MEXICO CITY (JTA) — It was during her ultimately successful campaign for Mexico City mayor that Claudia Sheinbaum made a reference to her Jewish heritage. Speaking before a group of Jewish women, she said she was proud of those origins.

“We celebrated all the holidays at my grandparents’ house,” she recalled.

For Sheinbaum, the capital city’s first elected Jewish and female mayor, the reference to her Jewishness was rare. Like many other liberal, secular Jewish politicians around the world, Sheinbaum rarely identifies publicly as Jewish. Despite extensive coverage in the Jewish media, her relationship with her Jewish identity is tenuous.

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Her victory was hailed as the feminist highlight of Mexico’s dramatic election season. Sheinbaum’s six-year term no doubt will have a tremendous impact on the lives of the approximately 25 million people who populate the metropolitan Mexico City region.

So Sheinbaum, 56, would prefer to talk about issues like high crime rates or social mobility rather than talk about herself. On the infrequent occasions that Sheinbaum shines the spotlight on herself, she mostly emphasizes that she’s a scientist or a woman. She is a well-respected physics and engineering professor who has helped the UN research climate change.

Her family has no formal relationship with Mexico’s institutionalized Jewish community and she has never taken a political stance from an overtly “Jewish” perspective: She hasn’t made any public pronouncement about Israel or spoken as a member of a minority even though Jews make up far less than 1 percent of the capital city’s population. But her identity still complicated her rise to her powerful new post, which she started Wednesday.

According to sources close to her family, who wished to remain anonymous in speaking to JTA, the Sheinbaums feel more connected to a tradition of political activism than their Jewish heritage.

Sheinbaum’s father, Carlos Sheinbaum, was a Mexican-born chemical engineer who spent much of his life living in Guadalajara, once the home of a Jewish community with a few hundred families. His family, originally from Lithuania, arrived in Mexico during the 1920s, like most of Mexico’s Ashkenazi Jews. Carlos’ father was a jewelry merchant who was involved behind the scenes in the semi-illegal Mexican Communist Party and had to distance himself from it or face persecution. According to Sheinbaum’s mother, Annie Pardo, the family observed the High Holidays, spoke Yiddish and ate Ashkenazi food at home.

Pardo comes from a family of assimilated Bulgarian Sephardic Jews from Sofia who arrived at the port of Veracruz in 1942, barely escaping the Holocaust. She attended elementary school in the Sephardic school of Mexico City, later pursued a career as a biologist and became one of the first Sephardic women to go into Mexican academia. Last week, she received the National Autonomous University Award, one of the most prestigious academic awards in the country, for her studies on lung functions.

Both of Sheinbaum’s parents were heavily involved in Mexican leftist circles of the 1960s — they protested in defense of Cuba, were involved in labor movements and joined in the famous student revolts of 1968 that ultimately resulted in police violence. Although the family lived in the Jewish neighborhoods of Polanco and Condesa, they eventually moved south to be closer to the National Autonomous University, where Pardo worked.

Claudia Sheinbaum, the couple’s second daughter, went to liberal non-Jewish schools and studied physics at the same university as her mother. An expert on climate change, she was part of an international team that won a Nobel Prize in 2007. Like her parents, she was involved in student activism and, in 1998, helped form the Revolutionary Democratic Party — for many years the main leftist opposition party in Mexico. She left the party six years ago to form Morena, or the National Regeneration Movement, with Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, Mexico’s new president.

Sheinbaum’s distance from the Jewish community hasn’t stopped journalists and others from noting her Jewish identity. A 2012 article described a deep division in Morena between Sheinbaum and Alfredo Jalife-Rahme, a well-known geopolitics professor, also at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, who spreads conspiracy theories about the Jewish billionaire George Soros and has been accused of anti-Semitism multiple times by Mexican anti-discrimination authorities.

Jalife-Rahme, who says he is a founding member of Morena, has accused Sheinbaum of maintaining close ties with Jewish-owned real estate groups, including Grupo Danhos In recent years, Grupo Danhos has taken heat for constructing a series of massive and controversial shopping centers in Mexico City. Illegal real estate construction has become a touchy subject in Mexico after multiple recent earthquakes — but especially after the recent collapse of a new shopping center, Artz Pedregal, in July.

Grupo Danhos’ owner, David Daniel Kabazz, is reported to have built close ties with Obrador when the latter was mayor of Mexico City. His daughter, Elvira Daniel Kabazz, served as a legal adviser to both the developer and Sheinbaum.

Sheinbaum has not spoken about these claims, but sources close to her told JTA that she has been a vociferous opponent of Jalife-Rahme within the party. She has tremendous clout in Morena, and since her fight with Jalife-Rahme, he has been relegated to a fringe role — he has backed Morena’s surge in the far left media such as Venezuela’s TeleSur channel, but not as an official party member.

Apart from this, the local news does not touch upon or discuss Sheinbaum’s Jewish heritage — likely how she wants it.</s>MEXICO CITY, Dec 6 — The first woman elected mayor of Mexico City was sworn in yesterday for a six-year term leading one of the world’s largest cities, in a country with a deep tradition of machismo.

Claudia Sheinbaum, a 56-year-old scientist and environmentalist, rode to victory in the July elections on the same anti-establishment wave that brought her ally and mentor to power, Mexico’s new President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador.

Grinning, Lopez Obrador — himself a former Mexico City mayor — raised Sheinbaum’s hand in a sign of victory after she took the oath of office before the city legislature. It was a potent symbol of the radical shift in Mexican politics, now dominated by the left-wing party he founded four years ago, Morena.

“We are beginning a new era of honesty and eradicating the privileges long enjoyed by top officials,” she said.

“The first thing we will do is put an end to abuses. As of now, we are reestablishing democracy and political freedom.”

