Mexico City mayor’s first day on the job

MEXICO CITY -- The city that was once considered one of the world’s most polluted and crime-ridden now boasts that it is a haven from Mexico’s drug violence and has gone so “green” with new mass transit lines and trendy vertical gardens that it is hardly recognizable from its former self.

Miguel Angel Mancera, the newly sworn-in mayor, vowed this week to continue the socially progressive policies of his predecessor and make Mexico’s gargantuan capital “safer, freer, more equal, more progressive” during his next six years in office.

“My government shall be humanist, truthful, honorable, transparent, democratic and united with the people,” the mayor said in his first speech after taking the oath of office Wednesday.

Mancera, 46, the former attorney general of Mexico City, holds a doctorate in law from the National Autonomous University of Mexico. He is a single father and fitness buff who boxes regularly. The society magazine Quien called him “the golden bachelor” in a recent cover story.

Mancera won the July 1 mayoral election by a whopping 63% of the vote, a margin of victory considered partly a referendum on the liberal Democratic Revolution Party, or PRD, and its uninterrupted run at City Hall since 1997, when the position of mayor was created for the Federal District, the formal name of Mexico City.

Mancera took the reins of the city’s government after the largely successful term of outgoing Mayor Marcelo Ebrard, a popular figure who is credited with reducing crime in the capital even as violence soared in other parts of the country and who legalized same-sex marriage and abortion on demand in the city.

The position of mayor is considered a launching pad for higher office in Mexico, but it is also a frustrating barrier for the PRD. Its presidential candidates in recent national elections, Cuauhtemoc Cardenas and Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, have both been mayors of Mexico City but have been unable to capture the presidency in a total of four attempts.

Ebrard, a product of the more centrist wing of the PRD, was sidelined as candidate in the 2012 presidential election by the populist stalwart Lopez Obrador, who finished second after Enrique Peña Nieto, the new president.

After his swearing-in, Mancera said he would install thousands more high-tech surveillance cameras to further reduce crime. He also proposed the creation of a post in his Cabinet, a U.S.-style city manager, to answer citizens’ needs.

On Thursday, his first full day on the job, Mancera waded into the capital’s current major controversy, the alleged abuse by police and abitrary arrests of dozens of protesters in clashes during last week’s swearing-in of Peña Nieto. The city’s human rights commission said Thursday that more than 20 people who weren’t involved in the violence had been arrested, including a Romanian journalist taking photographs of the events, and that at least four may have been tortured or beaten.

Mancera urged residents to be patient with legal proceedings for 69 people who face charges of vandalism and disturbing the peace on Saturday. “To say that no one disturbed the peace or public order would be out of touch with reality,” he said.

However Mancera’s term as mayor turns out, it may not be enough to catapult him higher if he harbors aspirations for the presidency in 2018. For that election, his former boss, Marcelo Ebrard, has already indicated he’s in the running.

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