Mexico’s Anti-Smog Plan Meets Industry Resistance : Pollution: Emergency measures may be lifted as soon as Thursday. Plant closures would be delayed two years.

In signs that the government’s anti-pollution fight is running into resistance, officials said Tuesday that emergency measures to reduce alarmingly high smog levels may be suspended as early as Thursday and announced an industrial anti-pollution plan that includes no factory closures for two years.

Local officials will discuss the effectiveness of the emergency measures and consider lifting the alert at a meeting this afternoon. Last week, emergency measures were lifted after only one day, and pollution immediately rebounded to dangerous levels.

Tuesday’s peak pollution level was at 131 on Mexico’s contamination index, well below the danger point of 200, the capital’s mayor, Manuel Camacho, said during a ceremony to announce the industrial plan.

Ecologists gave the industrial plan mixed reviews but accepted the reasoning behind lifting the emergency measures.

“It is politically necessary,” environmental consultant Luis Manuel Guerra said. “People were suffering from the effects, and public transportation could not handle the increase.”

“We can’t wear out the population” with continued emergency measures that include forcing 40% of the city’s private cars off the streets, said Alfonso Cipres Villarreal, head of a civic group called the Mexican Ecology Movement.

Industrialists also have been chafing under the emergency measures. Vicente Gutierrez, president of the National Manufacturing Chamber, told reporters Monday that industry can tolerate the plan’s demands for a 30% cut in production for no more than two months.

He also said that industrialists bear an unfair burden in the anti-pollution effort because cars, trucks and buses account for three-fourths of the city’s smog. It is a sensitive issue: The 30,124 factories in the Mexico City metropolitan area employ 711,000 workers and account for more than one-fourth of the country’s manufacturing.

Industry, while accounting for about 8% of the city’s general air pollution, is a major contributor in several categories of pollutants that are dangerous to health.

For a nation accustomed to dramatic gestures, such as last year’s closure of the government oil company’s polluting March 18 Refinery north of the city, the industrial plan was surprisingly bland.

Camacho had told citizens to expect “the most ambitious and radical industrial anti-pollution plan.” City Hall sources had predicted the removal of 20 top industrial polluters.

Instead, the government announced a 10-point program for more closely monitoring industrial pollution and reducing energy consumption and a $1.6-billion loan program for anti-pollution equipment and industrial relocation. But no factories will be forced out of the city until late 1994.

Environmental consultant Guerra said the factories were allowed to continue operating because of the jobs they provide. The plan is good, he said, because it concentrates on solving the problems of the 15% of factories that generate 70% of industrial pollution.