MEXICO CITY — Mexico’s president submitted a bill Tuesday to end daylight saving time, putting an end to the practice of changing clocks twice a year.
Health Secretary Jorge Alcocer said Mexico should return to “God’s clock,” or standard time, arguing that setting clocks back or forward damages people’s health.
That would mean darkness falling an hour earlier on summer afternoons.
“The recommendable thing is to return to standard time, which is when the solar clock coincides with the people’s clock, the clock of God,” Alcocer argued.
Mexicans set their clocks ahead this year on April 3, and are scheduled to set them back on Oct. 30. The changes, if approved, would presumably apply to next year.
The change would mean central Mexican time, which covers most of the country, potentially could be permanently two hours behind the east coast of the United States; it is now one hour behind for most of the year.
Economists argue that, while the energy savings are minimal, going back to standard time might cause trouble for financial markets in Mexico by putting U.S. east coast markets so far ahead.
President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has said he is considering keeping daylight savings time for some northern border states.
And businesses like restaurants that have become accustomed to staying open later may have to close earlier as many crime-wary Mexicans often try to be off the streets after dark.
Nearly a dozen states across the U.S. have already standardized daylight saving time.

US-MEXICO SPLIT
Meanwhile, the US Sunshine Protection Act, which passed the Senate unanimously and is awaiting a vote in the House of Representatives, would keep DST in place permanently from November 3, 2023.
This would put, for example, New York stock exchanges permanently two hours ahead of Mexico City, and the rapidly growing logistics hub on the US-Mexico border in two time zones.
Officials in states and cities bordering the US have begun arguments against the legislation.
“Hopefully the change isn’t made along the entire border, because it would affect all of us who are here,” Baja California state economy minister Kurt Honold Morales told reporters last month.
Honold, a former mayor of Tijuana, added, “We’re certain that we don’t want the change …. [It] would hurt us a lot on the border but especially in Baja California …. It would affect us a lot economically.”
AMLO has been trying to get rid of the mechanism since he was mayor of Mexico City (2000-2005).
The move could also be seen as another effort to align Mexico more with Latin America than the US, where several countries have abandoned DST in recent decades, including Brazil in 2019.

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