She vowed to end “the privatization of public spaces” in the sprawling capital of more than eight million inhabitants, whose greater urban area is home to some 20 million people.

And she promised to fight violence against women, in a country where gender inequality runs deep and more than seven women and girls are murdered each day, according to the United Nations.

Another woman previously served as Mexico City mayor on an interim basis — Rosario Robles, from 1999 to 2000 — but Sheinbaum is the first woman elected to the post.

Sheinbaum, who hails from a family of Jewish scientists, studied physics at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, earning a doctorate in energy engineering and going on to work as a consultant for the United Nations.

She was active in the university’s student movement, which rose up against an unpopular series of reforms at the institution in 1986.

She was one of many veterans of the movement to go into politics.

When Lopez Obrador was elected Mexico City mayor in 2000, he named Sheinbaum his environment minister.

She followed the fiery leader when he split with Mexico’s established left-wing party, the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), to launch Morena in 2014.

The following year, she won an election for district mayor of Mexico City’s Tlalpan neighbourhood, Lopez Obrador’s own district and one of the 16 “delegations” that make up the city.

That was her launch pad for her mayoral campaign.

But her rapid rise has not been without controversy.

When a private elementary school in her district collapsed in the earthquake that rocked Mexico on September 19, 2017 — killing 19 children and seven adults inside — it emerged that the local government had granted dodgy construction permits to the school’s owner, who is today on the run from the law.

A group of victims’ families has brought criminal charges over the case, and wants Sheinbaum to face investigation.

After she cast her ballot in the July 1 elections, a protester shouted “Murderer!” at her as she left the polling station.

Sheinbaum vehemently denies responsibility for the school’s collapse, and accuses her opponents of exploiting the tragedy for political gain. — AFP</s>MEXICO CITY (AFP) - The first woman elected mayor of Mexico City was sworn in Wednesday (Dec 5) for a six-year term leading one of the world's largest cities, in a country with a deep tradition of machismo.

Claudia Sheinbaum, a 56-year-old scientist and environmentalist, rode to victory in the July 1 elections on the same anti-establishment wave that brought her left-wing ally and former mentor to power, Mexico's new President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador.

She echoed Lopez Obrador's fervent anti-corruption message in her inaugural address before the city legislature.

"We are beginning a new era of honesty and eradicating the privileges long enjoyed by top officials," she said.

She vowed to end "the privatization of public spaces" and excessive fines and taxes in the sprawling capital of more than eight million inhabitants, whose greater urban area is home to some 20 million people.

Another woman previously served as mayor of the capital on an interim basis - Rosario Robles, from 1999 to 2000 - but Sheinbaum, who holds a doctorate in physics, is the first woman elected to the post.

Sheinbaum was an early ally of Lopez Obrador, who was himself Mexico City mayor from 2000 to 2005.

She was among the first politicians to leave Mexico's established left-wing party, the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), and join Lopez Obrador's breakaway, Morena, when he formally launched it in 2014.

The following year, she won an election for district mayor of Mexico City's Tlalpan neighborhood, Lopez Obrador's own district and one of the 16 "delegations" that make up the city.

That was her launch pad for her mayoral campaign.

But her rapid rise has not been without controversy.

When a private elementary school in her district collapsed in the earthquake that rocked Mexico on Sept 19, 2017 - killing 19 children and seven adults inside - it emerged that the local government had granted dodgy construction permits to the school's owner, who is today on the run from the law.

A group of victims' families has brought criminal charges over the case, and wants Sheinbaum to face investigation.

Sheinbaum vehemently denies responsibility, and accuses her opponents of exploiting the tragedy for political gain.</s>The first elected female mayor of Mexico City has been…

MEXICO CITY — The first elected female mayor of Mexico City has been sworn into office, and immediately announced she would dissolve the riot police.

Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum says “police are there to protect the people, and we don’t need a police force to repress them.”

Sheinbaum pledged Wednesday to build cable cars to impoverished slums, and improve bus and subway service.

She also said replacement housing would be built for victims of the 2017 earthquakes.

Sheinbaum has a doctorate in environmental engineering and is a longtime associate of new President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador.

The only previous female governor for the city of 9 million was Rosario Robles, who was appointed in 1999 to serve out the remaining year term of Cuauhtemoc Cardenas when he ran unsuccessfully for the presidency.</s>MEXICO CITY — Claudia Sheinbaum was sworn into office Wednesday as the first elected female mayor of Mexico City and immediately announced she would dissolve the riot police.

“The police are there to protect the people, and we don’t need a police force to repress them,” said Sheinbaum.

Sheinbaum pledged to build cable cars to impoverished slums, and improve bus and subway service.

She also said replacement housing would be built for people who lost their homes and apartments in the 2017 earthquakes.

The previous administration had offered loans for rebuilding, but residents wanted the government to pay for the new units.

Her key promises included reducing crime and enforcing zoning laws, a hot-button issue in the constantly growing megalopolis, where developers routinely build bigger buildings than zoning rules allow.

Sheinbaum, who has a doctorate in environmental engineering, did post-doctoral research at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California and is a former member of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

She’s also a longtime associate of new leftist President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador.

The only previous female governor for the city of 9 million was Rosario Robles, who was appointed in 1999 to serve out the remaining year term of Cuauhtemoc Cardenas when he ran unsuccessfully for the presidency.</s>International capital is worried and the world is hopeful as Mexico is ready to buck an international right-wing tide, shifting its government from right to left-of-center with the presidential inauguration of Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) on December 1.

The full quote by Porfirio Díaz is: “Poor Mexico, so far from God and so close to the United States.” Mexican President Díaz (1876-1880 and 1884-1911) got it at least half right. Mexico has suffered in the shadow of the Colossus of the North, but Mexico is not poor. Mexico is rich in many ways, yet it also has been impoverished. And Mexico has been greatly underappreciated by North Americans.

