Effort to Relieve Choking Congestion : 50 Mexican Agencies Told to Move Outside Capital

Opening a campaign Tuesday to relieve one of his nation’s most serious problems--the choking congestion that afflicts Mexico City--President Miguel de la Madrid ordered 50 government agencies to relocate outside the Mexican capital.

The move is small--the number of government workers involved is minuscule compared to the metropolitan area’s more than 17 million people. However, it represents an important first step in an attempt to reduce the growth of the city, already one of the largest and most polluted in the world.

The dizzying growth of Mexico City has bedeviled several Mexican presidents, who have spoken of decentralizing in order to move ahead. Their plans, however, have usually proven impossible to put into practice.

Manuel Alonso, the chief spokesman for the government, said that De la Madrid’s announcement marks the first serious efforts to control the problem.

Other plans that De la Madrid has for decentralization include relocating larger government agencies, encouraging the creation of government and private industry jobs away from the capital and improving housing and the quality of life in other cities.

To underscore the importance that the government attaches to the problem, De la Madrid took the extraordinary step of assembling the governors of Mexico’s 31 states and all the members of his Cabinet at Los Pinos, the presidential residence, to issue Tuesday’s proclamation.

“Our decentralization program is intended to reverse irrational trends by relocating to the provinces those agencies that have no reason to be in Mexico City,” said Carlos Salinas de Gortari, the minister of programming and budgeting.

Most of the departments that will be moved are relatively small, such as the National Fruit Commission, the Agrarian Investigation Institute and the government agency that promotes the development of cactus.

There was no indication how many government officials will be involved in the move, but it would appear to be relatively few of the hundreds of thousands of bureaucrats who live and work in the metropolitan area.

Although the head of the government employees’ union attended the Tuesday ceremony and offered his support of De la Madrid’s decision, some government bureaucrats have served notice that they will not go along.

Resistance by Workers Earlier this month, Maria de Lourdes Garcia, speaking for 75 employees of the National Commission on Arid Zones, declared that the workers will resist an effort to transfer the agency to Saltillo in northern Mexico. The commission was included in De la Madrid’s announcement.

Garcia said many employees objected to the disruption of their lives and the separation from the extended family that characterizes Mexican life. She complained that the government was presenting workers with an ultimatum to move or quit.

The resistance to the decentralization effort underlines the importance of Mexico City in the minds of many Mexican citizens. It is not only the political and financial center of the country but also its largest, most important and most culturally attractive city.

To many Mexicans, it is the only place to live, and this is the root of the problem.

Most Factories, Jobs Most of the nation’s factories are here, and thus most of its jobs. The president of the National Confederation of Tenants said recently that 100,000 Mexicans migrate to the capital each month.

Alfredo del Mazo, the governor of the State of Mexico, said in a speech recently that Mexico City and the surrounding area are growing at the rate of 900,000 people per year, accounting for well over half the population growth of the entire country.

No one can say if those figures are accurate, because the metropolitan area has grown too large to allow accurate studies.

One study prepared by the World Bank estimates that by the year 2000, the metropolitan area will be home to 30 million Mexicans. Government officials say they hope to keep that down to 24 million with programs such as De la Madrid’s relocation of public agencies.

In the city itself, growth has given rise to enormous problems. Mexico City’s air pollution is among the world’s worst, and water and sewage problems grow daily.

The capital’s traffic jams, once infrequent, are a daily irritation and the subject of scornful jokes in other Mexican cities.