Date: Wed, 10 Dec 1997 01:32:59 -0600 (CST)
Subject: M-NEWS: E;NYT:In Mexico City, an Outsider Is Now Mayor, Dec 6 (fwd)






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Date: Tue, 9 Dec 1997 11:25:23 -0600 (CST)
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Subject: E;NYT:In Mexico City, an Outsider Is Now Mayor, Dec 6


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Date: Sat, 6 Dec 1997 01:30:53 -0500 (EST)
From: Mauricio Banda <mbanda-AT-dch.mty.itesm.mx>
Reply-To: mexico2000-AT-mep-d.org
Subject: [NYT] In Mexico City, an Outsider Is Now Mayor

Sat, 6 Dec 1997 00:26:19 -0600 (CST)

* The New York Times, December 6, 1997
      
  In Mexico City, an Outsider Is Now Mayor
     
   By JULIA PRESTON

   MEXICO CITY -- In an inauguration that greatly broadened the reach
   of democracy in Mexico, Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, a veteran opposition
   leader, was sworn in Friday as the first elected mayor of Mexico's
   vast and tumultuous capital city.
   
   After a grin and an embrace from President Ernesto Zedillo, whose
   party and government Cardenas has long battled, and a standing
   ovation from Mexican leaders of all political stripes gathered under
   the stained-glass rotunda of the City Council Hall, Cardenas pledged
   to root out corruption, beat back crime and bring "a new way of
   governing" to Mexico City.
   
   Because the capital towers over the country's political landscape,
   Cardenas has become the first opposition politician in seven decades
   who will rival the prominence, if not the power, of Mexico's
   president on the national stage.
   
   The clout and unpredictability of the political forces Cardenas
   leads were in evidence Thursday night when the opposition-controlled
   lower house of the national legislature, in a chaotic session,
   rebuffed Zedillo for the first time on a major initiative by
   rejecting key portions of his 1998 tax bill.
   
   Starting Friday, the 8.5 million residents of Mexico's commercial
   and cultural center will get their first taste of local government
   elected by popular vote, and the mayor's performance in his
   three-year term will do much to determine whether Mexicans like the
   new pluralism that began with elections last July.
   
   The simple, almost austere inaugural ceremony was a sweet moment of
   redress for Cardenas, who ran for president in 1988 and 1994 against
   Zedillo's party, the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI,
   which ruled Mexico unchallenged from the 1920s until this year. Many
   Mexicans believe that victory was stolen from Cardenas by fraud in
   1988.
   
   If he is an effective mayor, Cardenas will be in a formidable
   position to oust the PRI from national power in presidential
   elections in the year 2000.
   
   True to his style, Cardenas, who is 63, allowed himself few
   rhetorical flourishes in laying out a nuts-and-bolts program.
   
   "We are going to take this city away from the criminals," Cardenas
   said. "There are more of us than them, and we have better tools to
   face them with."
   
   The task he faces is not easy. Mexico City is not only engulfed in a
   frightening crime wave but is also riddled with corruption and
   saturated with air pollution. Cardenas must also contend with
   soaring expectations among residents desperate for change.
   
   A poll published Friday morning by the newspaper Reforma showed that
   71 percent of city residents think that life in the capital will
   improve during his administration.
   
   "We expect to see a change," said Gabriel Coleote Zayas, a
   45-year-old merchant, as he stood earlier this week stirring pork
   rinds in a simmering vat of grease at his market stall in a
   working-class neighborhood. "He is going to watch where our tax
   dollars go to see that they don't end up in the pockets of some
   bureaucrat."
   
   Florencio Rodriguez Perez, 62, a sidewalk photographer who has
   dressed up in a red plush Santa Claus suit for the Christmas season,
   reported glumly one day this week that he had three customers, who
   bought pictures worth only $2 each, in a whole day's work.
   
   "We can't take any more lies and cheating from the city government,"
   Rodriguez said, waiting beside an empty and forlorn-looking sleigh
   in a public square. "We want Cardenas to keep the prices we pay for
   everything from going up and up. We want him to make more of an
   economy for poor people."
   
   Cardenas crushed his opponents in elections on July 6 by winning 47
   percent of the vote. He will face no opposition from the city
   council, since his left-of-center Party of the Democratic
   Revolution, or PRD, won 38 of the council's 66 seats.
   
   But although his actions will be scrutinized in the national
   limelight, in practice Cardenas does not even control all of the
   metropolis for which the public will hold him responsible. As mayor,
   he is in charge only of a federal district not unlike Washington, an
   urban core that encompasses only 40 percent of the Mexico City
   metropolitan area, which is home to 18.5 million people.
   
   Mexico City mayors were appointed by the president starting in 1928,
   and although that changed this year, the president still decides
   what funds the capital city will have to spend, since most come from
   the federal budget.
   