Mexico is bucking an international right-wing tide, shifting its government from right to left-of-center with the presidential inauguration of Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) on December 1. Speaking for international capital, The Economist is worried. The other 99% of humanity is hopeful. A cautionary history of this trice conquered land follows.

Pre-Colombian Mexico and the First Conquest

Prior to Europeans “discovering” the New World, Mexico was home to many great civilizations, which thrived for nearly four millennia: Aztec, Huastec, Izapa, Maya, Mixtec, Olmec, Purépecha, Teotihuacan, Toltec, Totonac, and Zapotec. History and Headlines rates the “10 great historical civilizations,” naming the Olmecs and Aztecs alongside the Romans, Persians, and Egyptians.

The popular image of the Aztec depicts savage men in loin clothes and feathers on top of stone pyramids making human sacrifices. But let’s put that into historical context. Historian James Cockcroft tells us that at the same time the barbarians in the New World were assuaging their pagan gods with human blood, more people met their end burned at the stake as “witches” by the civilized Europeans in the name of Jesus. Christian femicide is a forgotten legacy.

European contact in 1519 brought Christianity and disease to the then flourishing Mexican civilizations. While the Europeans and the indigenous Americans were roughly on the par technologically, the Europeans were far more adept at war and to them went victory and the spoils.

Geographer Jared Diamond estimates that 90% of the Native American population was obliterated by measles, small pox, flu, and the like for which the Europeans had developed relative immunities. Mexico did not regain its 1519 population until 1940, taking over 400 years to recover.

Although the official language of Mexico is now Spanish and Mexico is the most populous Spanish speaking nation in the world, it is also home to the largest number of actively spoken indigenous languages in North America.

The Second Conquest of Mexico

The first conquest of Mexico was by the Spanish conquistadores. The second was by the Yankees and has received far less acknowledgment.

Mexico won its independence from Spain in the period 1810-21 and with it slavery was abolished, though not entirely until 1829. It wasn’t until 1863, when the Emancipation Proclamation was issued followed by the Thirteenth Amendment two years later, that formal slavery was abolished in the US. However, sharecropping and Jim Crow laws continued to preserve the “peculiar institution” in the “land of the free.”

The Adams–Onís Treaty of 1819 established the border between the former Spanish colonial territories and the former British colony, now the US.

By 1836, the Republic of Texas succeeded from Mexico and was annexed to the US in 1845. The following year, the Mexican-American War was provoked by the US as a war of conquest.

Two years later, Mexico was forced to sign the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ceding nearly half its national territory. The US gained what would become parts or all of California, Arizona, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, Wyoming, and Colorado. The Gadsden Purchase of 1853 added southern Arizona and New Mexico to the spoils of war.

In all, 55% of Mexico, over half of her sovereign territory, was taken from Mexico by the ever-expanding Colossus of the North. No wonder our Chicanx compatriots remind us “we did not cross the border, the border crossed us.”

Gold had been discovered at Sutter’s Mill just a few days before the treaty was signed, which transferred Alta (upper) California from Mexico to the US. The discovery of gold was unknown to the signatories at the time.

Alta California was to become the Golden State. With a $2.7 trillion economy, the state now boasts the world’s fifth largest economy, larger than Mexico’s $2.4 trillion gross domestic product (GDP). Were Alta California to rejoin Mexico, the new union’s GDP would be surpassed only by the mega-economies of China, US, India, and Japan.

The constitution for Alta California was drafted in both Spanish and English. Despite having a bilingual constitution, the Alta California voters passed the English-only Proposition 227 in 1998. Then in 2016, the voters passed Proposition 57, which repealed the more egregious English-only provisions of the earlier proposition.

The repeal of the English-only proposition reflected an influx of non-English speakers into the state. Alta California is today a truly multi-ethnic state with 43% of its inhabitants speaking a language other than English at home. The largest ethnic group is again Hispanic-Latinx, comprising 39% of the population and outnumbering what the Census Bureau calls “white alone.”

The bully to the north became revolution-adverse after concluding its own revolution. When Haiti won its independence from France in 1804, the US joined Napoleon’s empire to force the fledgling Haitian nation to pay debilitating reparations for freeing itself from slavery.

Nevertheless, the Mexican Revolution of 1910-20 was able to slip by. In those days the US empire was not as capable at multitasking as it is now and was preoccupied by World War I.

The Mexican Revolution stands in the pantheon of great 20th century revolutions, pioneering the way for Russia (1917), China (1949), Vietnam (1975), and the many Third World liberation struggles of the last century.

As the first of the major 20th-century revolutions, the Mexican Revolution guaranteed labor rights, nationalized subsoil rights, secularized the state and curbed the power of the Roman Catholic Church, and gave inalienable land rights to indigenous communities. Women’s rights were advanced, and women fought as soldiers and even commanders in General Emilio Zapata’s revolutionary army. Many of these gains have since been eroded.

After the tumultuous revolutionary period, politics in Mexico became consolidated under the PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party). This single corporatist party brought together political factions representing the peasantry, labor, and urban professionals. As the revolutionary period receded, the PRI became politically centrist.

The one-party rule of the PRI was finally ended with the successful presidential election in 2000 of Coca-Cola executive Vincente Fox of the PAN (National Action Party). The PAN won the subsequent presidential election as well. The PAN is a right-of-center Christian democratic party. It has strong backing among northern Mexican agri-business and international corporations and has a conservative social agenda.

The current Mexican president, Peña Nieto, is a member of the PRI. As the PRI moved to the right, more liberal forces within split in 1986 and formed the PRD (Party of the Democratic Revolution). The main stronghold of the PRD has been Mexico City and among organized labor.

