Mexico's president calls march against mass tourism 'xenophobic.' Critics blame government failures
The criticism comes after Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum alleged that Friday's protest was marked by xenophobia, reviving a debate over an influx of Americans in the city.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
15 hours ago
- Yahoo
Police make six arrests at asylum hotel protest
Police made six arrests at a protest outside a hotel in London that has been used to house asylum seekers. Protesters gathered outside the Britannia International Hotel in Canary Wharf on Sunday afternoon, with some setting off pink flares and waving England flags. Some demonstrators carried a banner that said: 'We're not far right but we're not far wrong. Don't gamble with our lives. Stop the boats.' The Metropolitan Police said six arrests were made for breaching Section 14 Public Order conditions, possession of Class B drugs, and assaulting an emergency worker. In a post on X, the Metropolitan Police said: 'We have imposed conditions using Section 14 of the Public Order Act to prevent serious disruption at the protests in Canary Wharf. 'The group protesting against the use of the hotel by asylum seekers have been instructed to remain on the pavement opposite the Britannia Hotel.' The hotel has been the site of numerous anti-migrant protests in recent weeks.
Yahoo
a day ago
- Yahoo
Mexico, Guatemala and Belize to create tri-national nature reserve to protect Mayan jungle
Mexico Maya Train GUATEMALA CITY (AP) — The leaders of Mexico, Guatemala and Belize announced on Friday that they were creating a tri-national nature reserve to protect the Mayan rain forest following a meeting during which they also discussed expanding a Mexican train line criticized for slicing through jungle habitat. The nature reserve would stretch across jungled areas of southern Mexico and northern parts of the two Central American nations, encompassing more than 14 million acres (5.7 million hectares). Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum called the move 'historic' and said it would create the second biggest nature reserve in Latin America, behind the Amazon rain forest. 'This is one of Earth's lungs, a living space for thousands of species with an invaluable cultural legacy that we should preserve with our eyes on the future,' Sheinbaum said, standing side-by-side with Guatemalan President Bernardo Arévalo and Belize Prime Minister Johnny Briceño. The announcement was met with cautious celebration by environmental groups like Mexico-based Selvame, who have sharply criticized the Mexican government and Sheinbaum's allies in recent years for environmental destruction wrought by megaprojects like a controversial train line, known as the Maya Train. The group said in statement that the reserve was a 'monumental step for conservation" but that it hoped that the reserve was more than just 'symbolic.' 'We're in a race against the clock. Real estate and construction companies are invading the jungle, polluting our ecosystems, and endangering both the water we consume, and the communities that depend on it,' the group wrote. It called on Sheinbaum's government to put an effective monitoring system in place to 'stop any destructive activities.' At the same time, the leaders also discussed a proposal by Mexico to expand the very train line those environmental groups have long fought from southern Mexico to Guatemala and Belize. The thousand-mile train currently runs in a rough loop around Mexico's Yucatan peninsula, and was created with the purpose of connecting Mexico's popular Caribbean resorts with remote jungle and Mayan archaeological sites in rural areas. However, it has fueled controversy and legal battles as it sliced through swathes of jungle and damaged a delicate cave system in Mexico that serves as the area's main source of water. In a span of four years, authorities cut down approximately 7 million trees, according to government figures. Sheinbaum's mentor and predecessor former President Andrés Manuel López Obrador fast-tracked the train project without detailed environmental studies. The populist repeatedly ignored orders from judges to stop construction due to environmental concerns and publicly attacked environmentalists warning about damage done to fragile ecosystems. López Obrador first proposed the idea of expanding the train to Guatemala, and Sheinbaum has continued to push for the project. On Friday, she said the extension would usher in development in rural areas with few economic opportunities. But Arévalo was already on record saying Guatemala's laws would not allow it to be built through protected jungle in the north of the country. The Guatemalan leader said on Friday he sees the economic potential of the project to the jungle region but remained adamant that the construction should not come with the kind of environmental damage that it inflicted in Mexico. 'Connecting the Maya Train with Guatemala and eventually with Belize is a vision we share,' Arévalo said. But 'I've made it very clear at all times that the Maya Train will not pass through any protected area.' He said there would also have to be careful environmental studies and the two presidents looked at an alternative proposal that would have the train loop instead of directly cut through the jungles of Guatemala and Belize. It remained unclear how the train's potential route would be affected by the new protected area. —— Janetsky reported from Mexico City. Solve the daily Crossword
Yahoo
a day ago
- Yahoo
Britain's shameful past holds a vital message about immigration culture today
