Mexicans Look Hard to See Hope : Latin America: Election promises may prove empty for residents of slums near the capital. They now face eviction.

As she stood proudly on the rupturing fringes of the second-most populous city on the globe, in the mud of a shantytown that is only a dirt mine on maps, it was hard for Alejandra Sanchez to look with hope to the future--her future, Mexico’s future, the bold, new future the next president has vowed to bring.

The present, she said just a week after Mexico’s historic presidential election, is hard enough. And her view was from “the promised land”--one of scores of slums that have drawn millions of impoverished rural Mexicans to the teeming edge of the capital, Mexico City, in search of jobs and a new life.

Hers was, in fact, a view of post-election Mexico through the prism of the poverty shared by hundreds of thousands of families who voted as one in many of these slums. They voted for Mexico’s long-ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, for its President-elect Ernesto Zedillo and for his promises of a new era of democracy, reform and prosperity for the nation’s estimated 40 million poor.

In this tiny barrio called St. Geronimo of the Four Winds, Sanchez and about 200 other families--every one of them self-professed lifelong supporters of Zedillo’s ruling party--are about to be evicted from their land, tiny plots they bought from a professional swindler who is now behind bars.

“They’re trying to evict us, and already we’re suffering here,” Sanchez said. In the six years since her family paid 4,500 pesos (about $1,500) to a local ward boss for a small plot of land, they have received no electricity, no water, no schools, no clinics and no legal title to that land. And now, a company that mines dirt nearby for construction projects in the burgeoning capital claims to be the rightful owner of the land.

As she spoke, the 31-year-old mother of six cradled her youngest child, 10-month-old Sarah, while the older ones, all girls, played nearby, some using the skeleton of a forgotten Dodge as a jungle gym and others using a tree rope as a swing. Her husband, Santiago, wasn’t around, she said. He was out looking for work--a daily search for a day job in construction, the growth industry in a city long since grown out of control.

“Look at the way we are living,” she said. “What kind of future can we hope for for our children? . . .

“For the future, I wish only that we have the basic services of life, and that they don’t evict us from this land. If they throw me out, where will I take my daughters?”

But then she smiled, offering up her first real look of hope. “We’ll go to the United States,” she said, “if, of course, they’ll take us.”

It is, it seems, the bitterest of ironies that after an election billed as a watershed of democratic change, the end of a migration trail for so many millions would be merely the beginning of another.

And such are the bitter realities of these slums, the “lost cities” of the Mexican capital, that old pueblos such as Chalco, long ago swallowed up by the sprawl of a city now numbering more than 20 million, would become increasingly fertile ground for that migration.

Analysts say the United States has a vital interest in the present and future of the lost cities and their residents’ view of Mexican democracy.

“On Election Day, most of the people in the lost cities didn’t want to talk about politics. All they wanted to know was how long the flight is from Mexico City to Los Angeles,” said Douglas Payne, an expert on Mexico with the Washington-based Freedom House who spent eight days in Chalco before and during Mexico’s Aug. 21 national elections.

“They weren’t so worried about themselves. They just want to see to that their kids can get to the U.S. . . . It’s the most porous border between the First and Third World anywhere in the world, and the lure is constant, magnetic. The only real solution is to improve their situation in Mexico, physically and politically, or the flow will only continue to grow.”

The Mexican government under President Carlos Salinas de Gortari has tried to do just that--and nowhere with more public resources than it has devoted to Chalco.

The government’s ambitious social welfare campaign, known as the National Solidarity Program, began in Chalco in 1990. In the four years since Salinas, who visited Chalco’s squalor during his 1988 presidential campaign, chose this slum as a model for development, the government has pumped more than $300 million worth of roads, clinics, drinking water, electricity and other services into the 5,189 acres officially designated as the Chalco Valley.

Those efforts did improve the quality of life in much of Chalco, which is now home to more than half a million on the eastern fringe of Mexico City. But it was double-edged development.

It acted as a magnet for tens of thousands more migrants from the impoverished countryside. It exposed them to American television and an array of out-of-reach consumer goods. It planted the seeds of another dream that Payne labels simply “looking North.” And it so far has failed to change a grass-roots system of corruption, fraud and frustration that many residents say is synonymous with local elements of the ruling party.

Another veteran Chalco analyst, reporter Juan Lazaro of the Mexico City daily El Universal, summed up his own post-election impression of what has been his beat for the last four years:

“The Chalco Valley, the promised land, the land of misery and hope, where the federal government’s National Solidarity Program invested more than 1 billion pesos to improve the quality of life of about 500,000 residents in extreme poverty, now wants only to be free.”

