Mayor Mops Up : Tijuana’s New Leader Must Grapple With Repairing His Storm-Wrecked City

Installed less than two months ago as mayor of Tijuana, 35-year-old Hector Osuna did not have to wait long to face his first major test of leadership.

On Jan. 6 the rains came to the border city and did not let up for nearly two weeks. They caused catastrophic floods that coursed down canyons crammed with squatters’ settlements, killing 31 and leaving as many as 10,000 people homeless.

Osuna is now at the fore of an enormous reconstruction effort. The floods washed out dozens of bridges and compromised flood drainage in three of the city’s largest canyons. Rains swept away portions of main thoroughfares in about 100 of the city’s 500 colonias and left 35 colonias without drinking water. Repairs will take months.

Major traffic snarls are developing daily and, because of damage to arterial roads, will probably be a feature of Tijuana life for the next several weeks. Stretches of the Via Poniente Libramiento, one of the main east-west roads on the city’s southern border, will be closed for three months for repairs.

Osuna’s government will also have to find new homes, and quickly, for the thousands of Tijuanans left homeless. About 5,000 are staying in 30 temporary shelters--converted dance halls, warehouses and recreation centers--and the rest are staying with family and friends. Being crammed into shelters may test the patience of the newly homeless and delays in resettling them carry enormous public health and political risks.

So all eyes will be on Osuna, an architect and former Baja California state assemblyman, as he grapples with the monumental organizational and political tasks of making repairs and relocating the homeless.

Complicating his task is the fact that Osuna is only the city’s second elected mayor from the Partido Accion Nacional, the opposition party to Mexico’s entrenched PRI, the Partido Revolucionario Institucional.

So Osuna and his political mentor, Baja California Gov. Ernesto Ruffo, also a PAN member, will have to bow down to a federal government controlled by their political adversaries to receive disaster relief funds.

“We are an opposition government in Baja California and in Mexico it’s always been a disadvantage to be outside the mainstream,” Osuna said.

The aftermath of the floods will also force Osuna to deal with the larger issue of Tijuana’s stunning population growth rate.

Tijuana’s population growth, which increased from 535,000 in 1978 to 2 million last year, has been spurred because it is a staging area for illegal immigration into the United States and because of its prosperity as a maquiladora center. Maquiladoras are foreign-owned plants operated in Mexico that take advantage of low-cost labor to assemble products destined principally for the U.S. market.

That kind of “spontaneous growth” has far outstripped the city’s ability to provide housing, roads, social services and sewers, said Lawrence A. Herzog, a professor at San Diego State University involved with the U.S.-Mexico Border Studies Program.

As a result of the housing shortage, Tijuana officials looked the other way as tens of thousands of squatters settled on sloping hillsides and at the bottom of canyons, land that by conventional planning standards is uninhabitable.

“People are forced to find their own way and often that’s on land that no one else wants,” Herzog said. “The government allows them to do that as long as land isn’t valuable for private use.”

Newly settled canyons and flood plains were the scenes of most of January’s death and destruction caused by flooding and mudslides.

Before the floods, Osuna’s new administration was developing guidelines on how to relocate citizens from canyons to safer areas. Those plans have taken on a new sense of urgency, Tijuana Planning Director Diego Moreno said.

Floods have been an unfortunate part of the landscape in Tijuana, located on the delta where the Tijuana River meets the Pacific Ocean. Relocating flood victims to government-sponsored settlements has occurred periodically in Tijuana since the 1930s. Several neighborhoods are settlements of residents from flooded-out areas.

But flooding has occurred more frequently in Tijuana in the last 15 years because of the El Nino weather phenomenon, Osuna said.

In the past, Tijuana’s government has met with stiff resistance from squatters it wanted to move. But this time, city leaders are prepared to use soldiers to clear the canyon areas, Moreno said.

As Tijuana assesses the extent of the devastation, the worst to ever hit a city that has been plagued by deluges, Osuna has started moving on his top priority: resettling the homeless and getting colonia residents out of harm’s way.

On Wednesday, President Carlos Salinas de Gortari said the federal government would turn over 185 acres of its land to the state for resettlement. The federal government will also make lines of credit available so residents can buy lots and supplies for new houses. The land can probably accommodate about 3,000 families or 15,000 individuals, Osuna said.

City officials worry that disaster relief will be used as political leverage by PRI opponents of Osuna and Ruffo. They point to Ruffo’s largely unsuccessful campaign to obtain a greater share of the federal budget for Baja California. Only 5% of the federal tax revenue collected in Baja California comes back to the state, a disproportionately small slice that some blame on PRI officials.

“The president said he would help but he didn’t say how much,” Osuna said.

Times correspondent Miguel Cervantes contributed to this story from Tijuana.