 For more videos on people's struggles, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. Hello and welcome to People's Dispatch. Mexico currently sends 7th in terms of confirmed cases and 4th in terms of covid-related deaths. Today we're joined by Magdiel Sanchez-Cruz of Juenes and de la Regencia Nacional who will be discussing with us some of the factors behind this rapid increase in cases. Hello, thank you. Let's start with the basics. How has the situation been in the pandemic in Mexico? From March to here, we already said that Mexico is in the 7th place in terms of cases and 4th in terms of confirmed cases. So could you give a little bit of time? Well, as you say, the situation in Mexico is quite worrying. It is one of the countries that, although at the beginning there were not so many cases, it has been increasing in an accelerated way. The calculations that we have, at least yesterday, are already talking about 41,190 deaths and 362,274 infections. It is also worth saying that there is a great lack of data on these data. There is very little precision on the data. These are data that are presented daily at a press conference all afternoon. However, they do not include a daily count, because each one of the hospitals makes a report and the data they get to present in the day, they have to have sometimes 10 days, 20 days of phase, right? So it is calculated, and there are different studies that have talked about this, that the number of infections and deaths in real Mexico due to COVID is double, right? That is a topic that is also much more alarming, right? So we would be talking without wanting to be alarmists, which at least there are now about 80,000 deaths, really, right? And this is also given in a context of a very destroyed health system and the health of the Mexicans, Mexicans, quite sick, right? In the health issue, for example, and there are many reports of health workers who do not have enough medical equipment, that they do not have, for example, a diagnostic team, laboratories, enough, in some cases the elevator of the hospital does not work. It is said that hospitalization in Mexico is not so bad, that it is between 50, 60 percent occupied, but when you talk to doctors to corroborate these different medical places, they say, we do not understand how these numbers were, because our hospital is saturated. Mexico has, in addition to all this data, very few medical tests, right? If you are sick, you have COVID symptoms, and what they ask you is to call a phone, give you medical assistance, that is, they ask you if you feel sick, the symptoms, etc. And they say, if you are not without being able to breathe and you still have all the other symptoms, if you feel very bad, do not go to any hospital because you are going to get infected. Stay better at home. There have been testimonies also of people who have any other type of symptoms, perhaps not the ones of COVID, and I get to a hospital and it is rejected because they are giving priority to the people of COVID and there have been deaths of other types of things, because they are not admitted or they tell you, so that we can get you in, we have to guarantee that you do not have the virus, right? So they do an exam and what is going to happen is that the person has already died, so it is a very serious situation and it has to do with a health system that has been dismantling in recent years and with a very serious health problem, which is what is called comorbidities, right? The other factors that help that COVID is more serious, which is overweight, diabetes, hypertension, etc., that in Mexico they are very extended, they have grown a lot, but it does not have to do with that growth, let's say, simply because of a bad citizen behavior, as it suddenly wants to see, right? But in a direct way it has to do with how the food consumption patterns have been modified in a country that also has a source of origin, of the corn, for example, and of all the food around it, that they have to see directly with the imposition of the North American commercial model, from the TLC of 1994 and that in the end ends up being useful for the Mexican daily life because they are food with a large amount of calories or with a large amount of sugars to give them energy, then people and that now they are cheaper and easy to get, unlike the traditional Mexican food, which is very sophisticated, which takes a lot of work, which is complicated to do, etc. So that is growing a lot and that is making it a very strong topic, in addition to one more topic, which is the environmental damage that also affects the health, which also has to do with how in the last 20 years, at least, all the Mexican laws were modified to be permissible for any company, especially these benefits for the telecom, but also the Europeans, for other treaties with the European Union, to be able to install themselves in Mexico and be able to devastate the environment as an economic comparative advantage to be able to make Mexico what they cannot do in their countries, right? So that happens and it happens that we have a government that has reiteratedly denied, first of all, that from the start the existence of COVID or relativized it, the rest of the importance, that after that something that was done in a direct way or in a contradictory way, suddenly taking certain measures of care, that people do not go out of their homes, but at the same time encouraging people to reactivate the economy, right? And also pressured by the United States, that I oblige them to open very early, we lasted almost formally in strict quarantine, it lasted what was going on, everything that would be April and May, only two months, they were a little less, really, it was the strict quarantine and then the economy has been opening, a pressure by the United States on the subject of the industry, automotive, aerospace, of all the machines that work on the border, there are many cases of people infected on the border and another that has to do directly with the tourism, it needs to open tourism, because there are communities that think only of tourism, then it begins to open and there we have that until May 31 we had only 10 deaths and on June 1 the new normality is announced, we already returned, they say the pandemic has not ended but we are already in a new normality and from there they begin to shoot themselves to that we have today 41,000 dead, obviously I say in the counted numbers