   "The symbolism is much bigger than the job," said Adolfo Aguilar
   Zinser, a federal senator who has been both a close ally and fierce
   critic of Cardenas. "There is no relation between the expectations
   he faces and the powers he has to fulfill them."
   
   Cardenas is inheriting a city whose facts and figures draw a picture
   of disarray. The fiscal debt has risen to $1.5 billion, a 445
   percent increase since the last mayor took office three years ago.
   
   Cardenas has said he expects no windfall budget increases to help
   pay these debts. Instead, his aides say, he hopes by attacking
   corruption to achieve savings to plow back into city programs.
   
   Bribes and under-the-table fixes are standard operating procedure in
   city agencies. Aides to Cardenas estimated this week that as much as
   10 percent of the work force is made up of what Mexicans call
   "aviators," employees who collect salaries without showing up at
   their jobs.
   
   "Corruption will not be tolerated, not in any form," Cardenas said
   Friday. For the first time, he has insisted that all officials of
   his government will have to make personal financial declarations.
   
   Some two million residents have no work or not enough to make ends
   meet. At least 100,000 people live by selling trinkets or tacos on
   the street. These vendors spell trouble for Cardenas, since many
   lack licenses and have forced their way onto sidewalks downtown,
   choking traffic and defying the authorities to remove them by force.
   
   
   Cardenas has said he believes that three-quarters of the 628 felony
   crimes reported every day in the city are committed by well-armed
   organized rings whose members work hand in hand with the police.
   
   But his first anti-crime measure provoked controversy. He named a
   Mexican Air Force officer, Lt. Col. Rodolfo Debernardi Debernardi,
   to be police chief. Although he has served on the capital's police
   force, public opinion is running strongly against involving military
   officers in police work after a series of brutal crimes earlier this
   year in which police commanded by army officers have been accused.
   
   To be able to manage the city, Cardenas must secure the allegiance
   of more than 125,000 city workers who are members of unions, most of
   which have long been the domain of the PRI.
   
   Now that he has real power, Cardenas must also persuade followers in
   his own party, the PRD, to give up the combative tactics that served
   them well during the decades when they were a repressed opposition.


   Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company

   
* The Boston Globe, December 5, 1997

  Mexico City's new mayor vows new way
   
   By Steve Fainaru, Globe Staff
   
   MEXICO CITY - To understand what Cuauhtemoc Cardenas is up
   against, it is best to fly over this endless metropolis and gape.
   Below lies an urban explosion: 875 square miles of raw city spread far
   and wide over a valley; 18 million people, 4 million vehicles plodding
   along the avenues and sidestreets; all of it submerged in the gray
   soup of the world's worst air.
   
   The Mexico City telephone books span four volumes and 8,278 pages of
   businesses and residences. All of the 8.5 million people who make up
   the city proper will be under Cardenas' command after he is sworn in
   today. He is the capital's first opposition mayor since the
   Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, took control of nearly all
   aspects of Mexican political life in 1929.
   
   Five months ago, Cardenas trounced the PRI candidate to become the
   defining symbol of Mexico's democratic transition. Now he must take on
   something even more formidible: the PRI's vast web of political
   organization, patronage and blanket corruption that has made Mexico
   City run - against all odds - for nearly seven decades.
   
   The 63-year-old Cardenas has vowed to dismantle the system, but the
   task is staggering. The number of people in the city's employ are
   estimated at 200,000, but Cardenas said recently it could be ''100,000
   to 1 million.'' This monstrous PRI bureaucracy is responsible for
   collecting some 12,000 tons of garbage each day, servicing 86,000
   taxis and delivering the mail. It is greased by a culture of
   corruption in which little is accomplished without a bribe.
   
   ''Corruption has penetrated every single pore of the system,'' said
   Marti Bartres, the leader of the Cardenas-founded Party of the
   Democratic Revolution, or PRD, in the Mexico City legislative
   assembly. ''It is in the offices where they hand out construction
   permits, in the offices where they hand out driver's licenses, in the
   offices where they hand out passports. In every public office you will
   find officials peddling their authority.''
   
   Bartres said the system ''is going to have to be taken apart fiber by
   fiber. It is extremely delicate, because we are talking about all the
   intermediate bureaucracy, everything between the mayor and the lowest
   rungs of employees. All these separate interests are threads that have
   to be taken out very carefully, almost in surgical operations.''
   
   Cardenas has been circumspect about what exactly he intends to do.
   Asked about his anticorruption strategy at a media breakfast this
   week, he said rather quixotically that he intends to rely in part on
   ''very clear instruction to all government officials to fight
   corruption in whatever form it takes.'' He said he wanted to establish
   a career civil service that would promote stability and transparency.
   
