"Artist of black" presents 3-book series of sketches

BY MARIA GALLUCCI
The News
April 23, 2010

Beatriz Zamora established herself on the Mexico City arts scene by painting three-meter-tall triptychs entirely in black. Throughout the past four decades, she plastered charcoal chunks and glossy obsidian to textured ebony backgrounds at her expansive workshop in the historical center. But since her eviction from the studio six years ago, the artist has found that her now drastically-reduced quarters require a new kind of proposal.

Zamora this year is releasing a collection of 300 small-scale sketches in a three-book series titled “100x100.” Each book contains a hundred drawings paired with another hundred pages of her own poetry; all writings are published in English, Spanish and French.

The 75-year-old artist recently celebrated the publication of the second art book, titled “Los siete caminos del corazón” (“The Seven Paths of the Heart”), at the Pablo Goebel Fine Arts Gallery in Polanco. Her first book, called “Los límites del amor infinito” (“The Limits of Infinite Love”), was published in late January, and the third book is set for release in July.

“I’m a painter, I’m not an illustrator. But I need to do something,” the artist told The News from her one-bedroom apartment in Colonia Cuauhtémoc, where her sketches paper the narrow first-floor hallway and giant black canvases hang prominently on the windowless walls. The rest of her works – three moving vans’ worth – are stored in an Iztapalapa-area bodega, she said.

Zamora recounted that she had been living in her Centro Histórico workshop for nearly 15 years when she began to fall behind on rent payments. In 2004 and without warning, her landlord forced her out and shipped her work to the storage facility on the northeast side of the city, where Zamora says she is still unable to recover the paintings. Since then, the painter has developed new artistic expressions from her modest home while fighting to bring her “arte negro” (“black art”) back into wide open spaces.

“‘Arte negro’ is cosmic,” she explained. “It’s about reminding us that we are all children of the universe. Scientists say that 98 percent of all matter in the universe is dark, and so really, black is the true essence of life. When we forget that, we distance ourselves from our true nature.”

The National System of Creators has awarded Zamora a grant to carry out the project, and the National Council for Culture and the Arts (Conaculta) is printing and distributing the series. Copies of the first two volumes are on sale at Conaculta’s Educal bookstores around Mexico City.

Zamora, who studied at the L’École des Beaux Art institution in Paris, has participated in more than 300 individual and collective exhibitions in Mexico and abroad throughout her 40-year career.

For info on “100x100,” visit http://bz-100x100-02-zamora.blogspot.com.

Zona Maco art fair: cultural art fair marks its 7th year

BY MARIA GALLUCCI
The News
April 21, 2010

With nearly a hundred galleries sharing an endless 10,000-square-foot expanse, the single stories of artists and collectors suddenly blended into a collective hum as Mexico’s contemporary art community clamored together under one roof.

Amidst the buzz, however, emerged a classic rookie tale.

Less than a year after opening its doors in Mexico City’s Bosques de las Lomas neighborhood, the Caja Blanca gallery has headed straight to the big leagues. At last weekend’s Zona Maco international art fair (whose letters stand for México Arte Contemporáneo), the fine arts showroom found its stand outside of the “new proposal” zone and among Mexico’s most established galleries.

While the difference might mean little more than location to some passersby, the distinction signals a higher level of prestige and experience to other gallerists and collectors, explained Patricia Bessundo, who opened Caja Blanca in mid-2009 with Alejandra Funtanet and Lorena Jauregui.

“It was a top priority for us to be accepted here in our first year,” she said at the expo center. “Today, the Zona Maco is considered the best contemporary art fair in all of Latin America. Having the opportunity to be here has already opened doors. We’ve had a huge flow of people from the media, young artists, collectors, and other foreign gallerists who are interested in arranging artistic exchanges.”

The five-day art expo, now in its seventh edition, was held in the capital city’s Centro Banamex convention center. More than 25,000 visitors stopped by to check out works by 900 artists who hailed from 20 different countries. (The April 18 inauguration drew in 9,000 guests alone). Drink sponsors at the event pushed around carts of cocktails as an each day’s undying crowd maneuvered through the maze of gallery stands, a set-up worth 20 million pesos in participation costs.

Zona Maco director Zelika Garcia described the event as “a cultural platform between artists, collectors, gallerists and curators, plus the general public.