During a tour of Chalco’s mud-and-swamp barrios , many of them in legal limbo after corrupt land deals like the ones that victimized St. Geronimo of the Four Winds, Lazaro had little to add, letting the landscape speak for itself.

The visit included a stop at a primary school reachable only by truck, four-wheel-drive or the sturdiest automobile. Late last month, the school was filled not just with children but with men, women and families who spoke volumes about the system that analysts such as Payne say must change in the slums if they are to become an end, rather than a means, of Mexican migration.

There were no classes in the Ruben Jaramillo Primary School, a new concrete structure built two years ago under the Solidarity program along with scores of schools, streets and basketball courts throughout Chalco.

And there won’t be any unless the government finds a new home for the 420 families living in and around it, huddling under leaky tarpaulins and scrap tin that was all they could carry when they were evicted from their shanties on the eve of the Aug. 21 elections.

As they told their story--they too had bought from a swindler who is now in jail--it was clear that these people had much in common with Alejandra Sanchez and the families of St. Geronimo of the Four Winds. Their nightmare simply had progressed to the next stage.

But there were differences. For one thing, they said, they refused to promise their votes to Zedillo and the ruling PRI when local ward bosses offered their help in exchange for their votes.

“First the police came and said they would kick us out in a week. They said, ‘This land is not negotiable.’ But we said we paid for this land,” said Teresa de Jesus Perez Vasquez, 30, who was living under a small orange tarp behind the school with her five children, her unemployed husband, another family of seven and the last of their worldly goods.

“Then the PRI people came and said they had a way for us to stay there. If we voted for them, they said they would get us our land. But when we said we weren’t going to support one party or the other, that we were only looking to keep a small piece of land, they abandoned us.

“We were frightened from the harassment and threats (that followed). We couldn’t go out of our homes late in the day or at night.”

Then, true to their word, the police came on Election Day, according to Vasquez and dozens of her neighbors. More than 400 municipal riot police, they said, destroyed their shanties and stole many of their possessions. Only after a non-governmental, civic-action group intervened through the school’s director, Ignacio Martinez Romero, did the families move into the school.

Martinez confirmed that his civic-action group, the Popular Revolutionary Union of Emiliano Zapata, has filed a formal protest with the Federal Electoral Tribunal alleging that the ruling party used intimidation to attempt to force the families now living in his school to cast ballots for the PRI.

Martinez also said his group confirmed that most of the 420 families had indeed purchased their land, but without legal title, in what he called a typical, wide-ranging land fraud that is still under investigation.

“Unfortunately, this is not an unusual situation. It’s happening all over the lost cities,” the school director said, standing in the schoolyard amid cooking fires and refugee tents. One wall bears the portraits of Mexican revolutionary leader Emiliano Zapata and Cuban revolutionary Che Guevara.

“Everything here is (about) land. The city has swallowed Chalco, and now Chalco is swallowing itself. And fraud is the system. At this level, fraud and politics seem to go together.”

Martinez only smiled when asked what he thinks the next six years will hold. “I don’t even know where I’m going to hold classes,” he said.

Standing nearby, beside her makeshift tent, Teresa de Jesus Perez Vasquez was even more uncertain. Like millions of other rural Mexicans, she said, she came alone from the poverty of her home state of Oaxaca to the capital at age 12, searching for work. She found a husband, married and started a family. Now, she said, there is no question of going back.

The land in Oaxaca is bad and the poverty even worse, she and others in the group said.

“We’re near work here,” she said. “And to move would be too radical a change for the family. That’s why we’re continuing here in our fight to obtain a piece of land.”

With the new government, she was asked, will things improve?

“Things are going to just go on the way they are,” she said. “We don’t have anyplace else to go.”

But there was another voice among the 420 families, an elder of the group who spoke more freely of a deeper anger and a far-off hope for the future. Juan Aguilar Rodriguez, 60, who said he hauls carrots to the municipal depot and must buy a license from local ruling party officials to do it, said he harbors little hope for change from within.

“Look, the PRI is the biggest mafia in the country. Imagine, I have to pay a tax just to have the right to work,” he said.

“The government doesn’t even let us work. They want everything for themselves. They cut the slices of cheese to trade among themselves. They never let the people in on it. They know all the laws. They’re always citing the legal codes. But for them, the constitution is like an accordion. They play it the way they want it.

“Look, I don’t know how to read. I can’t write,” he continued. “It’s the hardest thing in the world for me to try to find work. And at my age, at 60 years old, can you imagine?

“I don’t want presents. I don’t want charity. I just want to work.”

But perhaps not here. Pondering the future, Aguilar stopped speaking, smiled and pointed at his T-shirt, which bore a silver-and-black football helmet and the words “Los Angeles Raiders.”