Thread: Some personal news.

We have just left Mexico after 22 wonderful years there with The Wall Street Journal. I am now in London with Helena and the kids and will be UK bureau chief at the WSJ. As Monty Python says, “And now for something completely different.” I will continue to watch Latin America and Mexico in particular with keen interest, and still post stuff about the region, too, if that’s OK. But my feed will also have a healthy dose of UK and Europe, too.

THREAD: Mexico's gov't of Lopez Obrador wants to jail 31 eminent scientists - from astrophysicists to microbiologists - in a max security federal prison that housed "El Chapo" Guzman and still holds some of country's most dangerous criminals.

wsj.com/articles/mexic… via @WSJ The scientists are members of an advisory body that helps the gov't get an impartial view from the scientific community on government policy and the direction of Mexican scientific research. Since its creation in 2002, it carried out that role with no problem.

Mexico's excess deaths through early March stood at 444,772, compared to its official Covid tally of 196,272.

Bear in mind the top health official in charge of the pandemic, @HLGatell, predicted 6,000 deaths initially.

isalud.insp.mx/t/UISP/views/E… It's worth re-reading past stories with his confident (some might say arrogant?) predictions over how things would play out. Here's our story from a year ago with @HLGatell saying it was likely no worse than the flu:

wsj.com/articles/senio…

Thread: Mexico's president AMLO made his career railing against the country's legendary corruption, describing what he said was a "mafia of power' between wealthy businessmen and corrupt politicians. This story gives a detailed look at how that works.
wsj.com/articles/how-a… Business stories with complicated financial transactions can make your eyes glaze over. But if you stand back and connect the dots on this story, as @PerezEnMexico and @RWhelanWSJ do here capably, it's shockingly brazen. It says so much about Mexico's crony capitalism.

Thread: Brazil is ranked number two in the world lists of Covid fatalities, behind the USA. But that is almost certainly wrong. Mexico is almost surely number two. And in this story, we explain why. wsj.com/articles/29-fa… via @WSJ Mexico is failing to accurately record the majority of those who die from Covid. How do we know? Because the surge of excess deaths in 2020 in Mexico was roughly 2.4 times the official Covid toll. On Dec 12, excess deaths were 274,486 compared to Covid toll of 113,704.

THREAD: Since the issue of Mexico's 2006 election has come up again given AMLO's refusal to recognize Biden until all the legal issues around the election are settled, I thought I'd share my experiences during that vote b/c I covered it closely. AMLO lost the election by about 234,000 votes out of nearly 42 million - a slender 0.56% of the vote (and a similar margin to Biden's win in Pennsylvania). Most pre-election polls showed AMLO winning, but others showed a toss up, and the race clearly tightened at the end.

Short thread: Do you care about what's happening to the Amazon? Then read this story about how Amata SA tried to make a business of sustainably harvesting hardwoods - cutting down only one tree per acre so the forest could regrow. wsj.com/articles/brazi… via @WSJ The Brazilian gov't believes that legal logging is the best way to save the forest from illegal loggers, who clear cut everything. In that sense, they are right. More legal logging will provide jobs and help keep trees that help ecosystem and suck up carbon.

Mexico's president was elected for one very good reason: His promise to end a culture of corruption that has long held Mexico back. But two years in, it increasingly looks like he's unwilling or unable to deliver. wsj.com/articles/mexic… via @WSJ We have a pretty solid body of evidence building up: He has steadfastly ignored the institutional solutions to corruption. Rather than name a strong, independent anti-corruption prosecutor, he named a party hack. Funding cut for transparency agency and elsewhere.

Short thread about this story below. We heard from a radio report this week that Mexico was running out of death certificates due to Covid (and a bureaucratic screw up). wsj.com/articles/coron… We confirmed the story. Then we called the Health Ministry and the coronavirus czar @HLGatell for comment on Thursday morning. They said they were working on it, and would get back to us.

HILO: Muchos en México han escuchado del brote de Covid en La Central de Abasto, el mercado mas grande de America Latina. Pero lo que tal vez no han escuchado es que, en muchos sentidos, es una historia de éxito. Aquí les va el porque... wsj.com/articles/mexic… via @WSJ En tiempos de pandemia, el mercado podría ser una pesadilla y convertirse en una catástrofe humanitaria. En días pico llegan hasta medio millón de visitantes y se dispersan por todo el Pais, potencialmente dispersando el virus por toda la parte central del país.

Quisiera compartir algo personal. Y disculpas por adelantado. Mi trabajo (y pasión) consiste en cubrir América Latina para el WSJ. A veces hay gente que responde a nuestras notas duras o comentarios críticos por Twitter diciendo algo como, “¿Por qué no te preocupas por tu país?” Nunca respondo, porque sé que la gran mayoría de la gente que lee un diario como el WSJ son cosmopolitas y quieren una perspectiva desde afuera de su país o región - una perspectiva idealmente independiente. No siempre lo logramos, pero hacemos un esfuerzo.

HILO: Hay mas muertes por Covid de los que dice el gobierno Mexicano? Casi seguro que si. Hoy salieron dos notas importantes sobre el tema en la prensa internacional. @jmontesWSJ reviso 105 actas de defunción en varios registros civiles de la CDMX. Encontró esto: Solo cuatro personas habían muerto oficialmente por Covid, porque se sometieron a prueba. Pero 52 murieron sospechosos de la enfermedad.

THREAD: Because Mexico takes a year (!) to publish mortality data, @jmontesWSJ pored over death certificates in Mexico City to see if Mexico was undercounting Covid deaths. The short answer: yes. wsj.com/articles/death… via @WSJ He obtained 105 death certificates filed over two days. Only four had Covid as the official cause of death. 52 more had "suspected Covid" or similar written next to official cause acute respiratory infection. But those aren't counted as official deaths by the gov't.

THREAD: Mexico’s coronavirus czar @HLGatell told us some surprising things in an interview this week. Among them: He is not convinced the virus is any more lethal than the flu.
wsj.com/articles/senio… via @WSJ He also said he expected that while two-thirds of Mexicans will eventually catch the virus, just 0.5% will get sick enough in some way to notice. Of the 0.5% who get sick, eight in ten would be mild cases.

THREAD: Some politicians and folks on the left in US, Europe and Latam wonder if what is happening in Venezuela is a coup against de facto President Nicolas Maduro. Let’s use an analogy that might help. Imagine a world where US President Donald Trump stacked the Supreme Court and other institutions with political hacks. The midterms come, and Democrats win a resounding 2/3 majority in Congress. Stunned, Trump gets courts to declare Congress null and void, ignores its decisions.

THREAD: For many years, I believed Africa probably had the world's highest murder rates. Or maybe the Mideast. But that simply isn't so (the Mideast is actually remarkably peaceful in terms of criminal violence). The region with by far the highest homicide tally is Latin America. Unfortunately, few people in Latin America are aware of this. So we set out to explore the problem and see what we could learn about Latam's murder epidemic. Here was the first story in a series: wsj.com/articles/400-m…