Mexico’s President-Elect Stuck Aboard Delayed Flight

New York Times – 9/21/2018

(Photo: Christopher Goodney/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

MEXICO CITY — Mexico’s austerity-minded president-elect has vowed to sell the presidential jet and fly commercial. And he even appears prepared to suffer the plight of average travelers: being trapped on delayed flights.

 

Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador was stuck for at least three hours after his flight from the Huatulco airport in southern Mexico was delayed by air traffic and weather.

Passengers posted videos Thursday of Lopez Obrador speaking from his seat on the plane bound for Mexico City.

Lopez Obrador says the experience won’t make him change his mind.

He said, “I am not going to get on the presidential airplane. I would be ashamed … to have a luxury airplane in a country with so much poverty.”

Read more…

 

Advertisements

Singer Belinda Hit for Involvement in Mexican Politics

09/20/2018 – The New York Times

Pop singer Belinda may have illegally interfered in Mexico’s politics because she’s a Spanish citizen and campaigned for President-elect Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, authorities said Wednesday.

A rival party filed a complaint because the singer gave out articles with Lopez Obrador campaign emblems.

The singer, whose real name is Belinda Peregrin Schull, also appeared in his campaign.

Read more…

‘We don’t want Maradona’: Soccer legend gets a mixed welcome in Mexico’s Sinaloa

9/19/2018 – Washington Post

Marco Ugarte/AP

CULIACAN, Mexico — The president-elect of Mexico, a man capable of convening massive crowds, passed through this coastal city on Monday morning and raised little more than a ripple.

The same afternoon, one of the living legends of major league baseball, Fernando Valenzuela, was left mostly in peace as he ate lunch with other retired ballplayers in the restaurant of the Hotel Lucerna.

The reporters and TV crews who had convened in the hotel lobby were more interested in another new arrival: a 57-year-old, short, paunchy Argentine man with graying stubble and a pronounced limp who had taken up residence in a seventh-floor suite and had hardly been seen for a week.

Read more…

Mexico Celebrates 208th Birthday

09/17/2018 – Bloomberg 

WATCH: Mexico celebrated it’s 208th Independence Day with a parade, fireworks, and President Enrique Peña Nieto ringing a bell on the balcony of the National Palace, in a traditional that began in 1810 #VivaMexico

 

See more…

Achieving A Dream: A Tale Of Becoming A Property Owner In Another Country

09/13/2018 – Forbes 

Harmon’s home offers a breathtaking view of Guanajuato from the upper patio.(PHOTO COURTESY OF DAVE HARMON)

When Dave Harmon recently finalized the purchase of a home in Mexico, what had previously seemed like an impossible dream became his life-changing reality — but it took a year to get there.

It all started with a summer spent studying Spanish in the small colonial city of Guanajuato, Mexico.  Harmon was instantly smitten with Guanajuato and found himself going back regularly, imagining what it would be like to live there. In his mind, the ideal spot would be in the historic center, close to the central plaza and the city’s main university with a view of the mountains. At first, that seemed like an impossibility, but after dabbling in real estate in his home town of Austin, Texas, the intimidation factor dissolved away. As soon as Harmon found a house in that perfect spot that would one day become his, things really became interesting.

Harmon says that purchasing a house in another country requires a steep learning curve and is not at all like buying a home in the U.S., where escrow, insurance and backout provisions are taken for granted. Instead, as is common in many parts of the world, Mexican home property purchases are typically all cash. For a non-citizen, that’s often because it is difficult to get financing from a local bank. In the end, it seemed the easiest part was finding the property in the desired location. The hardest part was negotiating a real-estate deal with the 29 family members who owned a piece of the property. With help from a local notary (in Mexico, notaries are licensed attorneys who also perform the functions of U.S. title companies), Harmon navigated the twists and turns of what became a very complex process.

Read more: 

The play ‘Like Water for Chocolate,’ based on the beloved 1989 Mexican novel, makes its U.S. debut

09/13/2018 – The Washington Post 

The women of the De la Garza family share a lighter moment on their Mexican ranch in “Like Water for Chocolate.” (Daniel Martinez)

A baby who cries so much that her tears flood a room. A bedspread knit over many years until it’s large enough to cover a whole ranch. A meal so sensuous that it propels a woman to run off to make love to a strange man on horseback and abandon her family. It’s moments like these that make “Like Water for Chocolate” so captivating — and a challenge to present on the stage.

Laura Esquivel’s 1989 novel “Como Agua Para Chocolate” was a best-seller in her native Mexico and in the United States after it was published in English translation the following year; the 1992 movie based on the novel was at the time the highest-grossing Spanish-language film in U.S. history. Yet, after having first been theatrically adapted in Spain in 2004, the work is only now having its U.S. premiere as a play, at GALA Hispanic Theatre.

“It is challenging to transform,” director Olga Sanchez says. “Theater has to do a whole lot of backbends to fulfill everything that people get out of a novel, which is so incredibly rich, and people read over months’ time. And a play, you basically have about two hours.”

Read more: 

Turning waste into bioplastics, Mexico strikes green gold

09/12/2018 – Reuters 

Tequila, avocado and corn are proving their worth beyond Mexican fiesta staples as key components for a fast-growing bioplastics market, with companies transforming waste from processing food crops into products such as bags, plates and even car parts.

Bioplastics make up less than 5 percent of the millions of tonnes of plastic produced each year around the world.

But as governments and consumers fret about the damage plastic is doing to the world’s oceans, scientists are experimenting by converting materials from cactus to shrimp shells and human waste into alternative greener plastics

Read more: