Cynics See Political Motivation for Mexico’s Move on Pollution : Environment: The issue threatens a free trade pact with the United States. Opposition parties have it in their platforms. And the skies still aren’t clear.

As this huge city comes to the end of a winter notable for toxic air pollution levels, the government is taking drastic action--closing a notorious oil refinery and 36 factories, requiring taxi drivers to buy new cars with antipollution equipment and putting up more than $1 billion in financing to help them do it.

The measures were greeted initially with praise and only a few mumblings that they were long overdue. But as residents wait in vain for the sky to clear, reactions are growing cynical.

“This is politics, demagoguery,” said the manager of one 50-employee chemical plant that was among those closed--temporarily, he noted. “They shut down our plant for polluting the water, then, the next day announced the air quality was better, as if the plant closures had anything to do with that.”

Mexico does have compelling political, as well as environmental, reasons to present an image of ecological consciousness to its own citizens and to the world. The government this year is facing a midterm election and free trade negotiations with the United States and Canada.

The environment figures to be a factor in both.

“At this moment, two forces have converged to make ecology a political issue,” said Lorenzo Meyer, a political scientist at El Colegio de Mexico, a research university here. “The destruction of the environment has reached an intolerable point, a level in Mexico City never before seen. Then there is outside pressure, from the United States.”

Mexican environmental policy, especially along the border, directly affects U.S. interests, he explained.

The pending North American Free Trade Agreement, scheduled for negotiation this year, has provided a focus for international pressure. One of the major arguments against the free trade agreement is the fear that U.S. and Canadian industries will flee to Mexico, where environmental protection enforcement is less strict.

Indeed, Mexican ecology groups earlier this month joined their U.S. and Canadian counterparts in demanding that environmental considerations be included in the free trade negotiations.

“The environment must be an important consideration in the talks, otherwise the big ecological loser could be Mexico,” said author Homero Aridjis, president of the Group of 100, an organization of ecology-minded intellectuals.

Environmental groups in the three negotiating countries are calling for harmonized, or uniform, rules on pesticides, asbestos and other polluting products.

Inside Mexico, pollution has become a major consideration in daily life.

Air pollution reports are a standing feature in most Mexico City newspapers. Workers in office towers look out the windows each morning to gauge the pollution level by the visibility of the mountains that ring the city. The peaks disappear from view for weeks at a time behind a gray sky.

The wealthy, who can insulate themselves from most of the overcrowding and other unpleasant aspects of life in this city of 18 million, try to minimize their exposure to pollution.

Colegio Peterson, a private school, gives “air filters in every classroom” equal billing with Montessori curriculum in its advertising; corporations routinely provide executives vacation homes where they can escape the smog on weekends.

Despite such precautions, said Meyer, “pollution affects all social classes, including the elite.”

There are those who believe that worry about pollution can be turned into votes at the August midterm elections, especially in the smoggy Mexico City basin, an area that voted overwhelmingly for opposition parties in the last presidential election.

“The pollution levels in Mexico City have reached the point that they threaten the health and well-being of the inhabitants,” states the current electoral platform of the National Action Party (PAN), the conservative opposition. “What is happening in the center of the country is a reflection of the national situation.”

The destruction of the rain forest in southern Mexico, pollution from predominantly foreign-owned factories in the north, and the poisoning of rivers and lakes throughout the country gives every region reason to worry, said Luis H. Alvarez, president of PAN’s national executive committee. PAN is advocating more local control over environmental issues.

On the left, candidates are actively involved in local environmental issues.

Juan Gutierrez--candidate for the Revolutionary Democratic Party (PRD) nomination for federal deputy from Matamoros, a town on the Texas border--is helping to organize efforts to close a foreign-owned chemical plant in his district.

Armando Mojica, his counterpart in the central Mexico resort city of Cuernavaca, got into politics in an effort to stop politically well-connected developers from cutting down a woods to build a shopping center.

In addition, an environmental party, modeled on the European Greens, was registered last month. The party base is the Environmental Alliance, a civic group that has been persuaded that political pressure is the only way to force change, said Jorge Gonzalez, national president of the Ecology Party. “We struggled intensely for seven years and achieved nothing,” he said. “We decided that without political influence and power it would always be the same.”

To date, the party has filled its slate in seven of Mexico’s 31 states and has candidates for about half the seats in Mexico City and the surrounding state of Mexico.

The Institutional Revolution Party (PRI), which has ruled Mexico for 63 years, is officially skeptical that the environment will play a big role in elections outside Mexico City.

Even here, said Cesar Augustino Santiago Ramirez, secretary of electoral action--the official in charge of getting out the vote--the PRI believes that it has an advantage.

“The voters will take into account who is really capable of carrying out proposals,” he said. “A party that actually does things is 1,000 times better than one that takes refuge in criticism for the sake of criticism and does not even admit it when there is a clear, sunny day.”

Last month’s closing of the 58-year-old, 5,000-employee oil refinery in northern Mexico City is an example of the kind of decisive action the PRI administration is willing to take on environmental issues, he said.

Meyer predicted more such actions as the election date comes closer.

President Carlos Salinas de Gortari has proven to be a master of the dramatic since taking office just over two years ago. And drama is what will be needed.

Mexico’s environmental problems have been accumulating for almost 500 years--since Spanish miners began cutting down forests for fuel--and they will not be solved in the remaining three years of Salinas’ term, much less the four months before the midterm election. “All they can do,” Meyer said, “is look for spectacular examples.”

That could be a warning to business people such as Marta Lopez, administrator of Laminadora Lopez, a 22-employee metal laminating factory that was listed among the businesses closed as polluters.

She had just installed anti-air pollution equipment. But when inspectors came to check it, they discovered a leak in an industrial oven that allowed copper and zinc to get in the sewage system.

The oven was closed for repairs; the next morning, Lopez saw her company’s name in the newspaper, on the list of factories closed for pollution.

“It was a trick,” she said. “They just want to make it look as though they are closing a lot of companies.”