The tip of the iceberg
A Guanajuato farm raid raises questions, plus CDMX launches an anti-gentrification plan
Welcome to The Mexpatriate.
In today’s roundup of the national conversation: a raid on a vegetable farm in Dolores Hidalgo, news from the Ayotzinapa investigation, the latest woes for three Mexican financial institutions targeted by the U.S. Treasury, Clara Brugada’s anti-gentrification plan and the controversial removal of two statues from a Mexico City park.
Got any tips for stories I should cover? Email me: hola@themexpatriate.com.
“Rescue” or “circus”?: A vegetable farm in the small city of Dolores Hidalgo made national headlines last week when state authorities announced they’d “rescued” 700 farm laborers (and their children) as part of an investigation into “human trafficking for the purpose of labor exploitation.” In a statement, the Guanajuato attorney general’s office also said that one person had been discovered with narcotics. A lawyer for the Chinese-owned company (Agroverdi) that runs Rancho El Ramillete described the operation as a “circus” and an “excuse to distract attention from something that they [the prosecutor’s office] are doing.” He also claimed no drugs beyond a marijuana joint had been found. The workers are seasonal day laborers (jornaleros) who migrate mostly from southern states and live on the premises with their families; they told reporters they came to the ranch voluntarily. But Governor Libia Dennise García (PAN) said on Tuesday that she had personally heard repeated complaints about the conditions at the ranch that “violated human rights,” and apparently the accusations go back years—a one-year-old baby living at the ranch died from dehydration caused by a GI illness in 2022.
If you look up Agroverdi, the first thing that appears is a Facebook page filled with recruitment ads, for everything from sowing supervisors to security guards—who are heavily armed, according to investigative outlet PopLab, which also noted that similar conditions can be found at farms throughout El Bajío. Meanwhile, the workers and their families remain at the ranch, though local authorities have offered to help them return to their places of origin. It is unclear if a criminal investigation will move forward, or if the company will only face labor infractions.
“Eccentricities and opulence”: This could be a harmless description of your boss if he runs a fashion magazine, but less so if he’s a prosecutor. Over two years after he was appointed to lead the investigation of the most notorious mass crime in recent Mexican history, Rosendo Gómez Piedra left his position as special prosecutor in the Ayotzinapa investigation on Wednesday. This follows a probe into reports by his subordinates that he asked them for financial contributions to the campaign of Sara Irene Herrerías Guerra (who won a position as justice of the Supreme Court in the judicial election), and that he held costume contests and would dole out award money to favored employees. Gómez denies the allegations, blaming them on disgruntled workers who had been fired. The parents of the 43 students who disappeared in Iguala, Guerrero in 2014 had also demanded that Gómez be removed when they met with President Sheinbaum in May. His predecessor, Omar Gómez Trejo, was appointed by AMLO’s administration in 2019, and was supposed to represent the end of years of impunity and obfuscation. Gómez Trejo succeeded in issuing 83 arrest warrants, but came up against resistance when the military was implicated. He left his position in 2022 (I wrote about it here) and is now a visiting scholar at the Human Rights Center of UC Berkeley. Sheinbaum says Gómez Piedra’s replacement, Mauricio Pazarán, is “highly familiarized” with the case and will pursue new lines of investigation.
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More banking blows: The three Mexican financial institutions that were targeted by U.S. Treasury orders (Intercam, CIBanco and Vector Casa de Bolsa) for suspected involvement in money laundering for drug cartels last month will be fined a total of 185 million pesos (US $9.8 million) by Mexico’s National Banking Commission (CNBV) for anti-money laundering compliance failures. Fitch Ratings also announced it will withdraw ratings of the financial institutions this week, after downgrading them on June 27. As one El País headline put it, the “slow agony” seems irreversible at this point. The Treasury granted a 45-day extension to the original deadline for U.S. banks to cut off all transactions with the three institutions, but their outlook is still grim. “It’s very complicated to see what future these institutions can have if they don’t solve the sanction issue quickly, and I can say from experience that these issues don’t get resolved quickly,” said the president of the Mexican Institute of Financial Executives (IMEF) at a press conference, noting that a loss of customers and possible insolvency will likely leave Intercam and CIBanco as “shells.”
Rent control, public housing and Airbnb regulation…oh my!: Two weeks after an anti-gentrification protest that made international headlines, Mexico City Mayor Clara Brugada presented 14 actions in phase one of a “profound, progressive and structural process to transform housing access in the city and combat phenomena like gentrification.” The measures include enforcing rent increase caps and short-term rental restrictions—both of which are already on the books—as well as construction of more public housing, and programs to support “community rooted culture and heritage.” Housing reform advocates are cautiously optimistic, while there have been grumbles from the expected quarters. One local city lawmaker, Diego Garrido (PAN), called the plan a “populist Frankenstein” and the opposition mayors of the Cuauhtémoc and Miguel Hidalgo boroughs also expressed concern about a potentially negative impact on private investment. Meanwhile, another anti-gentrification march is planned for July 20.
Che and Fidel “evicted” from a Mexico City bench: In July 1955, Ernesto “Che” Guevara and Fidel Castro met for the first time in the Tabacalera neighborhood of Mexico City. A monument to their encounter—statues of the men frozen in conversation on a bench—was installed in the neighborhood in 2017. But on Wednesday, they were removed by Alessandra Rojo de la Vega, mayor of the Cuauhtémoc borough (and not the first attention-grabbing one). “Neither Che nor Fidel asked for permission to settle in Cuba…nor in Tabacalera. But here we do apply the law. Cuauhétmoc Libre,” she wrote in the caption of a video post to X, alleging that the statues had been installed in a public park without proper permits. A tiff within the municipal government has ensued—the city claims Rojo de la Vega’s action was illegal, since it was not approved by the committee on monuments. This isn’t the first time the statues have caused controversy: they were vandalized during a protest calling for their removal in 2021. Another protest—this time, to bring back the statutes—is planned for July 26, the date of the armed attack by Castro on the Moncada barracks in Cuba in 1953. “The park is full of garbage, there are prostitutes here at night but no one cares,” complained one resident to La Jornada. “They just came to remove the statues.”
What will happen with Agroverdi? Will the workers stay at the compound, or leave?