Andrés Manuel López Obrador was the PRD standard bearer in the 2006 and 2012 presidential elections. His losses in both elections are widely believed to be due to fraud.

NAFTA – the Third Conquest of Mexico

The third conquest of Mexico was by North American finance capital came in the form of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and similar neoliberal arrangements. Neither free nor restricted to trade (e.g., it includes military cooperation), this stealth conquest facilitated the repatriation of foreign investment profits and the further integration of Mexico into the US economy.

NAFTA was ratified in 1994 among Mexico, the US, and Canada. The agreement remains controversial in the constituent counties. The Zapatistas in southern Mexico specifically chose the initiation date of their on-going rebellion to coincide with the day NAFTA started, presciently predicting the deleterious effects NAFTA would have.

By 2014, as many as a million US workers had lost their jobs due to NAFTA, which also had the effect of depressing wages.

NAFTA ended many Mexican government supports for agriculture, while encouraging the entry of US and Canadian agricultural products. Consequently, peasant and most family farm agriculture in Mexico are less economically viable. The result has been a massive internal migration from the countryside into Mexican cities and an external emigration of people forced off the land to the US.

A decade or two before the imposition of NAFTA, Mexico had appeared poised to transform from a developing to a developed country. New oil reserves had been discovered and a boom seemed imminent. Then instead of continuing a development model, Mexico bowed to international financial pressure and switched to a neoliberal model of deregulation and privatization.

Rather than lifting Mexico’s economy through its deeper integration with the US economy, as NAFTA’s proponents promised, Mexico has fallen even further behind. After NAFTA and the neoliberal “reforms,” poverty went up in Mexico while per capita economic growth lagged compared to the rest of Latin America.

Instead of wages becoming like those in the US, working wages became competitive with Guatemala. Mexico took its place in the international market economy as an export platform for low-wage maquiladoras, factories owned by foreigners and exporting to a foreign market.

Despite great national wealth, 46% of Mexicans live below the poverty line. The per capita income of Mexico is a third of the US, making the shared border the most income-unequal border in the world.

Neoliberalism has also had its winners. The government telephone monopoly Telmex was privatized in 1990, bought up by Carlos Slim Helú who became the richest man not only in Mexico but in the entire world by 2010. His ranking has now slipped to seventh, though he is still the top tycoon in Mexico owning 40% of the listings on the Mexican stock exchange. His net worth is equivalent to 6% of Mexico’s GDP, which is greater than the entire GDP of neighboring Guatemala and four times that of Nicaragua.

With a new strata of billionaires and deepening poverty, both spawned by neoliberalism, Mexico is among the more income unequal nations, with a Gini Index of 48.2. Carlos Slim and eight other international fat cats now have more wealth than half the world’s population.

Yet today Mexico as a nation is rich in many ways.

In terms of biodiversity, Mexico is way under-recognized. Mexico ranks fourth or fifth in the world, scoring high for the number of reptiles, birds, mammals, and plants. The much more celebrated Costa Rica in comparison doesn’t make the top ten in any of these categories, although it has a far better public relations apparatus. Mexico encompasses vast rainforests, dry forests, mountains, deserts, and the second largest coral reef in the world.

In terms of conservation, Mexico has been a world leader in the protection of whales. Commercial whaling was banned in 1954. In contrast, the last US whaling station in the San Francisco Bay was closed in 1971, followed the next year by passage of the Mammal Protection Act. The world’s first whale refuge was established in 1972 by the Mexican government. In 2002, Mexico again exercised world leadership in designating all its territorial waters and Economic Exclusion Zones as whale refuges.

Culinarily, Mexico’s cocina is considered among the great cuisines of the world; a lot more than taco trucks and cheap burrito stands. Amongst Mexico’s contributions to the world’s larder are avocado, chocolate, guava, tomato, vanilla, many varieties of beans and chiles, and most notably corn, which is now the world’s most important staple food.

Mexico has the most UNESCO World Heritage Sites in the hemisphere. The three most influential modern muralists are the Mexicans Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and David Siqueiros.

With 7.6 billion bbl of proven reserves, Mexico is a major crude oil producer. Ranking 12th in the world, it outproduces Nigeria, Qatar, and Libya.

Mexico’s economy ranks 11th in the world, placing it second in Latin America after Brazil. Mexico’s GDP is greater than that of Italy or Spain and just below France and the UK, making it one of the world’s economic powerhouses.

Left-of-center Andrés Manuel López Obrador ran for the Mexican presidency on July 1. Having broken from the PRD, this third run was the charm as he won decisively. Morena, his newly formed party, swept the national and state legislatures.

Mayor-elect of Mexico City, Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo, is also part of the winning coalition. She is the first woman and first Jew to be elected to the post. She is a scientist and was a joint winner of the 2007 Noble Peace Prize as a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

After decades of right-wing governments in Mexico, López Obrador is being sworn in on December 1. The popular sectors in Mexico are expectant that corruption, inequality, and other long-festering economic injustices will be addressed.

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Roger Harris is the immediate past president of the Task Force on the Americas (http://taskforceamericas.org/), a 32-year-old human rights organization, and is active with the Campaign to End US-Canadian Sanctions Against Venezuela (https://tinyurl.com/yd4ptxkx).</s>Narcos: Mexico has been causing some confusion among fans of the Netflix show. Netflix has labelled the shows separately on the streaming platforms, whilst elsewhere the series has been called “Narcos season four”. Narcos fans cannot agree whether Narcos: Mexico is, therefore, the same show as Narcos or a spin-off/prequel like Better Call Saul is to Breaking Bad.

