Mexico City’s New Mayor : Political Foes, Urban Woes Put Camacho on the Spot

The morning after a fireworks explosion killed 68 people in a crowded market here last month, Mayor Manuel Camacho Solis donned a gray jacket and slogged though the muddy ruins to be confronted by angry families who blamed the government for the tragedy.

A week later, Camacho presented the city’s annual budget at the federal Chamber of Deputies, where for 5 1/2 hours hostile opposition members of Congress grilled him about pressing urban problems and about whether he should even be allowed to hold the appointed office of mayor.

Then Camacho spent a smoggy Christmas Day at the funeral of the commander of an elite Mexico City police squad, who had died along with 24 others in a provincial jailhouse shoot-out.

All this happened in Camacho’s first month as regent, or mayor, of Mexico City, the largest and perhaps the most polluted, problem-plagued capital in the world. Being mayor of Mexico City is a fate you might not wish on your worst enemy, let alone your best friend, but new President Carlos Salinas de Gortari has appointed his closest adviser to the job of trying to govern a city that just might prove ungovernable.

It is a task made all the more difficult by the fact that only 27% of Mexico City’s residents voted for Salinas and his Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, in the presidential election last July. Even so, the president has the constitutional right to name the mayor of Mexico City, which is a federal district.

As a result, demonstrations by groups seeking national democratic reforms are a now permanent fixture in the capital. Members of the leftist National Democratic Front, whose candidate, Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, captured the most votes in Mexico City, routinely march to the zocalo , or central square, where Camacho’s office is diagonally across from the National Palace.

Hunger Strike Staged

At the same time, the right-wing National Action Party has staked out territory next to the golden Angel of Independence monument, where its former presidential candidate, Manuel J. Clouthier, staged a weeklong hunger strike in a mobile home.

Even federal bureaucrats, usually PRI stalwarts, are demanding pay increases by marching in small groups at strategic locations throughout the city to tie traffic in knots.

In response, the slight, bespectacled Camacho has taken to the streets himself. An economist and technocrat, he now finds himself engaged in the kind of tough, hands-on politics and direct dialogue that most PRI politicians have managed to avoid during the 60 years the party has been in power.

On the face of it, being mayor would appear to be political suicide for a young and ambitious person like Camacho, 42, who was Salinas’ right-hand official during the campaign and his international emissary after the election. He is rumored to be in line to succeed the president six years from now.

Indeed, the magnitude of the job can be measured in Mexico City’s chaotic growth. Fewer than 1 million people lived here in the 1920s. By 1975, the city had 11 million residents. Now, more than 18 million people--more than a quarter of the country’s citizens--live in the metropolitan area.

With growth also has come an increase in unemployment and an alarming rise in crime. For example, car theft has become so common that insurance companies refuse to issue policies to taxi drivers because their vehicles are too likely to be stolen.

Dangerous Pollution

Every day, buses and subways are jammed with 11.4 million passengers, more than the populations of Los Angeles and Orange counties combined. The city, at 7,300 feet above sea level, also harbors nearly 3 million automobiles and more than 40% of Mexico’s industry, which breeds a suffocating blanket of smog. Air pollution levels surpassed World Health Organization standards on 305 days last year--55 days more than in 1987--and on 60 of those days the air was considered dangerously contaminated.

Many of the solutions to these problems lie beyond the mayor’s reach: unemployment and democracy are national issues; Camacho does not set wages for the 2 million to 3 million bureaucrats who live in his city; to draw residents and industry away from the capital, Mexico must become less centralized and more developed overall.

Even if Camacho somehow could attenuate Mexico City’s myriad problems, it could be argued that might work against the mayor: The more habitable Mexico City becomes, the more people it attracts. Even now, an estimated 700,000 people move here each year, many as squatters in so-called lost cities.

Despite all of this, Camacho is oddly hopeful.

“The challenge is to make Mexico City survive,” he said in an interview. “I don’t believe a city this size is going to commit suicide.”

On a cold night before Christmas, the Monte Carlo Orchestra played marimba music in Rio de Janeiro park while neighbors strung crepe paper and pinatas over the cobblestone plaza. Suddenly, out of the dark appeared a masked man in a yellow cape, a red leotard and tennis shoes, glittery gold shorts and a red-and-yellow wrestling cap.

Men and women stopped to shake hands with the figure, and children ran up to hug him and touch the yellow “SB” prominent on his chest. He took the microphone.

“I ask all of you for a Christmas present to these kids. I ask you for a day without contamination, for a day of oxygen on Jan. 6. Do not use your vehicles on that day. We must begin to worry about the future of our city and the generations that follow us,” he said.

