.“The work has become so politicized, whereas really giving formula to a baby shouldn’t be a political issue.”In this election year, both Al Otro Lado and Border Kindness are bracing for further repercussions. “Regardless of outcome, elections are always destabilizing for the immigrant community,” Arellano said.Should Biden win re-election, she expects to see the situation at the border remain largely unchanged. The past years, Arellano said, “in many ways have been the worst it’s ever been at the border”, but there’s been less public outrage than Trump’s immigration policies elicited.If Trump wins a second term, however, she expects a “further decimation of legal protections and processes that can really impact people for years”.Pinheiro expects Democrats to push through changes in asylum law if Biden were elected. While adjudicating cases more quickly could help alleviate some of the pressure, she cautioned, expediting asylum requests could also result in fewer people receiving asylum who are qualified for it.“Forcing asylum seekers to go through these interviews while still detained in border patrol custody is not the answer,” she said, especially if they are not given access to information and legal representation.Should Trump be elected, Pinheiro expects humanitarian aid and legal workers at the border to face increased criminalization. During the last Trump presidency, she and other lawyers, human rights activists and journalists were put on a watchlist and interrogated at the border, she said. Targeting humanitarian and legal assistance could be a Republican administration’s way of stopping groups like Al Otro Lado and Border Kindness from documenting what’s happening at the border, she fears, and would curtail their ability to respond to people’s needs. More

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      A White-Collar Indictment Shatters Representative Henry Cuellar’s Blue-Collar Image

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      Representative Henry Cuellar started from humble origins, but records show he welcomed the trappings of power afforded by his position.Over the years, Representative Henry Cuellar often harked back to the small house in Laredo, Texas. It was there that his parents, one-time migrant workers who spoke no English, raised him and his seven siblings to value hard work and beware the dangers of debt.The references in speeches, campaign advertisements and interviews were intended to forge affinity with the largely Hispanic residents of his hometown. They demonstrated that “I am one of you,” as his campaign website put it in 2004, when he first won election to Congress as a Democrat representing Laredo, one of the poorest cities in the country.By 2013, those hardscrabble beginnings seemed a distant memory.Mr. Cuellar had become the hub of a bustling small enterprise that blurred the lines between his political operation, his businesses and his family, affording him trappings of affluence even as he sometimes strained to make ends meet.He had recently purchased a penthouse apartment in Washington’s bustling Navy Yard neighborhood near Nationals Park and a pair of properties in Laredo, including a 6,000-square-foot house with a pool and cabana in a gated community on a street called Estate Drive. He took on an increasing amount of debt, and his net worth declined.A new source of cash soon revealed itself, federal prosecutors are now saying.Starting in 2014, Mr. Cuellar and his wife, Imelda Cuellar, accepted at least $598,000 over seven years from a Mexican bank and an oil company owned by the Azerbaijani government, according to prosecutors.The Cuellars were charged earlier this month with accepting bribes, money laundering and violating foreign lobbying laws by trying to influence the government on behalf of their foreign paymasters. They pleaded not guilty and were released after each paid a bond of $100,000.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      3 Bodies in Mexico Are Identified as Missing Australians and American

