PERSPECTIVE ON MEXICO : A Green Revolution in Politics : For the first time, environmental issues, important to the rich and poor, are being addressed.

The electrifying competitiveness of Mexico’s presidential election is but one of the sea-changes transforming public life south of the Rio Grande. This year, for the first time, environmental issues are taking a front rank in the country’s political discourse.

The attention that Mexico’s three major political parties have given to the “green agenda” is a direct result of the heightened awareness about environmental concerns that surfaced during the debate on the North American Free Trade Agreement, which went into effect on Jan. 1.

Last month, Ernesto Zedillo, candidate of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) that has ruled Mexico unchallenged for the past six decades, issued a comprehensive 10-point environmental platform. In presenting the document, Zedillo pointed out that the contamination of the country’s air, water and land has cost Mexico billions of dollars in treating preventable illness alone.

Zedillo’s platform proposed the creation of a fund to capitalize and attract investment for sustainable development projects; a virtual revolution in mass transit; the installation of strong controls on smokestack industries and more attention to sewage treatment.

The National Action Party (PAN) of the other front-running presidential contender, Diego Fernandez de Cevallos, proposed to amend the constitution to include the right to a healthy environment and the concept of sustainable development. He also would mandate environmental impact statements to heighten community awareness on proposed development projects, and make existing environmental prosecutors’ offices independent of the executive branch.

Fernandez’s program forms part of his party’s support for increased foreign investment and economic liberalization. According to environmental writers Enrique Provencio and Gabriel Quadri, the PAN’s approach is influenced by international opinion that “the limitless power of technology” can be used to resolve the contamination crises; it proposes a greater transfer of technology from the developed world.

The Revolutionary Democratic Party (PRD) of Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, who lost a 1988 presidential bid in a bitterly contested election, linked its environmental program to issues of poverty, development and the creation of a New World Order but lacked specific proposals for action.

Provencio and Quadri say that the Mexican political community’s tardy awareness of the environmental disaster in their midst is due in part to the fact that ecological issues did not fit neatly into the parties’ traditional themes, which were narrowly focused on competing economic interests or political ideologies.

The increasing gravity of Mexico’s environmental crisis has forced the politicians to focus their platforms on concrete proposals for its remediation. For example, although separated by an almost bottomless chasm of education and opportunity, the one political issue capable of striking a common chord between Mexico City’s very rich and despairing poor are the many days that both are forced by air pollution to keep their children home from school.

Previously, even President Carlos Salinas de Gortari’s reformist government largely limited its environmental activism to the important but incomplete work of creating parks and protected areas. The contribution of NAFTA was to empower Mexicans to talk about their own environmental experiences and to call upon all levels of government to be more accountable and to take on more responsibility. NAFTA’s promise of economic growth, of being in the “big league” of economic powers, required Mexico to give more attention to both social and environmental issues.

This call to responsibility has had results both big and small. In the past, non-governmental organizations issued daily air quality reports from the smog-choked Mexican capital; today that is done by the city government. Newspapers and magazines are devoting far greater space to environmental issues, including exposes of wholesale dumping of hazardous wastes in heavily populated areas. The attorney general for the environment, although not independent from the executive branch, has stepped up enforcement mechanisms and is accessible to complaints from average citizens.

The Mexican revolution in environmental consciousness also comes at a time of a broader demand for professionalization and decentralization of government power. Throughout Mexico, state and local governments are independently taking more activist roles in environmental protection. In the state of Sonora, for example, heavy emphasis has been placed on environmental problems posed by the low-wage maquiladora industries on the border.

The recent composition of a trinational commission on environmental issues, made up of Mexico, the United States and Canada, should also contribute to greater accountability of the Mexican government’s environmental programs.

Not all the news from Mexico’s environmental front is encouraging. For example, in July the Chamber of Deputies approved reforms of Mexico’s environmental laws prohibiting the importation of hazardous wastes, but not until an amendment was added at the insistence of industrialists, the Mexican Commerce Secretariat and the PAN to allow for discretion in cases considered “exceptional.”

The best news, of course, is that the criticism, as well as Mexico’s environmental progress, are now part of the mainstream of the political debate.