Is Narcos Mexico the same as Narcos? WARNING: This section contains spoilers for Narcos and Narcos: Mexico. The two shows are set within the same timeline and feature a number of the same characters. Narcos: Mexico, however, is set earlier in the timeline than Narcos, and has as its leads a number of characters new to Narcos like Felix Gallardo (played by Diego Luna) and Kiki Camarena (Michael Peña). As such, most publications have considered Narcos: Mexico a spin-off of Narcos rather than season four of the same show. WHAT HAPPENED AT THE END OF NARCOS MEXICO?

Netflix lists Narcos and Narcos: Mexico as two separate series as does IMDB. Saying that, there are some arguments that we can consider the latter as the same show as the former. For example, Narcos: Mexico does focus on new characters, but this is not the first time Narcos moved away from its central characters. In 2017, Narcos’ third season did not feature Pablo Escobar (Wagner Moura) as all after he died in the second series. WILL THERE BE ANOTHER SERIES OF NARCOS?

Instead, the series told the continuing story of Javier Peña and moved on to the Cali cartel, yet this was considered part of the main series rather than a spin-off. Narcos showrunner Eric Newman told Slash Film at the time of Narcos season three’s release: “It pays to know a little bit about Pablo Escobar but I think you could experience season three independent of one and two.” The second argument for Narcos: Mexico being considered at Narcos season four is that it features Pablo Escobar himself. Wagner Moura plays an earlier version of his character from Narcos in one episode, which features a fictionalised meeting between Gallardo and Escobar. Both series also have the same showrunner, Eric Newman, and share a lot of the same creative team. WHO IS IN THE CAST OF NARCOS MEXICO?

The issue of whether Narcos: Mexico and Narcos are the same show is mostly an issue because of rumours that another series of the show is coming soon. These rumours do not make it clear whether this will follow on from the story of Narcos: Mexico and tell the ongoing story of the Guadalajara cartel, or whether the series will return to the story of the Cali cartel in the modern day. In the Slash Film interview, Newman was asked whether he wanted to bring the story of Narcos up to date. He said: “I do like the idea of going as far into the future, or rather the present, as we can.” Narcos: Mexico and Narcos are available to watch on Netflix now</s>When the new Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (known by his initials AMLO) took office on Dec. 1, he promised to “transform” Mexico into a more equal, less corrupt country. “I have no right to fail you,” he said at his inauguration. But the left-wing leader has his work cut out for him.

López Obrador began his term with a focus on law and order, in a country where homicides hit a record high of 29,168 in 2017. On his third day in office, he opened a new investigation into the disappearance of 43 students in 2014, an unresolved case that symbolizes for many Mexicans the ubiquity of corrupt police and the impunity of cartels. He appears to have abandoned campaign pledges to demilitarize the war on drugs, but his proposal to offer amnesty for low-level criminals and his support for more liberal drug laws risk alienating the U.S., which spent over $100 million on counternarcotics efforts and policing in Mexico in 2018 alone.

Even before AMLO took office, Mexico’s relationship with the U.S. was being tested by President Trump’s threats to close the border as migrant caravans headed north through the country. The new President agreed on Dec. 1 to a development fund for Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras in an attempt to tackle the issue, but Trump might want more. Trade, too, presents hurdles; the new free-trade agreement with the U.S. and Canada approved by Mexico’s last President might yet collapse.

López Obrador has pledged to revolutionize Mexico’s “neoliberal” economy, and he has slashed salaries for top bureaucrats–including his own. These promises and his leftist background have spooked the markets; since October, when he pledged to cancel the construction of a $13 billion Mexico City airport, Mexican stocks have lost 16% of their value. If he is to enact his policies, he must reckon with their effects on the market, and of the market on his government.

This appears in the December 17, 2018 issue of TIME.</s>The Mexican metropolis is a city of vast inequality, and access to water reflects that.

This story was adapted from “Defending Water, Defending Life,” published in Stranger’s Guide. Go here to sign up for their free newsletter, Field Guide. It’s a Friday evening in Coyoacán, Mexico City, and on the busy thoroughfare of Avenida Aztecas, a dozen neighbors mill around a tent erected just off the curb. They crowd around plastic chairs and mustard-colored couches. The back third of the tent has been turned into a makeshift kitchen, where a few people have prepared food for anyone who wants it: red rice, hard-boiled eggs, beans, sausage, sharply spicy red salsa. A spattering of university students and tattooed 20- and 30-somethings mingle with their elders, who they refer to with the honorifics don or doña. Commanding a particular degree of respect is Doña Fili, a tiny, gray-haired woman in her mid-80s. She can’t be more than five feet tall, but her presence commands immediate respect, and people jump up to greet her.

The tent’s walls flap as cars speed by. In large hand lettering, the street-facing wall reads: “PLANTÓN EN DEFENSA DEL AGUA”—“Sit-in in defense of water.” It’s April, and the sit-in is in its seventh month. The Asamblea General de los Pueblos, Barrios, Colonias y Pedregales de Coyoacán has been occupying the space in protest at what they believe is an environmental atrocity. A tall metal barrier separates the sidewalk from the adjacent property, Avenida Aztecas 215. On the site, the developer Quiero Casa is constructing a new building: a condominium with 377 apartments, meant to house over 1,700 inhabitants. According to the members of the Asamblea General, though, Quiero Casa has been systematically draining millions of gallons of water, flowing from a natural spring, into the sewer every day for over two years. A hammering starts on the other side of the barrier, and Doña Fili launches into a chant: “Va a caer, va a caer, Quiero Casa va a caer”—“It’s going to fall, it’s going to fall, Quiero Casa is going to fall.” The others join in. Above them, hand-painted banners and protest signs hang from the tent’s walls. A spray-painted poster of Emiliano Zapata, the iconic Mexican Revolution-era figure who’s come to symbolize solidarity with peasants, indigenous people, and the poor, stares out from the wall: Aquí el pueblo manda, y el gobierno obedece—“Here the people give orders, and the government obeys.” A painting of a brown-skinned woman cupping a plume of water proclaims, No secarán el río de lucha que nace en los Pedregales—“They will not dry up the river of struggle that is born in the Pedregales.”

