Mexico City Launches Crackdown on Squatters’ Settlements

They live anywhere they can: in abandoned boxcars, in shacks teetering on hillsides, in public parks, in roadside hovels.

For decades, little attempt was made to rein in the masses who migrated to Mexico’s sprawling capital of 8.5 million people but could not find affordable housing and built shelters wherever they could.

Lawmakers say at least 48,000 families--as many as 200,000 people--live illegally in 360 shantytowns built on property they don’t own.

Now, with squatters ranging into Mexico City’s last woodlands, authorities are cracking down, and the job has fallen to an unlikely man: leftist Mayor Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, who was hailed as a hero of the poor when he took office in December.

A month after Cardenas was sworn in, police evicted about 600 squatters who had invaded a public park and cut down scrub oaks to build shacks of tin and wood.

“No eviction is enjoyable, but this has to be controlled,” Jesus Estevez of the city’s Natural Resources Commission said as he drove past shacks built alongside a road by the people evicted from the park.

Irene Orduna, one of those forced from the park, is living in a hovel made of plastic sheeting, wood and tar paper. “All we want is a little piece of land,” she said.

The scarcity of land is such a problem that forest fires were intentionally set in early April on the city’s western edge in an attempt to clear parkland for housing, authorities say.

A blaze that blackened 1,000 acres of woods and clouded the already polluted city in smoke “was intentional and presumably aimed at changing the use” of parks where construction is prohibited, Assistant Environment Secretary Victor Villalobos said.

In a country where corrupt officials are often accused of “selling” public parkland to the poor and companies profit from supplying shack builders, the new city government vows to stop the “squatter industry.”

“Some settlements will be consolidated, given services, and some of them on hillsides will be shored up and made safer,” Estevez said, standing in a clearing in the mountains above the urban sprawl.

“But some will have to be removed,” he said, pointing to acres of wooden shacks clinging precariously to slopes stretching below.

It won’t be easy.

Days after the city’s new environment secretary said he wouldn’t allow “the loss of one more square yard” to squatters, dump trucks were found unloading tons of construction rubble near a protected lake, filling in marshy soil apparently to create land for shanties.

Many stand to lose from the crackdown: construction companies that save money by illegally dumping rubble on the city outskirts; cement companies that sell most of their product in 110-pound sacks for small builders; political groups that gain votes and money from allowing unplanned neighborhoods to spring up.

“It’s very profitable business,” said city lawmaker Alfredo Hernandez Raigosa, who accuses officials of the long-governing Institutional Revolutionary Party of profiting from squatters.

Camps were often established by local PRI leaders who charged squatters for plots as small as 400 square feet, Hernandez Raigosa contends. There often were additional charges for water and electricity, he said.

Those charges “add up to stratospheric profits for a few leaders,” said Hernandez Raigosa, a member of Cardenas’ leftist Democratic Revolution Party. “We face the inertia left by past [PRI] administrations . . . who looked the other way or made up pretexts to defend the squatters ‘rights.’ ”

PRI officials declined to respond to the charges.

But safety, not politics, is the main reason for the crackdown, most city officials say.

Squatters often live without drainage, with frayed electric cables hooked illegally into the city’s electricity grid, and with drinking water from buckets or leaky rubber hoses.

A fire apparently sparked by illegal electric hookups swept through about 100 shacks in “The Last Hope” squatters’ camp in an industrial area of downtown Mexico City on Feb. 25. No serious injuries were reported.

Most area residents didn’t even know the tar paper shacks had been built between two factories until the squatters’ burned possessions were shoveled into the street.

The problem isn’t confined to the capital. Dozens of squatters in the Pacific resort city of Acapulco were killed in October when Hurricane Pauline sent a river roaring down the dry stream bed where local officials had let them settle--and charged them rent.

Standing in the mountains above Mexico City, Estevez surveyed the makeshift home of Federico Hernandez and said the structure could easily tumble down the slope when seasonal rains start in June. The lot is so steep that Hernandez has sandbagged the house’s back wall to keep it from sliding downhill.

“It’s this or my hometown, and there’s not even enough food there,” said Hernandez, an itinerant vendor.

Gazing at the city below, he added, “There’s nothing I’d like more than to live down there, somewhere safer.”