This is Superbarrio. Superbarrio Gomez. His true identity is unknown, but he is a real-life comic-book hero, a symbol of strength for the politically voiceless members of society. Created by the Assembly of Barrios, a coalition of community organizations, he represents poor people demanding housing, tenants’ rights, pollution controls and representation in city politics.

He also is the brightly colored symbol of opposition to the PRI and to Mayor Camacho.

“Camacho is as illegitimate as Salinas. They say the regent has to be named by the president, but in this city Salinas didn’t win,” Superbarrio said in a interview on a park bench that night.

Like the National Democratic Front, which joins leftist parties with interest groups, Superbarrio believes Salinas won the election through fraud and subscribes to the key opposition demand for reform of the nation’s electoral laws.

He and the Assembly of Barrios also seek to make Mexico City the nation’s 32nd state, named Anahuac, with an elected governor and elected municipal leaders. The PRI opposes the idea, saying that the president must have his people at the helm of the Federal District.

Modeled after a popular wrestling and movie hero called El Santo, Superbarrio appears at eviction protests and community Christmas parties, at political demonstrations and neighborhood quinceaneras , or birthday celebrations, for 15-year-old girls. He has been roughed up by a governor trying to demask him and thrown out of Congress after deputies voted not to allow “drunks, drug addicts and masked men” into their chamber.

Occasionally he steps into the ring for a wrestling bout, but Superbarrio favors the political arena. It is there, however, that he may have met his match in Camacho.

One reason Salinas named his friend to the sensitive mayor’s post is Camacho’s ability as a conciliator and negotiator, qualities he demonstrated in the months following Mexico City’s devastating earthquake of Sept. 19, 1985.

The early morning quake killed 8,000 people, destroyed 30,000 housing units and damaged 60,000 more. Among the thousands of families camped in the streets, fear and anger turned quickly into discontent aimed at the government. And from the tragedy, the barrio organizations grew strong, creating a new urban political force.

When a reputedly corrupt official failed to recognize the political time bomb, former President Miguel de la Madrid removed him as head of the reconstruction effort and put Camacho, then undersecretary of budget and planning under Salinas, in charge.

Even-tempered and firm, Camacho immediately sat down to talk with the neighborhood groups, and through long negotiations reached an agreement to construct government housing. By the end of De la Madrid’s term last month, the government had built or financed about 90,000 units.

Even though the organizations founded in the quake’s aftermath helped the opposition win the election in Mexico City last July, Camacho may have helped save the PRI from worse troubles. In Nicaragua, the 1972 earthquake that destroyed most of Managua and the government corruption that followed are considered to have hastened a popular insurrection that toppled the Somoza family dictatorship seven years later.

‘A Democratic Negotiation’

Thus, Camacho views the reconstruction effort as a success for the PRI and Mexican politics. In an interview last summer he said: “We achieved a democratic negotiation. In the end, no one could say the government was against the earthquake victims. And the leftist parties worked within the political system. They agreed to talk and accept political rules instead of picking up guns.”

Now Camacho’s challenge is to renew the PRI’s prestige and win the capital back. Even Superbarrio recognizes the political talents of his adversary and sees him as a potential threat to the barrio movement and the National Democratic Front.

“He is very skilled. We saw that in the reconstruction. The fact that we are a political front has made us big but weak. That is in Camacho’s favor. He is going to try to negotiate with each group separately, making the minimum concessions,” Superbarrio said.

But he insists that Camacho’s conciliatory style is a product of pressure from the community groups--pressure that he promises will increase.

“Camacho has criticized our populist politics, but now he is adopting our style. It is no longer enough for politicians to hide behind their desks. Now they have to show their faces,” the masked man said.

Mexico City is at once vibrant and decaying, alive with the ingenuity of those trying to eke out a living but damaged like the Spanish-style cathedral that is sinking into the lake bed on which the capital was built.

Modern Mexico was erected on the ruins of pyramids from the great Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan, conquered for its riches by the Spanish explorer Hernando Cortes in 1521.

Today, the ruins of modern Mexico City rise up from busy intersections in the form of human pyramids--boys in greasepaint who climb on each others’ backs to juggle oranges for motorists, then scurry through clouds of exhaust to collect their coins.

Every street corner is a marketplace in the underground economy, with vendors hawking toy trains, brass coat racks, television antennas, exercise machines--even copies of Homer’s “Iliad.” From the center divider of Paseo de la Reforma, a man in worn shoes holds up a wall-sized plastic watch, and it is clear from the desperation on his face that his dinner depends on the sale.

