They May Protest Too Much

Shakespeare warned about the ides of March, and T.S. Eliot dubbed April the cruelest month. But they never lived in Mexico City, where May delivers a special kind of misery.

It’s the height of protest season here, when just about anyone with a grievance and a bullhorn heads to the capital, turning the city’s already devilishly gridlocked streets into an inferno. The month marks two of the year’s largest worker demonstrations, including a Labor Day march May 1 that took 400,000 chanting, sign-waving protesters to the city center, highlighting a traffic-snarling spring of discontent.

The last few weeks alone also have seen marches and blockades from disgruntled transport workers, neighborhood groups, unionists, communists, socialists, bicycle haters, Fidel Castro supporters and owners of black-market vehicles. Farmers recently took their beef to the streets -- literally -- arriving with cows in tow to condemn low milk prices. Three separate, simultaneous demonstrations by tax protesters, students and country folk jammed downtown streets so hopelessly one recent afternoon that a local newspaper called it the “Day of Chaos.”

It’s street theater at its best, but capital dwellers aren’t amused. They know that May’s escapades are just the latest in a seemingly endless string of demonstrations tying this city in knots.

Marches are so commonplace that radio reporters include them in traffic reports. Businesses have fled regular parade routes, fed up with vandalism and falling sales. Traffic gridlock has sapped productivity, worsened the city’s already lousy air and hurt the pocketbooks of poorer city dwellers who don’t get paid if they can’t get to work. The marches also have stirred a debate on how to rescue residents’ quality of life without sacrificing protesters’ free-speech rights.

“This is a civil war that we’re living through,” said Jorge Triana, a federal lawmaker who has introduced legislation aimed at regulating the tumult. “This city can’t endure much more.”

Demonstrations are nothing new in Latin America, a region of turbulent democracies and fragile economies. The capitals of Venezuela, Bolivia and Peru were recently rocked by noisy protests directed at alleged government misdeeds.

But Mexico City stands out even by Latin American standards. Security officials tallied more than 1,700 demonstrations in the last year in the Distrito Federal, or D.F., as Mexico’s capital is also known. That’s an average of nearly five a day, and officials say they probably aren’t counting them all.

Tradition partly explains the protest fervor. For better or worse, Greater Mexico City -- a sprawling megalopolis of 21 million souls and the world’s second-largest metropolitan area -- is the cultural, financial and political center of a country where federal power dwarfs that of the 31 states. So if citizens in the hinterlands want to get officials’ attention, they often skip state capitals and head straight to the D.F. to vent.

Veteran observers likewise say protests have grown more frequent and spontaneous since 2000, when the presidential election of an opposition party candidate, Vicente Fox, loosened the grip of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, which had stage-managed public dissent during its 71-year reign. Invigorated by the change in government, but frustrated by the slow pace of change, Mexicans have taken their complaints to the most public of forums -- the streets.

Marching in a recent demonstration of an estimated 60,000 unionized government workers that shut down Paseo de la Reforma, Mexico City’s grandest boulevard, Antonio Hernandez defended the traffic-choking display as the defense of democracy and liberty.

“Our constitution guarantees this right” to free speech, said Hernandez, a retired heating and cooling man whose union was demonstrating in hopes of protecting its generous pension benefits. “If other institutions aren’t working, this is the people’s only alternative.”

But others have a simpler explanation for why so many Mexicans hit the bricks: because they can.

Unlike demonstrators in other world capitals, protesters in Mexico City don’t need permits to commandeer public thoroughfares, said David Guerrero, spokesman for the government of the Distrito Federal. He said he had a vague memory of local officials once requiring marchers to secure permission ahead of time. But whatever the case, he said, permits are not required now.

Guerrero says some organizations do notify law enforcement in advance to get help with logistics. But most don’t, ensuring minimum lead time for authorities and maximum disruption to traffic. Mexican police generally tolerate such actions as long as they don’t turn violent.

“A lot of them are letting off steam,” Guerrero said of the protesters. “They aren’t punished” for that.

Experts say this hands-off approach stems from powerful memories of the 1968 Tlatelolco massacre, which has been described as Mexico’s Tiananmen Square. Mexico City was host to the Olympic Games that year, the first in Latin America. University students used the occasion to draw world attention to their nation’s entrenched poverty and stunted democracy, staging demonstrations that deeply embarrassed the administration of President Gustavo Diaz Ordaz.

