For the first time in U.S. history, Mexicans are no longer the number one group of people getting caught trying to cross the United States’ southern border. The Associated Press reports that Venezuelans were arrested 54,833 times by the U.S. Border Patrol after entering from Mexico in September, Mexicans were arrested 39,733.
Oaxaca’s top water official died in a car accident Thursday night. Raciel Cabrera García, head of the state water commission, was returning from a work event on a narrow stretch of road known locally in the Mixteca region as “the devil’s backbone” on the federal highway that runs between Juxtlahuaca and Huajuapan [not Huayapam, as mistakenly reported in the podcast] when the car he was in crashed through a guardrail. A female colleague of his was also killed in the accident, El Universal reported, and a third person was seriously injured. Officials haven’t said who was driving or why the car went off the road.
The federal highway connecting the city of Oaxaca is still not officially open yet, but President Andrés Manuel Lopez Obrador has said that the highway, which has been under construction, on and off, for roughly a decade, will open by November 29th. It will cut travel time from the capital to the coast to between 2.5 and 3 hours.
Support for today’s Oaxaca Newscast comes from Diseños SvdS. Offering custom-designed t-shirts and caps — embroidered or printed — for your business, sports team, or organization. You can find Diseños SvdS on Instagram or Facebook.
And from Davá Artisanal Shoe Design. A collective of Zapotec women providing more than 100 sustainable jobs, Davá makes and sells contemporary shoes and sandals using traditional indiengous textiles. Visit their shoe boutique in Oaxaca’s Centro Histórico at Cinco de Mayo number 210, near the corner of Murguía. Open every day from 8am to 5pm.
A Oaxacan athlete won a gold medal at the 2023 Panamerican Games this weekend in Santiago, Chile. William de Jesús Arroyo Reyes, who hails from San Juan Bautista Tuxtepec, beat out a Nicaraguan athlete for the medal in men’s individual taekwondo. The martial artist had already brought home 23 gold medals at the national level.
In Winter League baseball, the Guerreros beat the Veracruz Aguila 3 to 2 in a home game Friday night. Then the Guerreros celebrated a 5-1 victory over the Pericos of Puebla in a home game on Saturday, but things really heated up in the second home game against the Pericos yesterday: the Puebla team took an early lead in the game, but in the bottom of the eight inning, the Guerreros managed to tie it up at 6-6. But then… in the top of the ninth, the parrots just walloped the warriors, scoring an unbelievable nine runs to make the final score Puebla 15, Oaxaca 6.
If you’re a poet or a prose writer in search of an audience, or an audience in search of poetry and writing, Vino & Vinyl at the south end of the Parque Llano in the city of Oaxaca is having an English-language poetry, memoir and prose open mic today at 4:30pm.
In weather, tropical storm Otis has formed several hundred miles off Oaxaca’s Pacific coast, but the storm will head north before moving inland and is not expected to cause anything more than light rain here in the state of Oaxaca. In Huatulco, you can expect highs of 32ºC (or 90ºF) with a chance of light rain all afternoon. About 1-2 degrees cooler in Puerto Escondido with an equal chance of rain. Here in the capital city area today of around 25.5ºC (that’s 78ºF) and partly cloudy skies.
If you like the idea of having independent local English-language journalism here in Oaxaca and you’d like to see Oaxaca Newscast continue, the thing that would be most helpful right now would be for you to tell at least three friends about this podcast. And if they’re new to podcasts, please explain to them how they can subscribe so they automatically get Oaxaca Newscast on their smartphone.