MEXICO CITY — Local governments across Mexico pushed back Monday against President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s call to reopen the economy in some 300 townships that do not have active cases of coronavirus, with leaders saying they preferred to wait until June before resuming normal activities.
Mexico,
which has reported 51,633 total cases and 5,332 deaths, has seen a steep climb
in new infections. Front-line doctors fear that a premature reopening could
lead to a second wave of infections — a scenario that recently played out in
Chile and Guatemala, where governments had to roll back reopening plans.
But
López Obrador has been pressing to reactivate the economy. In addition to
opening virus-free communities, his health advisers have said that the mining,
construction and automotive industries could resume operations as early as
Monday.
The
country’s lockdown — which began in March — will remain in place, but those
industries will be allowed to return to production because Mexico’s top
advisory body on the pandemic, the General Health Council, had decided to
classify them as “essential activities.”
However,
in re-opening plans presented Monday, authorities said factories planning to
reopen should use social distancing, temperature screening and health
questionnaires rather than any new increase in COVID-19 testing to protect
employees. Mexico, a country of 125 million people, has performed only about
150,000 tests so far, a very low rate in comparison to other countries.
“Today
productive social activity has already started to open where it was agreed, and
they can start classes,” López Obrador said. “We are talking about around 300
townships where there are no infections.”
A
General Motors plant in the central state of Guanajuato told workers that one
shift would return to operations Monday. Workers must wear masks and glasses at
all times and be clean shaven.
“Measures
that seem extreme in the city are taken here because the circumstances here are
also extreme,” Pascual said from Guelatao, Oaxaca. “There are no doctors. To
get to a basic hospital can be five hours on dirt road. And they are
communities without phones, without internet, highly marginalized and
discriminated against.”
The
communities protected themselves because of an early information campaign that
explained the virus and its dangers. The confusion started with conflicting
messages from the federal government.
If the
federal government tells people in these communities that things are all right,
Pascual fears they will start traveling to the state capital.
“If you
open it, once the (infections) start, it’s going to be catastrophic for us
because the mechanisms to treat a case of COVID don’t exist here,” she said.
In neighboring
Guerrero, Gov. Hector Astudillo said it remained unclear when students could
return to classes.
“We are
not going to return to classes on the 18th in any township, and there aren’t
conditions to do it June 1 either,” he said. Guerrero had 12 townships on the
federal government’s approved list, but Astudillo said that really it was 10,
because two were adjacent to communities in Oaxaca with confirmed cases.
The
state’s mining and construction sectors were also preparing for a June 1 start,
Astudillo said.
At least
some townships that were approved to restart activities in the southern state
of Chiapas also decided to wait to open schools. But there was notably more
traffic in the streets in some of those communities.
The
western state of Jalisco also kept schools closed in its approved communities
but allowed work to resume in some sectors of the economy.
Gov.
Enrique Alfaro, who has publicly disagreed with some moves by federal health
officials, announced that some “non-essential” businesses that do not generate
crowds, as well as services like plumbing and landscaping and beauty salons
would be allowed to reopen.
“Here
there are not townships that open and others that don’t,” Alfaro said, noting
that the issue should not be for a Mexico City bureaucrat to decide. “It’s a
serious mistake this idea of opening some townships and not others. That
decision isn’t going to happen in Jalisco, nor be followed.”
The
northern state of Chihuahua said none of its townships on the federal
government’s list would reopen because they were close to Ciudad Juarez, the
sprawling border city that has been hit with the virus. Gov. Javier Corral
cited the tight relationship with El Paso, Texas, and the cross-border activity
it entails in saying that none of the handful of Chihuahua towns on the list
would reopen yet.
The
precariousness of the president’s plans was displayed Sunday night, when López
Obrador’s point man on the virus, Health Undersecretary Hugo López-Gatell, said
in the middle of his daily COVID-19 news conference that he was removing a
township from the list.
During
the presentation, he had received word from Guerrero’s health secretary that
one of the approved communities now had an infection, he said.
By the
end of his news conference, a reporter alerted him to another community in
Oaxaca that may have to be removed from the list. He said it was going to be a
dynamic situation.
“If this
happens tomorrow, it will be suspended where cases are detected,” López-Gatell
said.
https://wtop.com/latin-america/2020/05/local-leaders-resist-mexico-presidents-push-for-reopening/
***AP
writer Mark Stevenson in Mexico City contributed to this report.