As in most neighborhoods in Mexico City, residents of the Pedregales—or rock fields, as these neighborhoods built over lava rock refer to themselves—suffer from lack of water access. They turn on the taps, and nothing comes out. The Pedregales suspect foul play: a combination of corruption, racism, and institutional ineptitude that diverts water to wealthy neighborhoods and luxury developments. But unlike in most other neighborhoods, those in the Pedregales believe they have liquid evidence. Cities are changing fast. Keep up with the CityLab Daily newsletter. The best way to follow issues you care about. Two years ago, construction workers on the site of Aztecas 215 excavated a previously unknown natural spring as they dug out the building’s parking garage. Clear water flooded the site and it flowed down the street like a river. The spring released 76 liters of water per second, and a study by geologists from the National Autonomous University (UNAM) found that the water came from an aquifer and could be easily purified for drinking. It arrived in torrents. First, the construction workers let it flow freely into the street. Aztecas 215 sits on a hill, and soon the water rushed down the street in a river. A photo of the spring’s early days shows water gushing down the street, uncontained by the several industrial-sized hoses snaking out of the construction site. Of course, the neighbors noticed. They filed complaints with the city. Geologist Oscar Escolero Fuentes, from UNAM’s Institute of Geology, conducted studies on the water to determine its source. In one he found that the water came from a previously unknown underground aquifer, not, as the developer Quiero Casa and the city had variously claimed, from wastewater drains or septic tanks. Despite this, the developer started draining the water into the sewage system. So the neighbors decided to form an assembly to formalize their strategy and demands. Several dozen residents—young and old, laborers and students, shop owners and professors—formed the Asamblea General. They came primarily from the neighborhoods of Santo Domingo, Pueblo de los Reyes and Ajusco, all sharing Avenida Aztecas as a border.

On April 29, 2016, the Asamblea installed their first sit-in outside Aztecas 215. Quiero Casa stopped construction on the site because, it said, the sit-in posed a security risk. In that time, the water continued to flow, and the excavation flooded with water. On a Monday morning in April 2018, Don Vicente, another elder member of the Asamblea, spends part of his shift at the tent showing me photos of the result. Behind the barrier from the street, just feet from where we’re seated, the site is filled with a deep green pond. All manner of flora and fauna had sprung up. Swallows and cardinals made it their home. Two ducks swim in the water. In that time, Doña Fili tells me, the high walls had a tiny window that the neighborhood’s children stopped to look through. “They saw a paradise being born,” she says. In late September, the Secretary of Water (SACMEX) and the Environmental and Zoning Authority (PAOT) come to an agreement with Quiero Casa conceding them control over the water, provided that they construct a structure beneath the building that would allow the water to continue its natural course through the aquifer undisrupted. Documents on the PAOT’s website detail the plans for the system. That December, construction began again. In the city of nearly 22 million, 70 percent of residents have water for only twelve hours a day. Oscar Escolero Fuentes, the professor in UNAM’s geology department who conducted the initial study of the spring, says that this kind of structure is fairly common in buildings with deep excavations, particularly those with below-ground parking garages. The report calls it an “insulating belt.” Its purposes are two-fold, Escolero says: to manipulate the course of the water and to provide the security needed to build aboveground. Usually, of course, these structures are built before the building itself is constructed. On December 5, 2016, between 3:30 and 4:00 in the morning, riot police came to evict the Asamblea from their sit-in. The next day, Quiero Casa resumed construction at Aztecas 215 once again. The Asamblea continued with their regular activities—protests and actions at various governmental offices. Around March or April, they noticed that workers from the Aztecas 215 site had opened up the street to install tubing connecting to the sewage. According to the Asamblea, they’d opened up the drainage system and expanded it from 14 to 22 inches.

Quiero Casa claimed this was to accommodate the increased waste that the hundreds of condominium residents would eventually produce. When the workers installed that, though, they also installed two new manholes in the street, through which is visible a rush of clear water. Nearly every day, someone broadcasts a video on Facebook Live filming the water rushing through the channel. They say that the water is coming from the site, and that the workers in Aztecas 215 can reduce the water flow when functionaries visit to check the site. Members of the Asamblea insist that there’s no way Quiero Casa could have properly installed the isolating belt to return the water to its natural course. To install such a structure beneath the foundations, they would have had to stop all construction on the condos, which, the Asamblea says, they didn’t do. Rather, they insist that the developer simply installed pipes to drain the spring water directly into the sewage, with pumps to control the flow of the water. Without properly installing the isolating belt, Escolero says, this would be the only option to control its flow beneath the building: to constantly pump it out of the earth around the foundation and drain it elsewhere. Luis Olguin, Quiero Casa’s director of public relations, tells me over the phone that the water is not being drained into the sewage and that the structure to divert the water is, as various public officials have pronounced, functioning properly. When I ask about the water flowing through the manhole across the street, he says that he didn’t know where it came from: “Maybe there’s more water because it’s the rainy season.”