At city dumps, rag pickers in search of odds and ends to sell sift through the 5.3 million tons of trash added each year. New immigrants from the countryside ring doorbells of the middle class to ask for work or food.

Haze of Smog

In the thick of it all, those who live at the city’s intense pace sometimes fail to see its grime and poverty through a daily haze of smog, much as an overworked homemaker ceases to see her torn couch and frayed curtains until she is embarrassed by the indiscreet glance of a guest.

Residents are independent in their will to survive and individualistic in their desire to seek refuge from the assault of the city. They are, moreover, skeptical about promises of relief.

Indeed, Camacho considers his greatest adversaries to be apathy and cynicism, not Superbarrio and community organizations. In general, Mexicans disbelieve politicians and fear police, displaying minimal trust in government institutions.

Yet Camacho has little to offer residents that is concrete. His $2.6-billion budget is, in real terms, less than last year’s and allows for no major new public works. But Camacho thinks he has something else to proffer.

“This city has had subsidies and public works and people are still unsatisfied, so I believe it is a political problem, a problem of accessibility, justice, honesty,” Camacho said. His first priority, he declared, is to show that he can “resolve conflicts on a democratic basis.”

But when speaking of democracy, Camacho dodges the question of his own legitimacy as a member of the PRI appointed to preside over a city where the opposition claimed a clear majority.

More Steps Needed

“We have made big advances (toward democracy) with the presence of the opposition in the Senate, and I believe we must take more steps,” he said.

Aides to Camacho say that government polls show that crime and pollution are the two issues that most worry Mexico City residents. The government does not release detailed crime statistics, but it seems as though everyone here knows at least one person who has been mugged, whose house was robbed or car was stolen.

In response, the government has named reputed hard-liners--some of whom are said to be brutal--as police commanders, in a move that the political opposition reads as a warning to them. Camacho says the warning is for criminals and corrupt police officers, however.

The government also has announced its latest anti-smog program, a law requiring all vehicles to undergo emissions tests and owners to repair automobiles that do not meet standards--perhaps 50% of the cars here. The law threatens owners with fines and the impounding of their vehicles for failure to comply.

It remains to be seen, however, whether the government has the political will and resources to carry out the program.

Camacho vows to move forward but is circumspect in making predictions about a job that he did not seek--one that many political observers wonder why he accepted.

“This is probably one of the most difficult political jobs in the world. I cannot promise that I will be successful, but I will not be defeated before I begin,” Camacho said. “I live here. My children live here. Fifteen years from now, I do not want to live in an inferno and think that I might have done something.”

Anarchic growth seems to have turned Mexico City into a place prone to disaster. A year before the devastating earthquake, an explosion of natural gas storage tanks in the crowded residential neighborhood of San Juan Ixhuatepec left more than 450 people dead.

In the Merced candy market, meanwhile, no one has determined what set off the blaze of fireworks Dec. 11, although several residents recalled that the mounds of fireworks for sale were located next to taco vendors cooking over gas stoves. What is certain is that the mass of merchants and Christmas shoppers packed into the Merced’s narrow alleys made escape impossible.

When Camacho visited the ruined market, he did what Camacho does best: He offered a public forum to angry merchants who had lost their life savings and listened intently as residents complained bitterly about the government that had failed to heed warnings of the danger.

Like most of Mexico City, the Merced neighborhood voted heavily for Cardenas in the July election. The fireworks blaze, therefore, was an important test for the new PRI mayor. Standing atop a police car with a bullhorn, Camacho announced a citywide ban on the sale of fireworks and invited a committee of merchants to his office the next evening.

At the 2 1/2-hour meeting the next day, Camacho told the vendors they would be allowed to sell on the sidewalk until the market is rebuilt.

3rd-Generation Merchant

“He said he would help us rebuild the market and move the tanks of cooking gas,” said Armando Alatriste, who attended the meeting.

Alatriste, 38, is a third-generation merchant of homemade yam, fig and coconut candies. Born in the Merced, he married another candy vendor. They have four children who also were born in the working-class neighborhood.

Two weeks after the blaze, vendors like Alatriste sold candy they had borrowed or bought on credit at makeshift stalls. The sidewalks were nearly impassable with shoulder-to-shoulder customers. Fireworks were nowhere to be seen, although allegedly they could be purchased if a buyer were determined enough.

“This market has been around longer than the PRI,” Alatriste said above the din of shoppers. “Camacho has not won or lost in the Merced yet. He came, and he talked to us to win our trust. But he will only win if he really helps us, if he rebuilds the market.”