Ayotzinapa Case/LitioMx

Ayotzinapa Case. President Andrés Manuel López Obrador assured that during his government there will be no censorship, government lies and acts of torture as it occurred during the Ayotzinpa case. Furthermore, he called on all Mexican authorities to not be corrupted under any circumstances. “We are talking about several inconceivable torture cases in previous governments. We will not allow that because we care about Mexicans.”

In 2014, during former president Enrique Peña Nieto’s administration, 43 students disappeared in Iguala, Guerrero and the government reported they were murdered by the United Warriors Cartel in Cocula. According to the past administration, it was the Iguala police who handed over the students to the criminal group. Nevertheless, since the reopening of the case with new findings incriminating Enrique Peña Nieto’s government are popping up.

According to the Undersecretary of the Interior Alejandro Encinas Rodríguez, the “historical truth” given by the government of Peña Nieto is based on the fact that the students went to Iguala to boycott the briefing of the President of the National System for Integral Family Development (DIF) of that municipality. Nonetheless, Encinas said that the mission of the students was to take over some buses and when they arrived in Iguala the president’s event had already finished. Encinas Rodríguez reported that the students were never together and that there was a special operative dispersing the students in different regions of Iguala. In addition, he said that there was cooperation between the United Warriors Cartel and the security forces of the federal, state and municipal level to ultimately disappear the students.

LitioMx. López Obrador announced that the Mexican lithium industry and Lithium for Mexico (LitioMx) will be open to public and private investment. In addition, the president announced that plans are being developed so that Sonora becomes a hub for renewable energy projects. "We are developing a plan for Sonora to become a state for the generation of renewable, clean energy and also for the production of lithium batteries.”

After months of speculation and expectation, the government published a decree in the Federal Official Gazette (DOF) that created LitioMx as a decentralized organism. The company will exclusively oversee managing the extraction, transformation and transportation of lithium and its derivatives. According to the decree, Minister of Energy Rocío Nahle will be the Director General. Nevertheless, this morning various media outlets reported that Pablo Taddei, a Sonora native with a Harvard doctorate will lead Litiomx.

“LitioMx’s main objective is the exploration, exploitation and harnessing of lithium located in Mexico, as well as the management and control of the mineral’s value chain,” stated Article 2 of the decree.

Specialists believe that even though the government has created a new company to control the country's lithium reserves, the government may not be able to exploit the resource for another 7 to 13 years. This is because lithium production requires further studies, the acquisition of new technology and the creation of adequate extraction methods to make lithium exploitation economically viable.