Mexico: Choosing the Economy Over Life

The Pay Check

Bloomberg

Society & Culture, Business, Investing

4.4 • 630 Ratings

🗓️ 16 June 2022

⏱️ 24 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Mexico’s handling of the pandemic has been largely driven by its president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, and his desire to keep the economy open. That’s meant few restrictions and a “return to normal” even before vaccines. The approach hasn’t come without costs, particularly to the country’s health care system. During the first year of the pandemic, maternal mortality rates spiked 60%. In this episode of The Pay Check, Equality reporter Kelsey Butler travels to a rural part of Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula to get to the bottom of how that happened — and find out how to fix it.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	This is an IHeart podcast.
0:04.2	A warming planet, complex geopolitics and fierce competition means business operations are under more scrutiny than ever before.
0:13.0	Returning to Singapore this July, the Bloomberg Sustainable Business Summit is uniting leaders and investors
0:19.0	to explore how sustainability efforts can bolster resilience
0:22.9	and mitigate risk. Learn more at Bloomberg.com slash sbsd-singapore. That's Bloomberg
0:29.6	live.com slash sbs dash Singapore. It's 90 degrees out, and I'm covered in bug spray, lying on the dirt floor of a hut with a roof made of palms.
0:46.8	A woman is pressing hard on my stomach.
0:50.1	She's telling me something is wrong.
0:56.0	Do you know? Yes. Yes. She's telling me something is wrong. The woman forcefully massaging my belly is Doniachela.
1:04.4	She's a sobadora, a kind of traditional healer in the Yucatan region of Mexico.
1:10.2	Pregnant women come to her from nearby to make sure that the whole childbirth experience
1:14.1	is safe, kind of like a doula.
1:17.1	The massage she's giving me is one of the sort of services she performs for her clients.
1:22.6	It does a bunch of things, including putting the baby in a head-down position for labor
1:27.4	or calming the client's nerves.
1:33.6	This massage, though, did not exactly calm my nerves.
1:40.8	While massaging me, Don Yacela tells me that something of mine called El Sijro isn't where it should be.
1:49.0	This probably isn't a body part you've ever heard of.
1:52.0	But in Mayan culture here, El Sijro is an organ believed to be found in your midsection.
1:58.0	After you have a baby, a time where your organs are really shifted around,
2:02.6	you're supposed to come back 12 days after delivery to get a massage from someone like Donachella.
2:08.6	During that, she makes sure that your Cito is where it should be and massages it back into place if it isn't.
	...

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