Mexico City, Mexico — The Daylight Savings Time change that occurs around most of Mexico could be eliminated. On Thursday, the Chamber of Deputies approved eliminating summer daylight savings time.
The final decision has been turned over to the Senate of the Republic for analysis. If approved, most of Mexico would no longer participate in DST.
On July 5 of this year, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) signed an initiative to eliminate summer daylight saving time, saying that 71 percent of Mexicans reject the DST.
Jorge Alcocer, Secretary of Health, also supports the elimination of the DST arguing that the time change can have detrimental health effects such as heart attacks and depression when changing a person’s biological clock.
In the Chamber document, they say “this initiative proposes to repeal the current Law to replace it with a new one that recognizes the time zones according to the Greenwich meridian agreed internationally in 1884.
“However, it is proposed to maintain an exception seasonal schedule for the municipalities of the northern border given the deep existing labor, social, cultural and economic integration with the adjoining border area of the United States of America,” the document reads.
During the recent vote, the Chamber of Deputies endorsed the initiative with 445 votes in favor of and only eight against. Mexico has participated in the DST since 1996 when it was brought in to save electricity usage by making better use of natural daylight.
The DST time change applies throughout the country with the exception of the 33 municipalities along the U.S. border and in the states of Quintana Roo and Sonora.
Currently, Mexico observes four standard time zones, Pacific, Mountain, Central and Eastern, three of which, follow DST.
In October of 2014, the state of Quintana Roo opted out of the Daylight Savings Time change. Since then, the entire Cancun, Riviera Maya and Costa Maya regions do not move their clocks during the year, even when other Mexican states do. The state of Quintana Roo remains on Eastern Standard Time (UTC-5).
If the change is approved by the Senate, Mexico would make the last DST change at 2:00 a.m. on October 30 of this year, when the clocks fall back one hour and ignore the usual summer time change in April when clocks move forward one hour.
