Seniors Rally Around Mayor of Mexico City

If you think the AARP is a force to be reckoned with, then you haven’t met Martha Dominguez Davy.

She has high blood pressure and at times is troubled by arthritis. But the 72-year-old was headed to the barricades to defend her $64-a-month pension and the man who gave it to her. That would be Mexico City Mayor Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, whose impeachment by Congress last week was a major setback in his bid to become the country’s next president.

“I will fight with everything I have to help him,” said the Mexico City grandmother, kissing a button emblazoned with Lopez Obrador’s smiling face that she keeps pinned to her blouse, over her heart.

Such is the devotion the populist mayor inspires among the capital’s senior citizens, a long-marginalized group of voters who, like their U.S. counterparts, are mobilizing around the theme of social security.

Dominguez joined an estimated 400,000 people, many of them elderly, in the city last week to protest a decision by Congress to strip Lopez Obrador of his immunity from prosecution over a minor property dispute.

The front-runner in next year’s presidential race is expected to be charged and potentially jailed pending trial for allegedly ignoring a 2001 court order to stop construction of a city-financed hospital access road on expropriated land.

Under Mexican law, he would be banned from politics until his case is resolved. It’s a legal blow that could knock him off the 2006 ballot even if he is cleared.

Supporters of the leftist mayor, who has taken a leave of absence from his duties, say the decision is a dirty trick to sabotage his presidential aspirations. Lopez Obrador has made enemies of the rich and powerful for his criticism of the North American Free Trade Agreement, and for his opposition to the privatization of state industries and other tenets of free-market economics.

But he is wildly popular among the poor and working class. His administration has distributed free school supplies to youngsters and provided thousands of construction jobs to laborers through a slew of public works projects. No group, however, reveres him more than the capital’s senior citizens, for whom his administration has developed a bare-bones but universal social security system, something unheard of in the rest of Mexico.

Launched in 2001, the program provides about 370,000 Mexico City residents aged 70 and over with a stipend of about $64 a month. The money is credited to them electronically on plastic cards the size of a driver’s license. Holders can use them like debit cards in major supermarkets and discount stores to buy just about anything except liquor. Beneficiaries also receive free medical care at city-financed clinics.

Sixty-four bucks a month is little more than bingo money for many seniors in the United States. But it is a small miracle in Mexico, where eight out of 10 elderly people lack pension benefits and nearly half have no health-care coverage.

Although programs such as Social Security and Medicare have helped drive down elderly poverty rates in the U.S. from about 35% of American seniors in the 1950s to 10% today, around 60% of Mexicans over the age of 60 are poor. There is no old-age safety net beyond family for millions who work in Mexico’s underground economy, the nation’s principal job engine.

For seniors like Dominguez, a divorcee who supported five children working as a waitress, baby-sitter and bakery clerk, the monthly stipend has brought a small degree of dignity. Shampoo and underwear are no longer unthinkable luxuries. She said she eats meat regularly now and occasionally treats herself to cookies and chocolate.

“Thanks to Andres Manuel, I may have to lose some weight,” she said with a laugh, patting her firm midsection as she relaxed in her tiny living room. She has decorated the iron gate leading to her home with a poster of Lopez Obrador that reads: “They didn’t rob us of hope.”

Critics have called such social spending unsustainable and a thinly veiled attempt to buy votes from the poor. Conservative President Vicente Fox has warned the public repeatedly to beware of “populist messiahs” who “offer gold and riches.”

But some analysts who have looked at the books say Lopez Obrador has paid for the $342-million program at least twice over by slashing the capital’s bureaucracy.

Independent Mexico City economist Rogelio Ramirez de la O says the mayor has cut at least $721 million in city spending by eliminating jobs, consolidating office space, bargaining hard with vendors and yanking away cellphones, vehicles, business lunches and other perks from city employees.

“He is very hands-on,” Ramirez de la O said. “He literally squeezed that money out of the bureaucracy.”

Legions of senior citizens are repaying that generosity by rushing to Lopez Obrador’s defense. Sections of the capital’s massive central square, the Zocalo, looked like a Gray Panthers rally last week, with white-haired protesters waving banners and shouting, “We are with you!”

Socorro Camacho Romero is among the mayor’s defenders. The 79-year-old keeps her food card tucked inside a protective case along with the grocery receipts so that she knows exactly how much she has left to get her through the month.

In her nearly eight decades, she said, she can’t remember another elected official who has improved her quality of life as much.

A doctor’s appointment kept her away from the rally Thursday. But she vows she won’t miss the next big one, scheduled for later this month. “He is the only politician that has ever taken us old folks into account,” she said. “His enemies think that we’ll tire, that we’ll keep quiet because we are old and poor. But I am going to march until I can’t march anymore.”