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Wednesday, November 8th

Oaxaca Newscast
Oaxaca Newscast
Wednesday, November 8th
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Two sections of the new Oaxaca-Puerto Escondido federal highway have collapsed after heavy rains, once again delaying the opening of the highway. President Andrés Manuel López Obrador had recently said that the highway would open at the end of November, but now says this means at least 2 or 3 months of additional work will be needed before the highway opens. The collapses involved slopes or cliffsides meant to support the highway.

https://twitter.com/EF_Nacional/status/1722071839428538382

But, the president says, despite the setbacks, they’ll try to have the highway open by early January. The project has been under way for some 20 years now. The news site Infobae reports those sections will not only need to be rebuilt but also redesigned to add stability.

Mexican Supreme Court justice Arturo Zaldivar stepped down from his post yesterday. In an announcement on Twitter, the former chief justice said he was resigning in order to join the “transformation,” a reference to the politics of the governing Morena party.

Later in the day, Zaldivar met with Morena presidential candidate Claudia Sheinbaum, who has called for supreme court justices to be elected. Critics say that would politicize the court and remove checks and balances.

A court in Italy has refused to extradite a notario from Oaxaca… Jorge Alberto Merlo Gómez, formerly Notario #135 from Oaxaca, has been accused of accused of heading up criminal scheme to dispossess people of millions of dollars’ worth of property. He was arrested and detained on April 9th of this year in Turin, Italy. According to the news site Latinus, the Italian court denied the extradition because the crime Merlo is charged with — falsification of documents — is not considered serious enough to merit extradition.

More sensitive residents of Oaxaca’s coast might have felt a bit of a shake overnight, with a minor 4.5-magnitude quake at 3:52am this morning. The temblor’s epicenter was just up the coast from Puerto Escondido.

In the capital of Oaxaca today we’ll have mostly sunny skies and a high temperature just above 28ºC (about 83ºF), with a 70% chance of thundershowers today peaking at around 3pm. On the coast, high temperatures of 31 and a half ºC (that’s 89ºF) with a 50% chance of rain throughout the afternoon.

By Peter Aronson

I’m an award-winning radio journalist, a former Latin America correspondent, a longtime resident of Mexico and — for the past few years — a resident of Oaxaca. Now I host Oaxaca Newscast!