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An attack on a bar in Mexico’s Gulf coast city of Coatzacoalcos killed 25 people and injured about a dozen, officials said Wednesday, and they said it was apparently overseen by a man who had been recently arrested but released. “The criminals went in, closed the doors, the emergency exits, and set fire to the place,” President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said at his daily morning news conference.
A deluge of hail engulfed the outskirts of Guadalajara on Sunday, half-burying vehicles in ice and damaging nearly 200 homes. The freak hail storm in one of Mexico’s largest cities came as summer temperatures hovered around 31 degrees Centigrade (88 Fahrenheit) in recent days. At least six neighborhoods were covered in ice up to 2 meters (2 yards) deep. Civil Protection personnel and soldiers brought out machinery to clear the roads.
An infestation of a seaweed-like algae along some of Mexico’s most visited Caribbean beaches has pitted the local community against the president, who has described the problem as a “minor issue”. In a long-running issue attributed by many researchers to climate change, sargassum has covered the popular white sandbanks, turning the pristine waters brown and leaving a strong odor as it decomposes, alarming residents, businesses and tourists.
Luxurious properties seized from drug cartel leaders have been sold at auction in Mexico City. Houses with swimming pools and escape tunnels, a large ranch and an apartment where a cartel leader was killed were all up for sale. Mexico’s President Andres Manuel López Obrador had pledged that profits from the auction would go towards those affected by drug gang violence. But only nine of the 27 properties on offer actually sold.
The U.S.-Mexico migration agreement reached last week includes a regional asylum plan and Mexico’s commitment to examine and potentially change its laws, according to a copy held up to journalists by President Donald Trump on Tuesday. The deal lays out “a regional approach to burden-sharing in relation to the processing of refugee status claims to migrants,” the document said. A Reuters photograph of the folded document, taken as Trump held it up, allowed reporters to read parts of it.
U.S. President Donald Trump defended his administration’s deal with Mexico against criticism that there were no major new commitments to stem a flow of Central American migrants crossing into the United States, and said on Sunday more details would soon be released. The deal, announced on Friday after three days of talks in Washington, averted Trump’s threatened imposition of 5% import tariffs on all Mexican goods that had been due to start on Monday unless Mexico committed to do more to help reduce an increase in migrants arriving at the U.S. southern border.
Mexico is proposing to send national guard troops to its southern border with Guatemala as it seeks to stem the flow of undocumented migrants and reach a deal with the U.S., Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard said. Mexican officials are in talks with U.S. cabinet members in Washington this week to prevent President Donald Trump from slapping a 5% tariff on all imports from Mexico on June 10. Trump said last month he’d scale up the duties incrementally until they reach 25% on Oct. 1 if Mexico doesn’t stop migrants from entering the U.S.
President Donald Trump said on Thursday the United States will impose a 5% tariff on all goods coming from Mexico starting on June 10 until illegal immigration across the southern border is stopped. “The Tariff will gradually increase until the Illegal Immigration problem is remedied, at which time the Tariffs will be removed,” Trump said on Twitter. “Mexico’s passive cooperation in allowing this mass incursion constitutes an emergency and extraordinary threat to the national security and economy of the United States,” Trump said in the statement.
Mexico’s president has sent a letter to Spain’s King Felipe VI and Pope Francis urging them to apologize for human rights abuses committed during the conquest of the region 500 years ago. Andrés Manuel López Obrador said the indigenous peoples of Mexico had been the victims of massacres. Spain rejected his call and called for a “constructive perspective” instead. The territory which now makes up Mexico was under Spanish rule for some 300 years before gaining independence in the early 19th Century.
President Trump announced on Monday that he alerted US military that the migrant caravan approaching from Mexico constituted a ‘national emergency,’ asserting that aid to Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras will be cut off. The National Hurricane Center (NHC) warned of ‘potentially catastrophic’ Hurricane Wilma which is set to make landfall in Mexico on Tuesday.