A Pround Capital's Distress
By Otto Friedrich
Overcrowded, polluted, corrupted, Mexico City offers the world a grim lesson
When the ragged and exhausted Spanish conquistadors first beheld the lake-encircled capital of the Aztecs one November morning in 1519, they were stunned by its grandeur. A shining metropolis of some 300,000 people, far larger than any city in Europe, Tenochtitlan displayed immense stone temples to the gods of rain and war and an even more immense royal palace, where Aztec nobles stood guard in jaguar-head helmets and brightly feathered robes.
In the nearby marketplace, vendors offered an abundance of jungle fruits and rare herbs and skillfully wrought creations of silver and gold. "The magnificence, the strange and marvelous things of this great city are so remarkable as not to be believed," Hernando Cortes wrote back to the imperial court of Charles V. "We were seeing things," Bernal Diaz del Castillo recalled in his memoir of the Spanish invasion, "that had never been heard of or seen before, nor even dreamed about."
A newcomer today is more apt to arrive by air, and before he even glimpses the dried-up bed of Lake Texcoco, now edged with miles of slum hovels, the first thing he sees is an almost perpetual blanket of smog that shrouds the entire city. It is an ugly grayish brown. There is something strangely sinister about it--a cloud of poison. The pilot orders the seat belts tightened and announces an imminent descent into the murk and filth.
This is Mexico City, grand, proud, beautiful Mexico City, which already boasted a Spanish cathedral and a university when Washington and Boston were still woodlands. Within the past year or so this ancient metropolis has grown to about 17 million people, and it is in the process of surpassing Tokyo as the largest city of the world.* But that growth, which might once have been a point of pride, is a curse. It consists in large part of jobless peasants streaming in from the countryside at a rate of about 1,000 a day.
Novelist Carlos Fuentes has called Mexico City the capital of underdevelopment; it has also become a capital of pollution and a capital of slums.
This is the city builder's dream turned nightmare. It is the supercity, the megalopolis, infected by a kind of social cancer that is metastasizing out of control. Its afflictions--a mixture of overcrowding, poverty, pollution and corruption--are a warning to all the other great cities, particularly those in the Third World (see following story), but to New York or Los Angeles as well, that what is happening in Mexico City threatens them too.
The statistics of Mexico City's continuing self-destruction are appalling:
P: More than 2 million of the city's people have no running water in their homes.
Mayor Ramon Aguirre of the governing Institutional Revolutionary Party insists that 95% of the inhabitants have access to water, but for many that means one faucet shared by an entire block.
P: More than 3 million residents have no sewage facilities. So tons of waste are left in gutters or vacant lots to become part of the city's water and part of its dust. "If fecal matter were fluorescent," one Mexico City newspaper has said, "the city wouldn't need lights."
P: Mexico City produces about 14,000 tons of garbage every day but processes only 8,000. Of the rest, about half gets dumped in landfill, and half is left to rot in the open. One result: legions of rats.
P: Three million cars and 7,000 diesel buses, many of them old and out of repair, spew contamination into the air. So do the approximately 130,000 nearby factories that represent more than 50% of all Mexican industry. The daily total of chemical air pollution amounts to 11,000 tons. Just breathing is estimated to be equivalent to smoking two packs of cigarettes a day.
P: The combination of chemical and biological poisons kills 30,000 children every year through respiratory and gastrointestinal diseases. Overall, pollution may account for the deaths of nearly 100,000 people a year.
These are figures that inspire prophecies of disaster. Says one leading environmentalist: "The question is not whether we will be able to live a pleasant life a few years from now. The question is whether we will be able to survive." Says another, Gabriel Quadri: "If nothing is done to cleanse our home, this desert of steel and concrete will be our tomb."
The prospect of urban apocalypse threatens not only the Mexican megacity but also the U.S. The undefended 2,000-mile frontier between Mexico and the U.S. is the only place in the world where a wealthy industrial nation borders on a poor and overcrowded one. The official total of legal Mexican aliens in the U.S. stood at 596,000 as of 1981. Estimates for illegal immigrants vary from 3 million to 6 million. "Traditionally," says one U.S. expert, "about two-thirds of the Mexican peasants who can't survive on the land go to Mexico's cities and one-third somehow make their way into Texas or California. If those proportions were ever reversed, we'd be in terrible trouble."