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      Family members confirmed the identities of two Australian brothers and their American friend, who were found shot to death after going missing last month.Three bodies that were found in the Mexican state of Baja California last week have been identified as those of three tourists from Australia and the United States who had disappeared days earlier, the Mexican authorities said on Sunday.The bodies were confirmed to be those of Callum and Jake Robinson, two brothers from Perth, Australia, and Jack Carter Rhoad of San Diego, the Baja California attorney general’s office said in a statement. “The confirmation comes after the victims’ families were able to identify them, without the need for genetic testing,” the statement read.The Robinsons and Mr. Rhoad had been on vacation, surfing and camping along the coast near the Mexican city of Ensenada, when they disappeared on April 27. The Robinsons’ mother said in a social media post on Wednesday that they had never showed up at an Airbnb they had booked in another coastal town.Early on Friday, the Mexican authorities recovered the three bodies from a 50-foot-deep water hole near La Bocana beach. A fourth, yet unidentified male body, which prosecutors said had no relation to the case, was also found at the bottom of the hole.Each of the bodies later identified as those of the tourists had a gunshot wound to the head, said María Elena Andrade Ramírez, the state’s attorney general.Three suspects have been detained in connection with the killings. One has been charged with forced disappearance. Ms. Andrade Ramírez said he tried to rob the Robinson brothers and Mr. Carter of the pickup truck in which they were traveling. When they resisted, she said, he shot them and later disposed of their bodies. “Unfortunately, they stayed in an inhospitable place where there was no way to call for help,” Ms. Andrade Ramírez said at a news conference on Sunday.The other two people being detained have been charged with possession of methamphetamine, Ms. Andrade Ramírez said. She said that there might be more arrests, but that there was no indication that any of Mexico’s organized crime gangs had been involved in the killings. “The hypothesis so far is that they approached with the intent to seize the pickup truck and attacked the victims,” she said.Ms. Andrade Ramírez said a burned campsite had been discovered in a remote, isolated area south of Ensenada, about four miles from where the bodies were found. A single shell casing and blood stains were found at the site, and the tourists’ pickup truck, also burned, had been abandoned nearby, Ms. Andrade Ramírez said. More

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      Arizona Rancher Accused of Killing Migrant Won’t Be Retried After Mistrial

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      George Alan Kelly was accused of murdering Gabriel Cuen-Buitimea, an unarmed migrant from Mexico, on his 170-acre ranch in Kino Springs, Ariz., last year.Prosecutors in Arizona said on Monday that they would not retry a rancher who was charged with murdering an unarmed migrant on his property last year after a mistrial was declared last week.Jurors were not able to reach a unanimous verdict in the case against George Kelly, 75, who fatally shot at Gabriel Cuen-Buitimea, 48, on his 170-acre ranch in Kino Springs, Ariz., after Mr. Cuen-Buitimea crossed the U.S.-Mexico border in January 2023. Judge Thomas Fink of Santa Cruz County Superior Court declared a mistrial on April 22.The Santa Cruz District Attorney’s Office said in a statement on Monday that “because of the unique circumstances and challenges surrounding” the case, Mr. Kelly would not be retried.“However, our office’s decision in this case should not be construed as a position on future cases of this type,” the office said. “Our office is mandated by statute to prosecute criminal acts, and we take that statutory mandate seriously.”Brenna Larkin, a lawyer for Mr. Kelly, did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Monday.Ms. Larkin said last week that there had been a hung jury in the case, and that the final count had been 7-1 in favor of finding Mr. Kelly not guilty.Mr. Cuen-Buitimea was part of a group of undocumented migrants who were crossing the high desert in Kino Springs, Ariz., near the border with Mexico on Jan. 30, 2023, when they were spotted by Border Patrol and fled, according to the authorities. Mr. Cuen-Buitimea and another man, Daniel Ramirez, ran onto Mr. Kelly’s ranch, which is when Mr. Kelly fired an AK-47-style rifle at them, the authorities said.Mr. Cuen-Buitimea was struck in the back and died, law enforcement officials said.Mr. Kelly was charged in February 2023 with one count of second-degree murder and two counts of aggravated assault.The case emboldened immigration critics and conservative ranchers, who said that Mr. Kelly had been a victim, while others were horrified by the shooting.Ms. Larkin said in court documents that Mr. Kelly had been eating lunch the day of the shooting when he and his wife saw several men armed with rifles near his home.“Mr. Kelly responded by firing several warning shots over the heads of the group,” she wrote in court documents.Michael Jette, a deputy Santa Cruz County attorney, said during closing arguments on April 18 that Mr. Kelly had fired his gun “without verbal warning, without a shout, without any indication,” The Associated Press reported.Before the case went to trial in March, Mr. Kelly rejected a plea agreement that would have reduced the charges to one count of negligent homicide. More