As the standoff between the developers and the activists continues, the Asamblea’s dingy white tent has become a de facto community center, public kitchen, and living room. Two or three people keep guard at all times. They sleep on the dingy mustard-colored couches, cook over the makeshift range, and thumb through books from the small library they’ve accumulated. The Asamblea’s weekly Friday-night meetings take place in the tent, rain or shine. Visitors from across the city and country stop by several times a week, too, often activists involved in similar struggles over water. Across all of Mexico City, water shortages are a feature of everyday life. In the city of nearly 22 million, 70 percent of residents have water for only twelve hours a day. Much of the city was built upon a lakebed, and the water system pumps water from beneath the city, causing areas over the former lake to sink and buildings to warp. The plumbing system is old and poorly maintained, and around 800 gallons per second leak out of the pipes—leading to a total water loss of between 30 to 40 percent. In 50 years, some experts say, the city may no longer have water from its current sources. Santo Domingo, Pueblo de los Reyes, and Ajusco lie in Delegation Coyoacán, towards the southeast of the city, about a 40-minute metro ride from the city’s Historic Center, tucked just behind UNAM, the National Autonomous University. They consist of low-roofed and brightly painted cinderblock homes, interspersed with small produce stores and corner tienditas. Their residents are predominantly working-class, and many are descended from those who originally built the area in the ‘60s. These neighborhoods’ water access also tends to be spotty. A friend of mine who recently moved to Ajusco estimates that the taps in his house produce water maybe 20 percent of the time. The rest of the time, he and his neighbors rely on water from their tinacos—the massive water jugs most residents have on their roofs, which they refill every so often when water trucks, or pipas, pass by. “We live in a place of abundance. But we have a paradigm of scarcity. We design scarcity.” Not everyone bears equally the brunt of water scarcity. Mexico City is a metropolis of vast inequality, and access to water reflects that. Water flows from west to east, thirty percent of it starting its journey at the Cutzamala reservoir system on the western fringes of the city. In the western delegation of Cuajimalpa, whose vast mansions and highly secured private developments shelter celebrities, politicians, and CEOs with teams of domestic workers, water pressure reaches 14 kilograms per square centimeter. Residents have swimming pools and well-sprinkled lawns. Not 20 miles to the east, in the densely populated delegation of Iztapalapa, water pressure is around 500 grams per square centimeter. With water access, the same issue arises the world over: Is it a problem of supply or of distribution? Delfín Montañana would say that it’s both. Delfín works for the NGO Isla Urbana, which installs rainwater recycling systems in homes with poor water access across Mexico City. He’s in charge of Isla Urbana’s education initiatives, and he argues that Mexico City’s water crisis is a man-made problem. The problem is not water, he says, but the city’s paradigm for it. Mexico City, after all, was once a flourishing mountain lake with rich, diverse crops. “We live in a place of abundance,” Delfín says, “but we have a paradigm of scarcity. We design scarcity.”

He traces that scarcity back to the conquest. When the Spanish first came to the Valle de México, they broke the dams that the Aztecas had built to prevent floods. They destroyed the channel that funneled drinking water into the heart of the city. They covered the lake. Over the centuries, the watershed became less and less absorbent. The rivers beneath the city were entombed. Today, the city faces a fundamental imbalance: Far more water leaves Mexico City’s water system than enters. It doesn’t have to be this way. It rains six months a year here, all summer, every day at five p.m. like clockwork. That rain, Delfín says, could easily replenish the city’s water supply and then some. But the rainfall doesn’t absorb into the intake system: where it does infiltrate into the ground, it flows into the wastewater system. The city has no functioning wastewater treatment plants. The water that people use to wash, cook and, with precautions, drink, comes either from mountains far to the west or from aquifers deep beneath the city. The 70 percent of water that doesn’t come from the Cutzamala reservoir, including most of the water towards the northern, southern and eastern fringes of the city, comes from wells dug deep below the city’s soil. These wells are getting deeper and deeper all the time: Each year, the level of the water beneath the city sinks by a meter. Many wells, Delfín says, now reach hundreds of meters deep. In the eastern delegation of Iztapalapa, Mexico City’s mayor recently inaugurated a well that’s more than two kilometers deep. In other words, this thin-aired city high in the mountains now draws water from wells at sea level. The depletion of these wells, among other things, has caused the city to sink, slowly but perceptibly. Once used, water takes another kilometers-long journey to leave the city. Mexico City sits within a closed basin. It’s surrounded by mountains, and water has no natural point of escape. So Mexico City’s wastewater is artificially pumped out, to the state of Hidalgo’s Mezquital Valley in the northeast. There, it becomes the most reliable source of crop irrigation anywhere in Mexico. Farmers in the Mezquital Valley are the only ones in the country that enjoy a reliable, nutrient-rich, consistent water source year-round. Their fate is bound to the water consumption of the largest city in North America; so as long as Mexico City has water, so will they.

This is one of many reasons why Mexico City’s water supply has national ramifications. Mexico is a deeply centralized country: The capital is not only the country’s political hub, but also its economic, cultural and educational center. Nearly every government entity has its headquarters there. “If Mexico City runs out of water,” Delfín says, “it’s a matter of national security.” Delfín proposes a number of concrete steps: Harvest the rainwater; allow it to infiltrate into the system. Repair the water system’s leaks. Build functioning treatment plants. Most of all, change the culture of water. Move away from thinking of water in terms of tubes and pipes. Understand the water. Know the land. Many residents of the Pedregales pride themselves on just this sort of deep ancestral knowledge. Santo Domingo has a rich history of collective resistance to outside forces—governmental and otherwise. Doña Fili embodies this: She was part of the founding of Santo Domingo, and she is practiced at sharing the neighborhood’s story. On a Monday morning in the sit-in, she perches on one of the couches and launches into her storytelling. Whenever a new member passes by, she waves them over: “I’m telling her about what we’re doing here, don’t you want to say something?” Each one defers to her: “No, Doña Fili, better you explain it, you’re the expert!” So Doña Fili crosses her legs and begins telling the history of the Pedregales.