'East of Aldgate one walks into a foreign town', foreigners 'swamping whole areas once populated by English people'. The 'substitution of a foreign for an English population' has created 'increasing bitterness of feeling'. No, not Robert Jenrick or Nigel Farage, but William Evans-Gordon, the Tory MP for Stepney, fulminating in 1903 against the arrival of Jewish refugees fleeing pogroms in eastern Europe. 'Not a day passes but English families are ruthlessly turned out to make room for the foreign invaders,' he told parliament. Evans-Gordon was a founder of the British Brothers' League (BBL), a powerful anti-immigration movement with the slogan 'England for the English', and the driving force behind the 1905 Aliens Act, designed to keep out Jewish refugees. Where previous arrivals had 'merged in the population', Evans-Gordon wrote in The Alien Immigrant, 'the Hebrew colony' formed a 'permanently distinct block – a race apart', refusing to 'assimilate' but coming 'like an army of locusts, eating up the English inhabitants or driving them out'. They brought with them 'colonies of foreign crime". In certain courts in London, 'English was hardly heard'. According to Evans-Gordon: 'The proportion of aliens who live by vice is inordinately high'. They indulged in 'depraved' sexual crimes, 'which, but for them, would hardly be known in this country'. Evans-Gordon's themes echo across the century. Arguments about populations being replaced, denunciations of asylum seekers as 'invaders', the insistence that migrants are unassimilable, accusations of mass criminality and depravity, are all wearily familiar. One can even hear in Evans-Gordon the contempt for what many now call the 'liberal elite'. The 'wholesale displacement of our people,' he wrote, 'is regarded with much philosophic calm by their fellow countrymen who live at a distance, whose homes have not been invaded, and who are not subjected to the daily terror of being turned into the streets.' That might have been Matthew Goodwin. It is not difficult to recognise today how this portrayal of unassimilable Jews draws on deep-rooted antisemitic tropes. It draws also upon ideas of cultural homogeneity and difference still in play today. Across the century, critics have always portrayed immigrants as destructive of local culture. Cultures, though, are not sealed containers containing a fixed essence that migrants pollute. They are porous vessels, internally conflicted, and changing over time. Nor are individuals fixed by their cultural inheritance, but can also develop and change. The Taliban has imposed upon Afghanistan deeply reactionary norms, including about the treatment of women, that draw upon one strand of Afghan culture, but which is contested by those for whom Afghan culture means something very different. Half a century ago, Afghanistan was far more liberal than it is today. It is why so many resisted the Taliban and why so many now seek to flee. British culture was far more conservative half a century ago than it is today. The social views of conservative Muslims would have, ironically, been closer to that of the British mainstream in the 1970s. Even commentators who now rail against liberalism have absorbed the liberal transformation of the past few decades and, indeed, deploy it as a weapon against migrants from conservative cultures. Cultures are not sealed containers. They are porous vessels, internally conflicted and changing over time For many critics, African and Asian migrants, and Muslims in particular, cannot be accommodated within the 'Judeo-Christian' tradition that defines the west. Yet, as Evans-Gordon's screed reveals, barely a century ago Jewish beliefs and practices were seen as being as incompatible with British values as many now deem Muslims to be. The idea of the 'Judeo-Christian' tradition is of recent vintage. It became deployed in the 1930s, particularly in America, by those attempting to build public support for the struggle against Nazism, suggesting as it did a common civilisation between Christians and Jews. From the 1950s it was repurposed as a weapon in the cold war, President Eisenhower describing 'Judeo-Christian civilisation' as the 'fundamental concept' separating America from the atheist Soviet Union. In the 21st century, especially after 9/11, the use of the concept changed again, becoming primarily a means of depicting Islam as standing outside the western tradition and, more recently, of gaining support for Israel in its war in Gaza. Jewish thought has unquestionably played an important role in the shaping of what we now call the western tradition. That was denied for much of the past 2,000 years. When finally acknowledged, it was in a distorted form, to buttress particular political projects. And both the denial and the acknowledgement became means of defining certain immigrants, previously Jews, now Muslims, as not belonging. Like many contemporary critics, Evans-Gordon elided his deprecation of immigrant culture with claims that they deprived British workers of basic material needs, from housing to jobs. Again, from today's vantage point, we can recognise the falsity of such arguments. The material deprivation Evans-Gordon described was real, but its root cause lay not with Jewish refugees but with exploitative bosses, unscrupulous landlords and indifferent politicians. What transformed working-class lives in the early 20th century was not restrictions on Jewish immigration but the growth of trade unions, an upsurge of collective action and the development of political parties and movements that challenged inequalities. Jewish workers, particularly in east London, were at the heart of these organisations and movements, helping forge solidarity across sectarian divides and in so doing renewing working-class culture. Today, as a new generation of Evans-Gordons try to colonise our attention, that is the most important message to echo across the century. Photograph by Jewish Chronicle/Heritage Images/Getty