Yet Mexico City is not some vast urban junk pile. It is one of the most handsome and stylish cities in the Americas, and one of the most sophisticated. It is a city of broad boulevards and gleaming office buildings, of sparkling fountains and scarlet flower beds, of noble baroque churches that welcome every morning with a resonant litany of bells and chimes.
In any given week there are a dozen or more plays being performed, plus the celebrated Ballet Folklorico, a French or Japanese film festival, a first-rate bullfight. Eleven major daily newspapers and six TV channels compete for the eye and the mind. The shops in the Zona Rosa near the Paseo de la Reforma are as glittering as those in Paris or New York City.
A suede jacket at Aries or a silver serving spoon from Taxco may cost $200. In the garden at Bellinghausen's, visitors savor a splendid cabrito, roasted baby goat wrapped in tortillas with a spicy sauce.
That is the Mexico City of the rich, of course, and of the tourists. But as in any city, there are layers and layers of butchers and bakers and candlestick makers, housewives, secretaries, cops and robbers.
To them, the basic fact of life is that inflation, which neared an annual rate of 100% in 1982, still gallops along at more than 60%. The peso, which was worth 25 to the dollar in early 1982, has sunk to 194 to the dollar. That makes Mexico's imported goods extremely expensive--or nonexistent. Pablo Fernandez and his wife Pia, both 29, do not live at all badly on a combined income of $800 a month, but the budget pinch keeps getting worse. "Forget about buying books, or getting clothes, or going somewhere for the weekend," says Fernandez, a professor of social psychology. "We're living by the day," says his wife, who has an administrative job. "The refrigerator seems half empty most of the time."
Still, those who have jobs may consider themselves among the lucky. Officially, 12% of the city's inhabitants are unemployed, but underemployment runs to nearly 40%. As one U.S. expert puts it, "If a 35-year-old man with a wife and children spends his days hoping to shine shoes, is he employed?" To some, the answer lies in burglary and theft, which have risen 35% in the past year.
Below all the other layers of workers come the pepenadores, the rubbish pickers, who swarm like rats through the reeking mountains of garbage in the main city dump, the Santa Fe. There are about 2,500 regulars there, roughly one for each ton of trash dumped daily. By picking through the pile for resalable bits of metal or plastic, they, hope to earn enough to survive. Says Pablo Tellez Falcon, 45, the chief of the dump: "They regard us as the shabby people who work in the slime with a bottle of tequila in the back pocket."
Below even the garbage pickers, perhaps, are those who can do nothing but beg. On the Zocalo, the vast central square where the monumental cathedral shoulders the equally monumental presidential palace, a balding man in a frayed black suit plays mournfully on his violin while a haggard woman with a baby in her arms stands next to him and holds out an empty tin can. A block away, at the corner of Avenida Madero, a white-stubbled man with no legs holds up a few packs of Chiclets for sale. Just beyond him in the dusk sits one of those silent Indians who are known as "Marias," this one a grimy-faced girl of perhaps 15, in a ragged shawl and pigtails, with her baby wheezing in its sleep on the sidewalk beside her. She holds out a thin brown palm, but nobody stops.
The various symptoms of Mexico City's illness all work on and worsen one another. But the one problem that underlies all the others is the extraordinary growth in population. The Aztec capital known as Tenochtitlan, with its lakes and flower gardens (and an efficient sewage system), was depopulated by a smallpox epidemic in 1520, which killed more than 80% of all the Indians who survived the Spanish invasion. Mexico City did not reach the 2 million mark until after World War II. But then a systematic national policy of urban industrialization helped send the figures soaring: to 5 million in 1960, 9 million in 1970. About half this growth came from a high yearly birth rate (31 per 1,000), the other half from the continuous migration of peasants, who regard all the hardships of the overcrowded capital as an improvement on the hopeless poverty of their country villages. At current rates of growth, the U.N. estimates that Mexico City will house 26 million people by the year 2000. Mexico City's own, gloomier estimate projects an almost unimaginable 36 million at the end of the century--just 16 more years.
There must be some natural limit to the number of people who can crowd into a restricted urban area, but it is hard to tell just what that limit is. Sprawling Mexico City is by no means the world's most densely populated place, yet the demand for space inexorably devours the city's natural resources. In the past quarter-century, Mexico City has lost nearly 75% of its woodland, which reduces the water supply even as more water is needed. The city now pumps 1 billion gal. per day from natural wells (and loses 20% through leaking pipes), but that supply is so inadequate that an elaborate system of canals and pipelines is being built. These will theoretically bring in an extra 200 million gal. per day by the end of the century--when the need will have grown still greater, to an extra 700 million gal. per day.
