Stakes high in Mexico City
By Peter Gellert
MEXICO CITY — The stakes and expectations are high for the Mexico City administration of mayor Cuauhtemoc Cardenas and the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), which was elected on July 6 and took office on December 5.
This is the highest office ever won by the opposition in Mexican history, and represents a major challenge for the parliamentary left to run successfully local government, resolve pressing social problems and stimulate grassroots participation.
At the same time, both the Mexico City mayoral administration and the city legislative assembly, where the PRD also has a majority, have few powers. Mexico City is largely under federal government control. Even in the best of circumstances, it would be difficult for city hall to modify the national neo-liberal economic policy of President Ernesto Zedillo and the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI).
The problems of the world's largest city are daunting: poverty; growing crime, accompanied by rampant police corruption; an expanding informal economy that today represents 32% of the city economic's activity, and whose participants do not pay taxes or receive government social benefits; a 13 billion peso ($US1.63 billion) debt, 80% of which was contracted in the previous PRI mayoral administration; an estimated 1 million housing unit deficit; an increasing insufficient public transportation; an air pollution crisis (in only 27 days in the past year was air quality was "good").
Voter expectations are high, according to the results of a study by the Arturo Rosenblueth Foundation released on December 2. Unemployment, crime, and corruption and poverty were considered the new administration's top priorities, in that order.
About half the population expect the Cardenas administration to improve all the city's problems, except air pollution which the majority believe will remain the same, or worsen.
In the past few months, Cardenas' team and the PRD have sponsored a series of public forums attended by party activists, social leaders and experts at which proposals were presented to address some of the many problems the new mayoral administration will face. While attendance at these forums was not massive, they were useful for airing suggestions and bringing more expertise into the new mayor's team.
Thus far, much of Cardenas' attention has been occupied with appointments (among them activists from the far left, such as Marxist intellectual Adolfo Gilly and human rights leader Rosario Ibarra de Piedra), including for the sensitive post of police chief, currently occupied by a hard-line general. The new mayor has pledged that the military will no longer run public security in Mexico City and that corrupt elements will be purged from the police forces.
Heading Cardenas' call for a change in relations between government and society, proposals have emerged in the PRD forums for city-wide organisational structures to stimulate citizen participation. A multitude of legal changes have been proposed to give juridical recognition to neighbourhood organisations.
Discussions are under way with non-governmental organisations to establish neighbourhood-based public affairs offices to channel citizens' concerns, complaints and proposals to the proper authorities. The PRD is working to establish support structures for the new administration, as well as their own base committees, all on a neighbourhood level.
Within civil society, two broad and distinct perspectives are emerging on how to relate to the new administration. Sectors closest to the PRD city leadership, under the banner of realism and responsibility, see the Cardenas administration as representing the "people in power" and have spoken of the need to limit mass mobilisations as a way of supporting the new mayor. Indeed, from January to October, 2446 protest demonstrations were held in Mexico City, most against the city and federal governments.
Other forces, ranging from the far-left Independent Proletarian Movement and the Francisco Villa Popular Front, to the Neighbourhood Assembly and other organisations comprising the urban popular movement, while supporting Cardenas' victory as part of the struggle for the transition to democracy, see deepening and giving organisational form to grassroots participation as vital to social change in general, and the new mayor's success in particular. These groups, organised in the Metropolitan Convention, declare they will sponsor mobilisations if and when necessary.
The Cardenas administration faces two parallel dangers. One is a confrontation with the PRI and its corporatist structures among city workers, street vendors, etc., which could provoke problems on different levels. Veiled threats have already been issued by a PRI bent on revenge, but given the ruling party's relative weakness in Mexico City, any concrete moves in this direction could easily backfire.
The other potential danger flows from a permanent policy of negotiations with the powers-that-be which, taking into account city hall's limited powers, could constrict the mayor's actions to a very reduced spectrum of activities.
After being sworn in as mayor, Cardenas addressed tens of thousands of supporters in the central square in downtown Mexico City. He promised substantial changes. In each of the city's 16 delegations, centres for attending to women's issues and others focusing on children, including street children, will be established. Special programs will be designed for the 500,000 Indians living in the city, based on respect for their customs and traditions. The new mayor also called for the federal government to absorb part of the city's debt.