“Not only do we have an exhibition and art sale happen…the fair also creates a cultural environment in Mexico that we can grow upon each year,” she told The News. “We’re creating a new culture of art collection in the country.”

Contemporary artists representing the Caja Blanca gallery at the fair included Renato Grazo Cervera, whose puzzle-like, skeleton wood sculptures hung playfully overhead. His piece “El Dios,” for instance, recreates Renaissance artist Michelangelo’s fresco that depicts God’s hand reaching toward Adam.

“I like to play with ordinary images and give them a twist to portray them in another way,” he said at the stand. He added that the fair “gives artists important exposure to a public who otherwise might not go to museums or exhibits.”

Artist Manuel Mathar said that he was most looking forward to swinging by Zona Maco’s ever-growing international selection. Mather exhibited his set of small-scale, objectivist oil paintings titled “Cosas que copian cosas” (“Things that copy things”) at the Caja Blanca set-up.

“I have the possibility here to see things that I could only see otherwise by traveling to the
countries from where the galleries hail,” he said.

Noted Mexican galleries in the art fair’s principal zone included Kurimanzutto, Ginocchio Galería, I-20, OMR, Travesía Cuatro and Galería Enrique Guerrero. Among the “new proposal” galleries were Yautepec Gallery, Toca Galería, Antena Estudio and TalCual. Cultural publications such as Vice and Fahrenheit also set up booths near the expo center’s entrance.

The art fair’s two-year-old Zona Maco Sur selection featured 20 emerging artists from the southern hemisphere, with little previous exposure in the Mexican scene.

Tropical Brazilian music thumped from the speakers of Carlos Contente’s stand in the section. The young illustrator from the Rio de Janeiro gallery A Gentil Carioca showed a massive wall display with painted vinyl records that replace old-school images with urban graffiti.

Contente called his space a “theatrical zone between the public and the artist” that encourages dialogue and puts Contente in contact with other cultures, or, as he put it, inspires a “globalization of the heart.”

Yonamine, an artist billed from both Luanda, Angola, and Lisbon, plastered the three walls of his booth with a stunning installation. Broad sheets of newspapers hid their black-and-white text behind silkscreen shapes and images in bold shades of red, green and gray.

Up-and-coming Mexican artists received a special nod of their own. Tequila maker José Cuervo’s charitable wing awarded its Centenario prize to Maximo González, who came to Zona Maco on behalf of the Valle Ortí Gallery from Valencia, Spain.

Local media reported that the gallery paid $10,000 to purchase González’s artistic intervention, which uses plastic objects to reflect on petroleum’s widespread use and the world’s endless consumption of the fossil fuel. Plastic water bottles, cups and buckets were scattered throughout the booth and connected by a red light mimicking the beams of a high-tech alarm system.

Encilia Gómez Maqueo, a spokeswoman for Fundación Cuervo, said after the Friday award ceremony that the Zona Maco had helped to transform contemporary art in Mexico in the past seven years.

“This is a fair with very strong educational and cultural impacts. It gives society the opportunity to visit a great amount of works in a limited time and space that would be impossible to see any other way,” she said.

Zona Maco in Monterrey is set to take place this year from Sept. 2 to 5 at the Hotel Hábita.

For more details, visit www.macomexico.com.

Mexico's children greet US first lady

BY MARIA GALLUCCI
The News/Wire Reports
April 15, 2010

Michelle Obama kicked off her youth-focused tour of Mexico with a costume party.
The U.S. first lady on Wednesday met with hundreds of 6- to 12-year-old students in Mexico City during her first official trip abroad without her family. Dozens more children from the Escuela Siete de Enero public elementary school in the city’s Álvaro Obregón borough greeted the wife of President Barack Obama with a traditional Aztec dance and song while donning feathery and paper costumes.

“That was beautiful, everything you did, I loved the singing, I loved the dancing. I love to see you all moving and exercising,” she told the media after hugging the young performers. “Everyone here got to see the best of Mexico’s young people.”

The first lady has made it a priority during her international tour to meet with students and young people while pushing Mexican citizens and governmental officials to make education for all a top priority. Mrs. Obama also reached out to traumatized children in Haiti during an unannounced stop on Tuesday in post-earthquake Port-au-Prince.

Her stop at the top school for kids from underprivileged backgrounds underscores her steadfast message that nothing should stand in the way of the world’s youth receiving a quality and nurturing education.