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      Biden y López Obrador prometen una acción conjunta para abordar la migración ilegal

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      En una declaración conjunta, los presidentes de EE. UU. y de México se comprometieron a abordar la migración no autorizada, pero no especificaron ninguna acción concreta.El presidente Joe Biden y el mandatario de México, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, prometieron el lunes una acción combinada para prevenir la migración ilegal. Biden se encuentra bajo una intensa presión política desde todos los bandos para enfrentar el impacto del aumento de los cruces fronterizos antes de las elecciones presidenciales de este año.En una declaración conjunta, Biden y López Obrador afirmaron que habían ordenado a sus asesores de seguridad nacional “trabajar juntos para implementar de inmediato medidas concretas para reducir significativamente los cruces fronterizos irregulares y al mismo tiempo proteger los derechos humanos”.La declaración, que se produjo luego de que ambos líderes conversaron telefónicamente el domingo, no especificó ninguna acción concreta. Un alto funcionario gubernamental se negó a dar detalles sobre lo que Estados Unidos y México podrían “implementar inmediatamente”. Pero el funcionario dijo que, entre las posibilidades que se están analizando, hay medidas coercitivas más estrictas para impedir que se utilicen ferrocarriles, autobuses y aeropuertos para el cruce ilegal de fronteras y más vuelos que regresen a los inmigrantes a sus países de origen.Este tema podría ser decisivo para la permanencia de Biden en la Casa Blanca durante otros cuatro años. Las encuestas realizadas en los últimos meses, tanto a republicanos como a demócratas, indican que la situación en la frontera genera gran preocupación. Incluso algunos de los más fervientes partidarios del presidente en ciudades liberales le están exigiendo que haga algo para frenar el flujo de inmigrantes.El más reciente plan del presidente al respecto —con un proyecto de ley de migración muy restrictivo que contaba con cierto apoyo bipartidista— se estancó en los últimos meses tras ser bloqueado por los republicanos en la Cámara de Representantes. Biden había pedido que la legislación se aprobara junto con la ayuda financiera para Israel, Ucrania y Taiwán, pero cuando el Congreso llegó a un acuerdo sobre la financiación a principios de este mes, la legislación fronteriza no estaba incluida.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Talk of an Immigrant ‘Invasion’ Grows in Republican Ads and Speech

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      Once relegated to the margins of the national debate, the word is now part of the party’s mainstream message on immigration.A campaign ad from a Republican congressional candidate from Indiana sums up the arrival of migrants at the border with one word. He doesn’t call it a problem or a crisis.He calls it an “invasion.”The word invasion also appears in ads for two Republicans competing for a Senate seat in Michigan. And it shows up in an ad for a Republican congresswoman seeking re-election in central New York, and in one for a Missouri lieutenant governor running for the state’s governorship. In West Virginia, ads for a Republican representative facing an uphill climb for the Senate say President Biden “created this invasion” of migrants.It was not so long ago that the term invasion had been mostly relegated to the margins of the national immigration debate. Many candidates and political figures tended to avoid the word, which echoed demagoguery in previous centuries targeting Asian, Latino and European immigrants. Few mainstream Republicans dared use it.But now, the word has become a staple of Republican immigration rhetoric. Use of the term in television campaign ads in the current election cycle has already eclipsed the total from the previous one, data show, and the word appears in speeches, TV interviews and even in legislation proposed in Congress.The resurgence of the term exemplifies the shift in Republican rhetoric in the era of former President Donald J. Trump and his right-wing supporters. Language once considered hostile has become common, sometimes precisely because it runs counter to politically correct sensibilities. Immigration has also become more divisive, with even Democratic mayors complaining about the number of migrants in their cities.Democrats and advocates for migrants denounce the word and its recent turn from being taboo. Historians and analysts who study political rhetoric have long warned that the term dehumanizes those to whom it refers and could stoke violence, noting that it appeared in writings by perpetrators of deadly mass shootings in Pittsburgh, Pa.; El Paso, Texas; and Buffalo, N.Y., in recent years.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More