While Brazil has sown up the unenviable title of the worst coronavirus hotspot in Latin America, Mexico has steered a similar course to disaster in the face of the pandemic. As Brazil’s coronavirus count climbs to well over 1.1 million confirmed cases and closing in on 53 thousand fatalities, the galloping toll in Mexico—60% the size of Brazil population-wise—now registers 191,410 cases and 23,377 deaths (as at 24-June-2020).
(Source: www.lonelyplanet.com)
False security?
Among some Mexicans there seem to be a sense that the country’s demographics which are skewed toward the young—around 85% of the population is under 55—may act as a barrier against coronavirus. This confidence may be misplaced due to several factors: pre-existing health conditions in Mexico which affect younger cohorts as well—make the population more vulnerable to the ravages of coronavirus, as the table below indicates [‘Many young Mexican at risk from Covid-19’, (James Blears), Vatican News, 31-March-2020, www.vaticannews.va]. the death-rate from COVID-19 among maquiladora workers in the border region of Baja California was found to be 25 times higher for the age bracket 40-49 than in the corresponding San Diego County, [‘COVID-19 killing young maquiladora workers, study shows’, (Salvador Rivera), Border Report, 11-Jun-2020, www.borderreport.com].
A league of populist leader ‘bedfellows’?
The way Mexico under its president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, has approached the pandemic has disturbing parallels with that of Brazil’s leader Bolsonaro, and with the US under Trump. Despite a difference of ideological orientation—Obrador (who’s commonly known within Mexico as AMLO) is a Left-populist whereas Bolsonaro and Trump are Right-populists—the Mexican leader has pursued much the same course with similar outcomes. AMLO’s government was slow to engage in the fight against COVID-19 in the critical early period. The virus apparently entered Mexico via overseas returnees, primarily wealthier Mexicans returning from business trips to Italy and skiing holidays in Colorado, and then spread to low-income groups [‘Mexico’s Central de Abasto: How coronavirus tore through Latin America’s largest market’, (Mary Beth Sheridan), Washington Post, 21-Jun-2020, www.washingtonpost.com].
🔺 AMLO, pressing the flesh (Photo: Mexico’s Presidency Handouts/Reuters)
How not to contain a pandemic
Like his US and Brazilian counterparts, AMLO justified his inaction by being dismissive of the disease, continually downplaying its risk to people, and he was negligent by example. After the outbreak Obrador toured the country, holding rallies sans face masks, nonchalantly meeting and greeting supporters, freely shaking hands, embracing people and even kissing them✱. The president’s advice to the Venezuelan people was simply to continue to “live life as usual”…until late March he was encouraging people to go out, attend fiestas, dine in restaurants and go shopping, airports remained open◘ – a clear indicator that Obrador’s priority was the health of the economy rather than the health of the public [‘Poverty and Populism put Latin America at the centre of the pandemic’, (Michael Stott & Andres Schipano), Financial Times, 14-Jun-2020, www.amp.ft.com; ‘AMLO’s feeble response to COVID-19 in Mexico’, (Vanda Felbab-Brown), Brookings, 30-Mar-2020, www.brookings.edu].
Abject lack of medical preparedness.
Obrador’s dangerous indifference to the crisis extended to a half-hearted medical intervention. Testing for COVID-19 has remained woefully low, no program of widespread testing or of contact tracing – these vital measures dismissed as being impractical for a population of 128 million (Sheridan; Stott & Schipano). The reluctance to test extensively is no doubt also related to Mexico’s health care incapacity. Despite having gone through the experience of the 2009 H1N1 influenza outbreak, subsequent Mexican administrations have permitted the country’s health sector to run down, funding to hospitals and medical centres have been cut by millions. Mexico has only 1.4 hospital beds for every 1,000 persons and just over 2,000 ventilators all up. The shortfall extends to physicians, medical equipment including PPE and coronavirus test kits [‘Mexico’s coronavirus-sceptical president is setting up his own country for a health crisis’, (Alex Ward), Vox, 28-Mar-2020, www.vox.com].