“My message to the young people is that success and possibility doesn’t know a race, a background, a gender, a socioeconomic class. We are going to need the energy and the passion of every single young person. We are going to have to develop those schools and have those young people believing in their own potential,” she said in a video message distributed by the White House on Wednesday morning.

Mrs. Obama and Mexico’s first lady Margarita Zavala discussed drug addiction treatment and early prevention programs during a private meeting earlier on Wednesday.

US First Lady brings 'pep talk' diplomacy to Mexico

BY MARIA GALLUCCI
The News
April 15, 2010

U.S. first lady Michelle Obama has marked the first full day of her Mexico City tour with a “yes-we-can”-style speech delivered to around 2,000 invited Mexican university and high school students.

During her first official, solo trip abroad as first lady, Mrs. Obama on Wednesday afternoon addressed a jam-packed pavilion at the Universidad Iberoamericana (Ibero, for short) in the city’s Santa Fe neighborhood. Her visit to the elite private university was preceded by a talk with low-income children at the Siete de Enero public elementary school in the Álvaro Obregón borough.

Mrs. Obama has been guided throughout her three-day trip by Margarita Zavala, the wife of President Felipe Calderón. The two ladies have developed a cross-border friendship since Mrs. Obama earned her ‘first lady’ title in January 2009. Both women are former lawyers, the mothers of young children and presidential wives who have made the well-being of youth their main concerns.

Outside the Ibero pavilion before the event, high school senior Rafael Leyva, 18, said that he looked forward to gleaning a bit of advice from the first lady. Leyva later joined about a hundred students selected to sit on stage behind Mrs. Obama during the speech as part of a recognition of the students’ academic leadership. Students from 15 Mexican universities attended the speech from crowded bleachers.

“Mrs. Obama has been a huge determining factor in, above all, the human development of her country,” he told The News. “If she has come here to give us part of the knowledge she has gained from her experience in all the fields she has been working in, it will be very enriching for all of us as Mexicans.”

Javier Reyes, 18, a classmate of Leyva’s, said that he was honored to have been chosen to sit on stage.

“We feel very proud; it is like our efforts (at school) are finally starting to bear fruit,” he said. “I hope to take her advice as an example to follow and to be able to arrive at a future as successful as the one she has achieved.”

Following an introduction by Ibero rector Jose Morales Orozco, Mrs. Obama recognized U.S. Ambassador to Mexico Carlos Pascual and thanked Zavala for her hospitality throughout the official trip.

The U.S. first lady explained that she scheduled the Ibero visit for the same reason that her husband, President Barack Obama, visits schools and universities along with the palaces and parliaments as he swings by during his various foreign travels.

“This isn’t an accident. Today, we’re seeing what has come to be called a ‘youth bulge’ – an explosion of the youth population in nations around the world. Here in Mexico, nearly half the population is under the age of 25…and young people between the ages of 15 and 24 alone now make up 20 percent of the world’s citizens – the largest group in history making the transition to adulthood,” said Mrs. Obama.

“Soon, the world will be looking to your generation to make the discoveries and build the industries that will fuel our prosperity and ensure our well-being for decades to come,” she continued in her address to the students. “We’ll be looking to your generation to seize the promise of clean energy to power our economies and preserve our planet for your kids and grandkids.

“We’ll be looking to your generation to find the courage and patience to resolve the conflicts and heal the divides that plague our world. And I’m here today because I believe that all of you – and your peers around the world – are more ready than ever to meet these challenges.”

The first lady explained that presidents Obama and Calderón were working together to rebuild education systems and revive their respective economies in an effort to create more jobs for those fresh out of school.

She noted that she and her husband both overcame humble backgrounds by tapping into their own potential and defying expectations to become United State’s first black presidential couple.

Michelle Obama also pointed to the 19th-century Mexican modernizer Benito Juárez as an example of how an orphaned servant became “one of Mexico’s greatest presidents” by way of a Franciscan friar who helped Juárez receive a proper education at a local seminary.

“But this isn’t just about discovering those few extraordinary folks who will change the course of history,” she cautioned.

“It’s also about breaking down barriers across the globe so that all our young people can learn and work and be productive members of our societies.

“And in order to do this – in order to open up opportunities for more young people – those of you who already have a seat at the table must do your part to make room for others who don’t. Young people around the world must reach out to help others realize their talents and make their voices heard.”

