No Breather From Crisis in Mexico City

Beyond the legal limits of Mexico City’s self-destructive sprawl, the view from the mountainside neighborhood of El Zacaton was breathtaking--literally.

A photochemical soup spread across the urban valley 1,500 feet below. Skyscrapers, factories, highways and homes loomed grayish-brown through a translucent toxic smog as more than 20 million people and 3 million cars coughed, choked and gasped their way through ozone levels more than double those considered safe for humans.

The cloud spread across the horizon, burning eyes and lungs even up in fast-growing El Zacaton--the Pasture, where construction workers, oblivious, continued carving the city deeper into one of its few remaining forests, illegally building makeshift homes to accommodate a population boom that brings 1,000 new residents to Mexico City each day.

“The city’s growing fast,” said shopkeeper Elecuterio Martinez, rubbing his reddened eyes one recent afternoon. “It’s the demographic explosion.”

The scene was reminiscent of Los Angeles in the 1970s, when its levels of ozone, auto emissions and industrial development were roughly comparable to Mexico City’s today.

As Los Angeles celebrates its lowest smog readings in decades, Mexico City officials have been declaring a record number of smog-emergency days--four in a row recently. Many here fear that the coming months--Mexico City’s smog season--will rank among the city’s worst. And environmentalists are pointing to neighborhoods like El Zacaton as a principal cause.

Officially, city authorities say the pollution problem, though bad, is so far statistically no worse than in recent years. They blame the weather for the recent string of smog emergencies--the most on consecutive days since an air-quality alert system was put in place six years ago.

Ozone levels topping 2 1/2 times international norms trigger automatic bans on hundreds of thousands of cars and cutbacks on factory production. It wasn’t until strong winds and cool air blew through Mexico City’s valley that the ozone finally dropped below emergency levels.

Yet even during the last week of below-emergency readings of ozone--a chemical that protects humans from harmful ultraviolet light in the stratosphere but makes life miserable at ground level and may cause serious health problems--are above accepted norms almost every day. And those levels are averaging about double the highest readings in Southern California.

In more than a dozen interviews and thousands of pages of recent studies, Mexican and U.S. scientists agreed that the most direct causes of Mexico City’s toxic cloud are as varied as the alphabet soup of chemicals swirling inside it. But they also agreed that efforts to contain it, especially amid the lasting impact of Mexico’s economic crisis, are a case study in environmental frustration.

As the economic crisis has pushed impoverished rural Mexicans into the capital at unheard-of rates during the last two years, environmental officials have begun directly linking the pollution problem to what one recent government study on the subject called “the process of megalopolization of the central region of the country.”

The study called for “a new conceptual framework” that attacks not just the vehicle, factory and natural gas emissions known to cause the smog but also uncontrolled urban growth.

“Pollution is the product of economic marginalization,” concluded Jose Luis Pedroza, director of the city’s air pollution monitoring network, which measures the metropolitan area’s ozone with 32 sophisticated sampling stations. “We have realized that to efficiently combat air pollution, we need to fight on many different levels.”

Humberto Bravo, a Mexican scientist who pioneered studies on the city’s pollution soon after the problem was discovered in the late 1950s, said, “Each inhabitant has certain needs--transportation, for example--so it’s logical that when the population increases, so does the pollution.

“But the correlation is not as exact as it was in Los Angeles, where the growth of population, cars and industry were directly responsible for the pollution,” he said. “In Mexico, it was population growth combined with poor political decisions.”

University of Northern Colorado geography professors Charles Collins and Steven Scott found in their own recent study that “the mega-urbanization” of the Mexican capital stymies the search for a solution to the pollution. The task is even more difficult, they said, given “Mexico’s current social, economic and technical status.”

And the recent Mexican government study cited the rampant and often illegal urban sprawl evident in new neighborhoods such as El Zacaton for a problem that it concluded will take the equivalent of billions of dollars to solve.

That study, a five-year plan to improve the city’s air quality by the end of the century, also framed the magnitude of a solution in a city where the mayor concedes that the transportation system is “pure anarchy,” where city engineers admit that fewer than 40% of the vehicles have pollution-controlling catalytic converters, and where urban planners have resigned themselves to a population that will top 30 million in the year 2000.

In one “totally hypothetical” scenario to bring ozone levels down to the international norm of 0.11 parts per million overnight, the 243-page study determined that officials would have to ban all private cars, buses and trucks every hour of every day; suspend all electricity generation in the metropolitan area; cut all factory production in the city by 50%; and install hundreds of millions of dollars worth of catalytic equipment at all city industries.

The costs of even less extreme anti-smog measures would come as the city and country continue to reel from Mexico’s worst economic crisis in memory.

Los Angeles beat the worst of its ozone-driven smog with a new generation of cars equipped with catalytic converters and the mandatory use of high-quality unleaded gasoline. The result: just seven days of smog alerts from May through October.

In Mexico City, where ozone levels have exceeded international norms on all but about a dozen days this year, unleaded gas is sold but rarely used. And during the economic crisis, many drivers cannot afford either the more expensive unleaded gas or the cars that use it.

“So now there are fewer options for people to be responsible about fighting pollution,” said Pedroza, the chief pollution monitor. “The authorities no longer have the necessary resources to efficiently fight the pollution problem. And every day, more people are coming to live in the city.”

Urban planner Jorge Legorreta said that new arrivals from the impoverished countryside settle first in poor inner-city districts, where they rent bed space while working in menial jobs to save money. Later, many go to the city’s outskirts to build a small home and settle.

El Zacaton, on the metropolitan area’s extreme southern fringe, is a case in point. Ten years ago, shop owner Martinez recalled, the neighborhood had just eight houses. Today, there are hundreds--and hundreds more on the way--most of them encroaching on an officially sanctioned ecological reserve.

“Yeah, they’ve torn out the trees,” said Martinez, who migrated here from the impoverished southern state of Oaxaca in 1978 and built his shop and home in El Zacaton three years ago.

El Zacaton residents steal electricity through a spaghetti-like snarl of cables connected to a legal settlement across the road, and many have fraudulent deeds to “their” land.

Such new settlements--and there are dozens of them ringing the city--eat into what officials call “the lungs of the city,” officially sanctioned “green areas” where dense forests produce oxygen through photosynthesis that helps curb pollution’s effects.

“These areas are specifically designated and protected because they produce oxygen for the city,” Pedroza said. “But there’s a problem protecting these ecological zones. They’re at the outskirts of the city in rural areas often without police. So there’s no way of preventing the people from squatting there illegally.”

Despite occasional bulldozing of the illegal new colonies by city officials, most spring up again within months. And the city’s latest development plan appears to give up on the idea of urban containment. It envisions a “megalopolis” that extends more than 100 miles from Cuernavaca in the south to the state of Hidalgo in the north.

Yet even in the face of such mind-boggling growth, not all scientists are pessimistic. Much of that development is expected to take place beyond the mountain ranges that help contain the capital’s smog, which would help diffuse the pollution sources.

“The city will adjust,” urban planner Legorreta concluded, noting its adaptability through centuries of often phenomenal growth.

“Is the city moving toward death? No. It is a city that recycles itself, reinvents itself every day. Mexico City will be a city of 30 million, but in no way is it going to kill us.”