Shooting the messenger
Inevitably AMLO has copped a lot of internal criticism for his irresponsible response to the crisis. Rather than taking positive measures to try to undo the disaster of his own creation, Obrador has gone on the attack against the Mexican independent media. Again invoking the Trump playbook, he has railed against the “fake news” and “Twitter bots” who have opposed his government’s handling of the situation. Independent investigations in fact have brought to light the clandestine activities of Notimex (the state-owned news agency) which has created a network of bots and fake accounts to discredit prominent journalists and label them as ‘criminal’ [‘Mexican President López Obrador frets about the spreading virus of fake news, but not COVID-19’, (José Miguel Vivanco), Dallas News,16-Jun-2020, www.dallasnews.com].
AMLO has taken to giving regular video ‘sermons’ to the masses (he calls them “Decalogues to emerge from coronavirus and face the new reality”)…these are not as you might surmise updates on how the government is attempting to counter the pandemic, but an uninspiring mish-mash of banalities about staying positive, eating corn and getting sun and fresh air. With the unchecked escalating death toll from the disease, many believe Obrador has given up any pretence to even trying to combat the virus [‘Mexico’s president has given up in the fight against the coronavirus’, (León Krauze), Washington Post, 19-Jun-2020, www.washingtonpost.com]. In this most unpropitious context AMLO is now taking an imprudent gamble by lifting restrictions – despite the curve of Mexican infections continuing to shoot upwards.
🔻 Mega-mercado, Mexico City
Footnote: Mexico City epicentre
Mexico City accounts for about one quarter of all COVID-19 deaths in Mexico. The offical counts however are only starting points to explain the catastrophe. A Mexico City study by Nexos magazine found that there was an “excess mortality” of more than 20% unaccounted for by the official figures [‘8,000 ‘excess deaths’ in Mexico City as coronavirus rages: study’, Ajazeera, 26-May-2020, www.aljazeera.com]. One of the capital’s biggest clusters is the wholesale mega-market, the Central de Abasto. The enormous mercado providing 80% of the city’s food is a petri-dish for the virus which has cut a scythe through its 90,000-strong workforce, infecting its tomateros, chilli vendors and other workers whose need to keep working is often greater than their fear of the pandemicφ. The vendors and carters have another reason for continuing working even when they become ill – working class Mexicans are accustomed to poor quality health care and often harbour a distrust of hospitals (Sheridan).
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(Image source: www.studentnewsdaily.com)
Venezuela: Showcase numbers but a lack of transparency
Although the available statistics relating to Venezuela don’t reflect the dramatic numbers in Mexico, the situation in the South American country is peer bit as parlous. Venezuela has fessed up to 4,186 cases and 35 deaths (24-Jun-2020), but these figures have little credibility with independent observers. Venezuela has done very limited testing for the disease with the testing data guarded very carefully by the government [‘Hunger, Infection, and Repression: Venezuela’s Coronavirus Calamity’, (Stephanie Taladrid), The New Yorker, 29-May-2020, www.newyorker.com]. Doubters outside the country have noted that Venezuela’s health system was already in a state of collapse before COVID-19 arrived, citing as evidence: the country‘s functioning intensive care beds are estimated to number between 80 and 163; nil or intermittent supply to water to two-thirds of hospitals; power cuts off at regular intervals; shortages of gloves and face masks in 60% of hospitals; 76% of hospitals shortage of soap and 90% were short of sanitising gel [‘Venezuela’s Covid-19 death toll claims ‘not credible’, human rights group says’, (Tom Phillips), The Guardian, 27-May-2020, www.theguardian.com].