In concluding her speech, she told the students, “We’ll need you to work as hard as you can, and do as much good as you can, driven by that belief that has always summed up the spirit of our youth – three simple words: “Sí, se puede!” (“Yes, we can!”)

Zavala then invited Mrs. Obama to an afternoon reception with women leaders held at the presidential residence, and the first ladies later dined with Calderón at the estate.

Mrs. Obama’s agenda on Thursday includes a private breakfast with U.S. Embassy employees and their families, as well as a talk with young Mexican leaders at La Hacienda de los Morales banquet hall. She is set to fly home to the White House this afternoon.

Wallpeople turns streets into community gallery

Foto: Courtesy of Azul Enzué Durán

BY MARIA GALLUCCI
The News
April 14, 2010

Jorge Alba presses his palms to the dirty concrete surface and smoothes the tape adhered to his colorful photograph collage. Satisfied that the montage will stick, he steps aside as a swarm of outstretched arms approaches the wall with tape-covered snapshots, grainy printouts and pieces of personal artwork.

Half an hour later, the chipped white paint of a parking lot wall has transformed into an open-air art gallery surrounded by the heaving traffic and sour smells of Mexico City’s streets.

Wallpeople has made its mark.

The collaborative art project struck the city’s Roma neighborhood last Saturday as part of an international movement that encourages residents to get outside and revamp public spaces with acts of creativity.

Mexico City became the final urban center to join the Wallpeople project, which has 10 other bases in Buenos Aires, Barcelona, Madrid, Valencia, Seville, Lisbon, Rome, Nicosia, Budapest and Istanbul.

According to organizers, the group’s concept is to rescue the artistic spirit of mega cities, support physical works of art in a digital world, and give residents a chance to showcase their lives in a public space.

“Photographic exhibitions have always been indoor activities. Now is the time they come out to the street and convert walls into improvised and open-air museums where everyone can exhibit and observe the works of others,” they said on their Web site.

Mexico coordinator Fernando Figueros, 28, said the event called for photographs and posters in particular to demonstrate how artistic expressions other than graffiti and aerosol art can be exhibited on city walls. He noted that an outdoor group collage was an active alternative to passively posting images on file-sharing sites like Facebook and Flickr.

“People today are always so isolated by new technologies. The idea here is to get people out of their homes to retake the streets to make it a place where they can participate in collective activities,” said Figueros, whose friend, Pablo Quijano, developed the idea for Wallpeople in Barcelona last year.

“We hope that Mexico becomes more participatory, and that Mexicans become more involved in questions of art, collaboration and of going out on the streets. Our goals are the people be less sedentary and be more active, and we hope that (Wallpeople) can be a great start for many activities to come,” he said during a pause from organizing participants and soothing a policeman’s qualms about the growing crowd.

The coordinator said he expected around 200 children, teens and adults to plaster their contributions to the wall along the southern leg of Insurgentes Avenue. Participants on Saturday crowded onto the narrow sidewalk during the designated half-hour period for posting personal photos and posters. The massive collage remained up for two more hours before organizers peeled off the mural and restored the wall to its original gritty façade.

Alba, 35, said he had come out simply to be part of the massive public event.

“Here is a situation where you can establish yourself as a citizen and express yourself in a
cultural way,” he said.

He added that he selected images of his twin brother, his wife and his niece for his photomontage because, “The family signifies many things. It means support, understanding, friendship and companionship, even in the bad times. It’s a refuge.”

Ariana Torres, 23, passed around a communal roll of masking tape as she stood off to the side with a group of friends and waited for the call to hang up photos. She said she had printed off a headshot of herself so that passersby would know her face.

“I’m really interested in seeing everyone else’s photos. I like to see what other people are thinking and to see what’s inside their heads,” she said. “This mural is letting people know that we are interested in other things besides soccer, lucha libre (wrestling) and soap operas. It shows that in Mexico we are more than just these things.”

She said that she hoped Mexico’s participation in an international project would help shine a more positive light on her country across the world.

“I hope people can get to know us better and see that we’re all the same,” she said before scurrying toward an open space on the parking lot wall.

For more details on Wallpeople, visit www.wallpeople.org.

The Urban Three: Photo exhibit captures the Centro Histórico's modern history

BY MARIA GALLUCCI
The News
April 9, 2010

To visitors passing through the shoulder-to-shoulder throngs in Mexico City’s historical center, it might seem impossible to find a singular moment amid the flurry of bodies, sounds and sights. But among the bustling rush down narrow streets and past colonial monuments, three capital city photographers have done precisely that.