On Oct. 2, 1968, Mexican police and army forces opened fire on student demonstrators who had gathered in Mexico City’s Tlatelolco neighborhood. Official government and eyewitness accounts diverge sharply to this day, but human rights activists say hundreds were killed and thousands were arrested.

Students commemorate the event every October with -- naturally -- a demonstration. Last year’s event turned violent, as a small contingent of the 40,000 protesters shattered windows of government buildings and pelted police with rocks and bottles. There were a handful of injuries, and police made about 75 arrests -- a rarity, according to veteran observers.

Jose Luis Reyna, a political scientist at Colegio de Mexico, said no Mexican politician wanted to revive the ghost of Diaz Ordaz by cracking heads just to keep traffic moving. Certainly not Fox, whose National Action Party was dealt a humbling setback during last year’s congressional elections. Nor Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, Mexico City’s populist mayor and a leading candidate for the 2006 presidential election.

“So now we’ve got a situation where if 100 people want to paralyze the Periferico, they can get away with it,” Reyna said, referring to Mexico City’s main north-south highway.

Experts are split on whether this civil disobedience really accomplishes anything. Some believe that it’s an imitation of real democracy, a noisy charade in which officials allow interest groups to create temporary havoc in the seat of power as a substitute for doing anything concrete to address their grievances. For example, tens of thousands of teachers arrived in the capital recently, demanding that the government double their salaries, a goal that both the protesters and officials knew wasn’t feasible given Mexico’s current fiscal woes.

But others note that some standoffs have resulted in victory for demonstrators, such as a 2002 fight by natives of San Salvador Atenco, a small town about 20 miles outside Mexico City, to stave off government attempts to seize their land for a new airport. The villagers took hostages, waved machetes and basically rattled the Fox administration into backing down.

The airport fight reinforced “the idea that if people don’t protest, the government won’t notice,” political scientist Reyna said.

At a minimum, demonstrators typically win a private meeting with officials to air their grievances. That has enraged critics who say it’s the millions of average citizens and businesspeople who are truly suffering.

Pedro Garcia, whose newspaper stand occupies the corner of a prime protest route near Mexico City’s historic center, watched glumly as thousands of marchers passed by his stall as part of the annual May 1 workers demonstration. Although the 36-year-old sold an occasional soft drink to thirsty protesters, he said his bread-and-butter news sales would be off by at least 25% that day.

“They can’t read while they’re marching,” Garcia said. “This is bad for my business. But what can I do?”

Manuel Tron, president of the D.F. Chamber of Commerce, estimated that businesses in Mexico City’s center lose a combined $4.5 million in sales every time the district is paralyzed by a major demonstration, not to mention the expense of picking up garbage and repairing vandalism.

Mexico’s secretary of the interior building -- which houses federal agencies handling such vital matters as civil defense, border issues, disaster prevention and human rights -- is a frequent protest target. So many merchants have fled the neighborhood, the scene of nearly 450 demonstrations last year, that one newspaper dubbed the area a “phantom zone.”

“Of course citizens have the right to protest,” Tron said. “But they don’t have the right to destroy property, businesses and lives.”

He supports recently introduced legislation in the Distrito Federal’s assembly that would require protesters to register their plans in advance and prevent them from blocking streets and other public spaces without permission.

So far, the measure has gone nowhere, stymied by the majority Democratic Revolution Party, many of whose left- leaning members are squeamish about being perceived as curbing free-speech rights. A federal bill is stalled as well.

Now, a group of conservative National Action Party members is trying another approach. They have just kicked off a petition drive to gather nearly 70,000 signatures to pressure local leaders into taking action.

Supporters say D.F. residents, fed up with the continual stream of marches, will eagerly support such a measure. Indeed, the city recently passed legislation aimed at cracking down on illegal street vendors, squeegee men and a host of other urban nuisances.

Failing that, Homero Aridjis, a poet and environmentalist who has written about Mexico City’s deteriorating quality of life, has another idea.

“We need to organize a huge march to protest all the marches,” Aridjis said with a laugh. “That would get their attention.”

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Researcher Froylan Enciso in The Times’ Mexico City Bureau contributed to this report.