Last Thursday, officials reported the recovery of the last known victim of Mexico’s magnitude 7.1 earthquake, raising the total death toll to 369 (Wright 2017).
When you first meet Danielle Michon, she immediately stands out. Not just because she is a native French-Canadian native living in the small town of Valladolid, Mexico, but because she radiates positivity and compassion.
When many people think of the most devastating conflicts currently playing themselves out around the globe, they often jump to the war in Syria, Afghanistan or Yemen. Although Syria’s civil war did result in the most fatalities in 2016 (an estimated 50,000 people), the second-deadliest conflict occurred much closer to home and was accompanied by a shockingly low amount of reporting – Mexico’s drug war.
The body of Alonso Guillén, a missing 31-year-old Mexican immigrant living in Texas under the DACA program, was found on Sunday, September 3, in the floodwaters and wreckage left behind by Hurricane Harvey that week in Spring, Texas.
On August 13th Cándido Ríos Vazquez, a Mexican journalist, uploaded a video to his Facebook page. In it, he denounced a number of suspected corrupt government officials for illegal utilization of government funding and electoral fraud.
A certain atmosphere of “rehearsal” is always present when sub-national or mid-term legislative elections take place with a new race for the national executive already in sight. The electoral dispute for diverse state-level and municipal offices, including the governorship of Mexico’s homonymous metropolitan state (Edomex), on June 4th was no exception.
The combination of high levels of political violence with a relative low number of inter-state armed conflicts has been a secular trend of Latin American history. The 2017 Armed Conflict Survey of the London-based International Institute for International Studies (IIIS) confirms the continuity of that historical pattern –which also happens to confirm a global tendency.
Religion, as a belief system, interacts with virtually every socio-cultural manifestation, such as family, politics, law, economics, clothing, health, diet, and so on. Thus, religion may affect behavior, values, and even --among other things-- what in anthropology we call material culture.(1)
“To make it you have to be fully alive. I do my best to do that. I enjoy every moment because I believe that once we die, that’s it. We’re not coming back. Lovers come back. Styles come back. But time? It never comes”1.