A street sweeper moving his twig broom across the concrete. Sandal-clad tourists lugging backpacks and guidebooks. White-haired ladies ambling down an alley. All everyday and unremarkable visions that otherwise go unnoticed, the artists contend.

Benjamín Alcántara, Víctor Mendiola and Mark Powell have captured the people and peculiarities of the Centro Histórico in a collective exhibition titled “Tres Urbana” (“The Urban Three”) at the Archive Museum of Photography in the heart of the Federal District. The display, which opened March 6, will wrap up in one month on May 16.

Alcántara said the project began when the museum extended the photographers an invitation to display their works. Rather than put up previous images, however, the artists began clicking away in the streets surrounding the museum, which stands behind the Aztec empire’s Templo Mayor and the grandiose Metropolitan Cathedral.

“All the images that are hung by the windows have the same textures as the buildings seen through the glass,” he told The News. “It’s like an on-site exhibit; with all the sounds we can hear from the outside, it’s as if we were on the streets seeing the same scene. We wanted to create a dialogue with the museum and the images themselves.”

The artist said his third-floor “Entre Bárbaros” (“Among Barbarians”) display explores the city’s dynamic between international tourists and Mexican residents. His collection’s title is a play on the Greek word “barbaros,” or foreigner, and the modern interpretation of barbarians as invasive and uncivilized.

“I wanted to highlight the stereotypes that both groups have of one another, and also take an ironic look at this daily interaction between the two that does exist, but that we don’t always see,” he said.

In one image, a sour-faced Mexican woman in a black velvet “goth” getup poses with a silver-haired couple in town for an extended trip. Although the trio on the outside appears an uncomfortable match, Alcántara said the visitors had befriended the darkly dressed woman during their stay. A second photo shows a shaggy-haired tourist grinning amusingly between four Mexican men donning rubber masks of U.S. President Barack Obama.

While Alcántara’s collection shows the Centro Histórico’s more ephemeral inhabitants, Mendiola’s display, entitled “Somnolencias,” focuses on the city’s permanent and invisible residents. The photographer creates a portrait of the historical center during its quietest moments, when the first signs of life begin to appear as dawn bleeds into day.

Each image is paired with a short biography, such as the portrait of a street sweeper wearing electric orange pants and a reflective vest. The caption explains that the young man buses in from the State of Mexico every morning and works eight hours a day from Monday to Sunday to earn 900 pesos a week. The following photo shows a middle-aged woman holding a chicken in a dingy coop; on days that she doesn’t earn enough to eat, she’ll snap a chicken’s neck and subsist on the meat, the caption reads.

Mark Powell’s first-floor “Shelf Life” exhibit is a metaphor, extolling the idea that photographers are like cans of food that conserve memories, and that the photographs boast long expiration dates. In the image “Total Recall,” two frosty-haired ladies in matching patent leather pumps admire a bronze-gilded bust. Their stance at first glance gives the appearance of Siamese twins.

Unlike Alcántara and Mendiola’s works, however, several of Powell’s photos venture outside the museum’s parameters and travel east to the Iztapalapa borough, where Powell teaches digital photography workshops at the El Faro Oriente arts college. A second-floor exhibit at the museum features photos by workshop participants Fermín Guzmán and Alfredo Moreno, plus Irving and Jair Cabrera Torres.

Alcántara explained that aside from the unifying city themes in “Tres Urbana,” the three headlining photographers also belong to the same “sandwich” generation.

Mendiola and Alcántara were born in Mexico City in 1969 and are both members of the Via 69 photography collective. Powell, born in 1968 in Detroit, Mich., has lived and worked in Mexico City for more than five years. All three men have lived the transition from analog photography to digital technology, and the trio is surrounded by consecrated tradition on one end and innovative multimedia art on the other.

“In our generation, there are many photographers who are completely focused on conceptual photography, and others who are strictly photojournalists,” he said. “I think we (three) are contemporary documentary photographers who mix both strategies with traditional documentation.”

Alcántara noted that the photography museum has become an important hub in Mexico City in terms of its relevant exhibitions and an archive of more than a million negatives documenting the expansive metropolis.