   Asked how long it would take to see results, he said: ''I can tell you
   that from the very first moment you are going to be seeing actions
   that are different than anything that has been seen up till now.''
   
   Cardenas has not held elected office since he served as a PRI governor
   from 1980-86, shortly before he was expelled from the party in 1987
   for challenging its leadership. The transition will be daunting. The
   most pressing issue he faces as mayor is one of the worst crime waves
   in the city's history. According to authorities, some 700 crimes are
   committed each day, including an average of 13 car thefts an hour.
   
   Last weekend, 25,000 people marched to the center of the city to
   demand that authorities address the situation, which has grown only
   worse in recent weeks after military officers in the police force were
   charged in a torture-slaying of six youths. This followed an anticrime
   operation in one of the city's poorest and most violent barrios.
   
   ''Chilangos,'' as Mexico City's denizens are known, sound almost
   desperate when they talk about their hopes for Cardenas. ''If Cardenas
   isn't able to do something, and do something quick, we are going to
   face a tremendous crisis in this country, because no one will be able
   to believe in anything or anyone anymore,'' said Jose Luis Gonzalez, a
   29-year-old liquor distributor.
   
   However, some critics wonder whether he is the right man to confront
   the PRI, noting that he was weaned on the system that he is now trying
   to destroy. His father, Lazaro Cardenas, was a hero general of the
   Mexican revolution who was later tapped by the PRI's founder to serve
   as president. He used his term, from 1934-40, to construct the
   modern-day PRI, wedding it to the labor unions, the military and
   millions of subsistence farmers.
   
   That axis allowed the PRI to maintain peace after nearly two decades
   of fighting in which an estimated 1 million people died. Bartres said
   corruption quickly became ''the cement that holds together the PRI.''
   
   One of the most famous sayings of Alvaro Obregon, a founder of the
   current political system, is, ''Nobody can resist a gunshot of 50,000
   pesos.'' PRI simply substituted corruption for bullets. They used
   gunshots of money to buy off, pacify, coopt and control people. They
   converted tactic into a political tradition.
   
   Cardenas was a PRI loyalist until his break a decade ago, in part
   because he was not chosen as the party's presidential candidate.
   Instead he ran for president in 1988 under an alliance of four
   parties. He was leading the PRI's hand-picked candidate, Carlos
   Salinas de Gortari, when a party functionary uttered some of the most
   famous and prophetic words in modern Mexican history: ''The system has
   collapsed.''
   
   Although allegations of election fraud never were proven, Cardenas may
   forever be known as the man who would be president. He ran again in
   1994 and lost. Most observers say his three-year term as mayor is just
   a warmup for a run in 2000.
   
   Cardenas' inauguration was preceded by a strange subplot: a ferocious
   campaign against him by Vicente Fox, the opposition governor of
   Guanajuato, who already appears to be running for president against
   him. ''I'm sure [Cardenas] will try to run. I'm sure he's going to be
   there for the third time,'' said Fox in an interview. ''I would like
   nothing better than that. I want to face him. I hope I face him.''
   
   Fox, who represents the center-right National Action Party, said he
   believes now that Cardenas ''is honest, whatever connection he had
   with the PRI has been cut off.'' But, he added, sounding very much
   like a candidate, ''I know Cardenas' personally, I have talked to him
   for many, many long hours, and I just don't see the capacity to
   govern. I guess this is a stern assessment on my part, but I still
   think Cardenas is a myth. He is utopia based on his father's name.''
   
   Cardenas knows that he cannot possibly win the presidency without
   demonstrating that he can bring order to the chaotic capital. ''People
   are mistaken if they think that December 5 is a starting date for the
   presidential campaign. There are going to be many changes in the life
   of this city that are going to take place from the first moment this
   new government is sworn in.''
   
   Under every rock, Cardenas can find seeds of the old system to be
   destroyed. Earlier this year, when control of Mexico City's
   legislative assembly shifted to Cardenas' party, its leaders quickly
   learned that the decision-making body had been distributing
   approximately 500,000 pesos a month, about $62,500 at today's exchange
   rate, in bribes to various local journalists.
   
   Even last week, PRI foot soldiers tried to sabotage Cardenas.
   According to several street vendors, the operatives fanned out across
   the city, revoking long-standing work permits and denying new ones.
   ''They told me I would have to take it up with Cardenas,'' said one
   vendor who lost her newspaper kiosk.
   
   ''I really hope he can do something,'' said David Franco, a
   32-year-old credit union employee. ''Because the corruption changes
   your life. Here is how corruption affects you: It is not that you are
   corrupt, it's that you become corrupt. You become one of them.''
   

   This story ran on page A01 of the Boston Globe on 12/05/97.
   (c) Copyright 1997 Globe Newspaper Company.


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