In Mexican Politics, Even Peddlers Have Clout

The peddlers who in normal times travel to Balderas Street armed only with fake gold watches, plastic cassette recorders and a nimble sales pitch arrived one day with clubs, broken bottles and knives. They weren’t selling good will.

The vendors were preparing to defend their sidewalk sales places from invaders. They had won the curbside space as a result of negotiations between their leader, Alejandra Barrios, the self-described “Queen of the Street Vendors,” and the Mexico City government.

A rival of Barrios, Guillermo (Memo) Vargas, had gathered his own platoon of street hawkers who--Molotov cocktails in hand--were intent on grabbing a piece of Balderas, a juicy location just outside the Juarez subway station.

The showdown last month brought predictable results: overturned fruit stands, stolen merchandise, bruised heads, hardened feelings and the intervention of riot police.

The brouhaha also exposed some fundamental practices of Mexican politics. Not long ago, Barrios had won a special concession from the city: In return for supporting the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party in the July 6 presidential elections, municipal officials granted Barrios and her followers documents that legalized their presence on Balderas and elsewhere in the capital.

Now that a part of her empire was under siege, Barrios relied on city officials of the PRI, as the governing party is known, to keep her merchant network intact.

“If they don’t, I won’t deliver my votes,” she said in an interview.

Barrios is a cacique , an archetypical Mexican grass-roots political leader. Caciques win influence with the government by carving out constituencies in farm or labor unions or, in Barrios’ case, among some 3,000 downtown street vendors grouped in her Legitimate Assn. of Civic Merchants.

Sidewalk Territories

Using potential votes as leverage, Barrios protects her peddlers from harassment by police and city inspectors and lobbies government to open up sidewalk territories for new legions of mobile merchants.

In this presidential election, control over such caciques and their followers, which number in the hundreds of thousands nationwide, is especially important. The PRI candidate for president, Carlos Salinas de Gortari, is facing unusually strong challenges from opposition candidates on the left and the right of Mexico’s political spectrum.

Salinas and the PRI are counting on labor, peasant and other organized trade groups to buttress the party in the election. The huge Confederation of Mexican Workers, considered the biggest cacicazo , or empire, of them all, alone is expected to deliver perhaps 4 million votes to the PRI.

Barrios’ promise of support for the PRI appears to have been effective in resolving her current problems. Her conflict with Vargas was settled when the city government barred Vargas from Balderas while granting him 25 posts on less traveled Queretaro Street, several miles away. Barrios’ 50 peddlers could stay on Balderas.

Barrios considered the settlement a victory.

“Queretaro Street is dead,” she said. “You see, Memo has no real following, maybe 20 vendors in all. I have 3,000. The PRI understands that.”

An embittered Vargas asserted that Barrios owes her stay on Balderas to slavish adherence to the PRI. “Alejandra drags her workers to PRI meetings. I support the PRI, too, but I ask the vendors to support the party voluntarily.”

Vargas also accused Barrios of bribing PRI officials and lining her own pockets with fees that street vendors pay her association. Barrios’ followers pay her up to $5 a day to reserve sidewalk space.

“Corruption rules, as everyone knows,” Vargas said. He claimed he represents the bulk of the Balderas peddlers but that they have been cowed by threats.

Barrios denied that she pays bribes or is becoming rich. She does not deny, however, that the PRI has tight control of her political inclinations. In unusually candid comments, she admitted that were it not for the protection the PRI affords, she would support the presidential candidacy of Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, a renegade PRI politician opposing Salinas.

In January, she agreed to run as a candidate for Mexico’s Chamber of Deputies under the banner of the Authentic Party of the Mexican Revolution. The party is supporting Cardenas.

When her candidacy became public, the smooth operation of her vendor network broke down, she said. Police evicted some of her vendors from corners. Vans belonging to city inspectors showed up at several locations. The inspectors closed down several stalls because they obstructed sidewalks or created trash problems.

Barrios read the omens. “I resigned my candidacy,” she said.

Now, she dutifully organizes her followers to attend PRI political rallies, although sometimes even she is unable to whip up their enthusiasm.

“In our hearts, we are not with the PRI,” Barrios said. “We were at a rally at a borough hall a few weeks ago. When I tried to begin a chant ‘Long live the PRI,’ everyone just remained silent.”

Barrios, 46, is a third-generation street vendor. “My grandmother sold bras and underwear; my parents sold clothing,” she recalled.

She began her organizing career on Tacuba Street in the late 1970s in reaction to harassment from police. She was a fruit vendor, and the city was then trying to clear the growing number of ad hoc hawkers from thoroughfares.

Jailed on several occasions, Barrios began to militate among her co-vendors to resist arrest. In 1980, she gathered 20 street merchants together and formed the merchants’ association. “At first, the police attacked us and beat us. But we persevered,” she said.

Six years ago, a PRI official at city hall called her in and invited her to incorporate her organization.

“They saw we could be useful,” she explained.

The organization grew and expanded throughout streets in Mexico City’s crowded downtown. Still, Barrios found she needed to be watchful. Once, two years ago, she took a trip to Monterrey to visit ailing relatives. Upon her return, she found that a rival had invaded one of her domains.

“I vowed never to let that happen again,” she said.

Support for the PRI is evidently a small price to pay to keep her realm intact.