Pharmacy law duels culture of self-prescription

BY MARIA GALLUCCI
The News
April 7, 2010

With a prescription sheet in hand, Fernando Rodríguez disappears from behind various shelves stocked with pills, creams, syrups and serums and returns with a box of the customer’s order. Not quite a remarkable task for a pharmacy counter clerk in Mexico City, except for one tiny detail – the penned doctor’s order in his grasp.

As of last Thursday, the age of easy access to prescription drugs in Mexican pharmacies has come to a close, much to the chagrin of many Mexicans and ex-pats living on a budget. No longer can customers stroll into a nearby shop with just the tongue-twisting drug’s name scribbled down, effectively bypassing the expense of a doctor’s consultation. And they certainly can’t ask a counter clerk for the cheapest antibiotic in stock to treat a rash, cough or the inevitable stomach virus.

Partly a reaction to an increase in self-medication during last year’s H1N1 flu virus outbreak, the Health Secretariat last Thursday began enforcing a 25-year-old law that requires a doctor’s prescription for most antibiotics and amphetamines, as well as medications for diabetes, hypertension and depression. The changes carry the threat of closure for pharmacies that violate the rule.

The secretariat’s greatest concern, officials said, is a rising resistance to antibiotics among a population whose national culture reaffirms self-determined diagnoses. According to the Federal Commission for Protection Against Sanitary Risks (Cofepris), around 40 percent of adverse reactions to medications are related to self-treatment.

While countries such as the United States, Spain, Chile and parts of Europe have already put policies in place mandating prescriptions for certain drugs, many customers in Mexico until recently enjoyed the cost-saving benefit of going doctor-less.

Laura Yates, who moved to Mexico from the United States nearly two years ago, said that she now might try photocopying previous doctor prescriptions to use at her neighborhood pharmacy in Colonia Roma. Although her Texcoco-based office does offer on-site medical services in the State of Mexico, the ex-pat said the law gave her fewer alternatives at home in Mexico City.

“If I get sick over the weekend or during the hours (the doctor) isn’t here, I’m out of luck,” she said from her office. “If they are actually strict about enforcing this, it will be a big hassle, especially if I need to renew a prescription for something that I got from a specialist.

“Once I have already seen a doctor for something…there is no need to waste time and money going back to the doctor’s office to get him to write down what will probably be the same prescription.”

Rodríguez said that many of his customers at Farmacia Elite expressed similar sentiments to Yates’ and would often return without a prescription for refills or to find similar medicines. The clerk agreed with the secretariat, however, that too many clueless customers seek out antibiotics based on little more than family advice, online searches or medical guesswork.

He said that many people had been irked or bothered by the health law’s enforcement, although few in his pharmacy’s upscale Lomas de Chapultepec business district had been truly upset.
Residents of small towns and rural communities, on the other hand, would be hardest hit by the regulatory changes, he said.

Local media have also speculated that inaccessibility to antibiotics for some consumers could mean the rise of black market medications or falsified prescription sheets. Fear of higher medical bills even had some residents throughout Mexico in a frenzy, with throngs of people racing to pharmacies stock up on antibiotics and other drugs before April 1, the papers reported.

Rodríguez noted that many Mexicans had limited access to public health systems, such as the Mexican Institute for Social Security (IMSS) or the Seguro Popular health insurance program. (Participation in Seguro Popular actually went down 16 percent from 2008 to 2009 due to dissatisfaction, according to the program).

Consultations at private hospitals can cost anywhere from 300 pesos for a general doctor to more than 600 pesos for a specialist’s opinion – virtually pennies for many middle-class customers, but more than a day’s wage for others.

“In these tiny pueblos, pharmacies are the only access some people have to medications. We’re there only hope for treatment,” he said.

Guadalupe Tinoco, a counter clerk at the Farmacias del. Dr. Descuento (Dr. Discount Pharmacies) branch in the Cuauhtémoc neighborhood, said that most customers at the shop had reacted far more calmly than the frantic shoppers.

The chain, like many other discount franchises in the city, offers 20-peso consultations through resident medical professionals. The National Association of Pharmacies in Mexico (Anafarmex) has said that around 20,000 pharmacies have at least one medical professional on their staff.
The health secretariat is also expected to offer technical training to around 40,000 pharmacists and clerks in the next two years to facilitate consultations and sales control.

“Not only do we give out prescriptions, but also the security that what you’re taking is safe and will work effectively,” Tinoco said.

“Hopefully people will realize that this law is good for their health; it’s for their own good.”