“The settlements of Coyoacán are of water,” she says, since pre-Hispanic times. When Hernán Cortés arrived, he put his first settlement in Coyoacán, because here, he found water. Even before him, inhabitants grew gardens and farms. They planted spinach, squash, beans and corn; they fed themselves with their crops. Cuauhtémoc, the last native ruler of Tenochtitlán, was from Coyoacán, Doña Fili tells me. But in this particular region of the borough, the land wasn’t so easy to inhabit. When the volcano Xitle erupted, around the fourth century CE, the lava dried over the southernmost part of Coyoacán and left the region covered in a layer of rigid volcanic rock. These came to be known as the pedregales: the rock fields. In the centuries after Hernán Cortés’s first settlement, Tenochtitlán urbanized into the Mexico City of today, slowly and then quickly. UNAM built its campus in Coyoacán in the ‘50s. When rural-urban migration began to speed up in the ‘60s, demand for housing ballooned. In 1971, residents of the neighborhoods Ajusco and Pueblo de los Reyes orchestrated a land invasion—essentially a massive, overnight coordination of squatters claiming a new site, common in peripheral urban communities across Latin America—to form what would become Santo Domingo. Doña Fili was there. “No one ever imagined that the Pedregales could become a neighborhood,” she says. “What the government couldn’t do, we did with our own hands. It was collective work.” They built houses from piled rocks with roofs of cardboard or tin. They built their own schools. With their own hands, Doña Fili tells me, they carved out the volcanic rock to build roads. As she tells her story, she pauses to emphasize: “This is historical memory.” Resistance runs through Santo Domingo’s DNA. “We never asked the government for anything,” Doña Fili says. “We always struggled with the government, because they came in and made us pay high taxes on the roads that we built.”

Before Quiero Casa, Aztecas 215 was home to a school. Quiero Casa’s plan for their development was approved in 2014. For Doña Fili, Quiero Casa’s nature as a for-profit developer was enough of a red flag. “The housing is not of a social character,” she says. “It is for whoever can pay, whoever can buy, whoever has the money and can acquire it.” In a neighborhood built by the hands of collective community effort, the invasion of an outside, for-profit presence raised suspicions. And then they discovered the water. The Asamblea frames their battle—their lucha—as most specifically them versus the government and Quiero Casa. And they’re part of a city-wide pattern of accusations against developers for irregular construction and practices. Of course, irregularity is nearly a defining feature of Mexico City’s landscape. But when the actors are developers building condos for millions of residents rather than, say, a family adding an extra bedroom to the top of their two-story house, the consequences can be serious. The September 2017 earthquake, which left hundreds of people trapped in dozens of collapsed buildings, brought to the forefront talk of the “real estate cartel,” that is, the corruption that allows developers to build without regard for safety codes. This could mean building on land that can’t handle the weight, or simply using subpar materials. One residential building that collapsed in the earthquake had been finished just nine months prior, and engineers noted that the structure lacked essential resistance columns.

The Asamblea General’s accusations that the water is rushing into the sewer, not back on its natural course, also taps into a deep struggle at the heart of life in Mexico City. Corruption is a part of daily life, and sometimes, it can cost lives. This time, the face of the enemy may be Quiero Casa, but the enemy is various. Most immediately, the Asamblea wants an end to the Aztecas 215 project. They want water. They want their community back. They want, too, autonomy and freedom; they want an end to the many kinds of corruption that keep the city, and the country, running. Solidarity with the Pedregales runs deep and wide. Each week, they receive visitors from other collectives of activists and organizers from around the city and country. One week, it’s the collective of residents of Atenco, the municipality in Mexico State where residents have spent years fighting against the erection of a new airport whose construction would have devastating consequences for the water table. (“We really need to ally ourselves with the Atenco struggle,” one Asamblea member tells another over cups of horchata. “If they drain that basin, it’s going to screw over all of us.”) Later that day, two visitors from the Las Abejas collective in Acteal, Chiapas, where police massacred 45 indigenous Zapatista sympathizers in December 1997, share stories of their community’s current struggles. One Friday in mid-May, Doña Fili arrives at the sit-in with a single long-stemmed red rose and a laminated photo of Javier Valdez, the Sinaloan journalist famed for writing about the drug war and government corruption. He had been killed one year and one day ago. She goes about making a humble shrine on the plastic table at the front of the tent: she props up the photo on some volcanic rocks from the Pedregales, lights a candle, places the rose on top and places a jar of spring water next to the arrangement.

This week, their guests are a group of farmers from Sinaloa who are fighting for access to water to irrigate their crops. Doña Fili begins the meeting welcoming the compañeros. Today, too, they welcome “a guest who accompanies us spiritually.” They dedicate the meeting to Javier Valdez, who they explain was a part of the Pedregales community when he studied at UNAM in the 80s. Doña Fili recounts how he always helped them carry water, how despite his university education he remained humble, how he marched with them for disappeared people, how he became a part of the community. Moments like these evoke the expansiveness of the struggle in the Pedregales. Though Valdez became known for writing about the drug war, his life’s work overlaps the Asamblea’s. Narco violence, disappearances, corruption, privation of land and water rights—they’re all facets of what the Asamblea, and leftists of their ilk, simply call el mal gobierno. This is about more than water. The struggle stretches from indigenous communities in Chiapas to campesinos in Sinaloa and beyond. It stretches back centuries. It is about dignity; it is about self-determination. It is about, as Doña Fili so often repeats, historical memory. This spring is a symbol: of colonization, centuries of robbery, erasure of an entire continent’s people and memory. As the Sinaloan farmers end their presentation, the whole tent erupts in yet another practiced chant: “El agua es vida, y la vida se defiende”—“Water is life, and life is to be defended.”</s>This article was originally published on ETFTrends.com.

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