🔺 Maduro: “People, we are identity”
President Maduro—already embroiled in a political and socio-economic crisis acerbated by long-term US trade sanctions on Venezuela—imposed a national lockdown in March. A side benefit to the lockdown (now extended to July) is that it allows the regime more scope to crack down on its critics…the obvious targets being opposition politicians and increasingly journalists, doctors and nurses who report adversely on Maduro’s handling of the pandemic (especially if they query the reported official numbers). [‘Venezuela’s Zulia State emerges as coronavirus hot spot’, Reuters, 24-Jun-2020, www.news.yahoo.com].
Footnote: Rich and poor, a widening of the divide
At the point of corona impact, the contrast between Venezuela’s masses and the elite have sharpened even more. The brunt of the economic crisis has fallen squarely on the poor and middle-class citizens – skyrocketing prices, scarcity of necessities, a greatly devalued Venezuelan bolivar, the oil price plunge (oil accounts for 98% of Venezuela’s export revenues), and over-reliance on the informal economy by the lower socio-economic classes [‘Why coronavirus could be catastrophic for Venezuela’, (Katy Watson & Vanessa Silva), BBC News, 12-Apr-2020, www.bbc.com]. With corruption, cronyism and nepotism ingrained in Venezuela, the Maduro regime and its acolytes—the heirs of Chavismoism—continue to benefit lavishly from black-market and other illicit financial activities◊ [‘Freedom in the World 2020: Venezuela’, Freedom House, www.freedomhouse.org].
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✱ AMLO preferring to travel and mingle accompanied only by his personal amulets for ‘protection’
◘ only in the last week of March did the government retreat a bit and start to urge the public to stay-at-home
φ the CDMX-run market only acted, bringing in health workers, ramping up testing and contact tracing, after workers starting dropping in significant numbers (Sheridan)…as with the rest of Mexico, too little, too late
◊ beneficiaries of this state largesse and privilege include the bolichicos, the wealthy children of the regime’s top leaders
The Universal Postal Union (UPU), (French: Union Postale Universelle), originally the “General Postal Union”, was established in 1874 with the task of laying down regulations and bringing uniformity to the setting of tariffs (including the transit costs) for mail exchanges between countries. Prior to it’s inception, a complicated, loose bilateral system prevailed where an individual country would have to establish postal treaties separately with each other country it wished to correspond with. Sometimes this involved calculating postage for each leg of the journey and finding mail forwarders in a third country if there was no direct delivery to the country of destination [‘Universal Postal Union’, 
The initial mid-19th century impetus to create such a global entity came from American frustrations at postal communication with Europe, especially with France, but the decisive thrust came from Heinrich von Stephan, a senior Prussian postal official from the North German Confederation (and later the Reichspost), whose advocacy prompted the Swiss government to host the inaugural international postal conference leading to the formation of the UPU.
UPU’s role also includes the resolving of any polemical issues that may arise between member nations. The great explosion in E-commerce trade has tended to exacerbate cost anomalies in postage tariffs. In 2018 US companies were paying twice as much to mail an item to a US customer than it cost China (and other subsidised Asian countries) to send items to the same US customer (
This issue aside, the habitually low-profile UPU has been largely free of controversy✶, but one other minor discordant note occurred in 1964 when the Fifteenth Congress of UPU voted by a large majority to expel South Africa from membership. This was controversial because several country delegates raised the objection that the action was unconstitutional, arguing that a member could only be expelled for violating UPU’s regulations. The South African delegate initially refused to budge but did so after other African delegates demanded his expulsion [“Universal Postal Union.” International Organization, vol. 20, no. 4, 1966, pp. 834–842. JSTOR,
The UPU has gone from a largely Eurocentric organisation in 1874 to a truly universal one today with about 192 countries of the world (plus territories) signed up۞. A number of other non-member states and territories get their mail routed through a third (member) country including Andorra (through France and Spain), Taiwan (through Japan and US), Kosovo (through Serbia), Northern Cyprus (through Turkey), Micronesia (through the US) and Somaliland (through Ethiopia) [‘List of members of the Universal Postal Union’, Wikipedia, 