The pumping of so much water out of the subsoil has caused parts of the city to sink, in some places as much as 30 ft., a process worsened by periodic earthquakes. The redoubtable Palace of Fine Arts, which looks rather like some turn-of-the-century world's fair pavilion made of vanilla ice cream, has sunk nearly 10 ft. since it was completed in 1934. The 16th century church of San Francisco, which has sunk 5 ft., can be approached only by going down a flight of stone stairs. At the shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe, just north of the city, the original basilica tilts forward and sideways at such an alarming angle that it has had to be closed.
Mexico City has another natural peculiarity that makes it unable to support its millions. At 7,350 ft., it is one of the highest cities in the world, and yet it lies in a 50-mile-wide basin surrounded by mountains rising 3,000 ft. higher, notably the snow-covered volcanoes Popocatepetl and Iztaccihuatl. ("The two monsters," D.H. Lawrence wrote of them, "watching gigantically and terribly over their lofty, bloody cradle of men ... murmuring like two watchful lions.") The thin air not only contains 30% less oxygen than at sea level but makes auto engines produce nearly twice as much carbon monoxide and hydrocarbon pollution. Then, when the city's befouled air rises, the mountains trap it in the virtually permanent smog that now blocks the snowy crests from sight. The 14 million new saplings that the city planted on many streets between 1976 and 1982 are already withering and turning yellow. Every once in a while an enterprising reporter tests the air by putting a caged bird in the middle of the Zocalo; the bird customarily collapses and dies within two hours.
Technology, according to the dreams of urban planners, is supposed to solve such problems, but in a swollen megalopolis like Mexico City, solutions keep lagging behind the growing needs. Consider, for example, the question of how to get increasing millions of people to their jobs. Seventeen years ago, the government girded Mexico City with the six-lane Periferico, which is now one long series of traffic jams (on a reasonably typical afternoon, a one-mile stretch contained twelve broken-down cars).
Since more highways attract more cars, the newer urban theories insist on mass transit. Mexico City's 69-mile French-built subway system, started in 1969 and still expanding, is a marvel: clean, fast, comfortable and almost free (a ride costs less than 10). But it carries 4 million riders a day, and at rush hours the crush is so intense that the authorities gallantly (or chauvinistically) reserve certain cars for women only.
Technology is supposed to guard people's health against a polluted environment, and, according to government statistics, it is doing exactly that. One major reason for the population increase is that Mexico City's death rate declined from 9.6 to 6.7 per 1,000 during the 1970s. The health ministry operates not only six large hospitals but 217 local health centers, and there are hundreds of private hospitals and clinics. However, some experts doubt the rosy figures. "We calculate that 50% of the Mexico City population has no access to medical treatment," says Luis
Sanchez Aguilar, head of the opposition Social Democrats.
David Benitez Mendoza, 29, is one of nine doctors working at a new public clinic in Chimalhuacan, typical of the shantytown suburbs that ring Mexico City. Most of its 120,000 residents live in shacks of concrete and corrugated steel. The streets are unpaved, and there is virtually no sewage system. "People are eating excrement every day without being aware of it," says Benitez. He estimates that the number infested with parasites is close to 100%. Chronic anemia is common, along with malnutrition and respiratory illness, even tuberculosis. "We're fighting," he says, but his clinic has no beds, no ambulances, little equipment.
At the Santa Rita Pharmacy in the northeastern suburb of Texquesquinahuac, Dr. Gilberto Lopez Sanchez, 30, runs his finger slowly along a glass display case. What it displays is a film of grayish dust that has accumulated just in the past 15 minutes. The dust comes from the stacks of Cementos Anahuac, Latin America's largest cement plant, about a mile away. "Sixty percent of my patients here suffer from respiratory problems," says Lopez. In the neighboring community of Barrientos, Schoolteacher Marisela Mendieta Gonzalez, 21, keeps her children indoors on windy days from January to June because of the dust. "On a bad day they get very tired in class and their eyes hurt," she says.
There are laws against pollution, but they are not enforced very strictly. Says Armando Baez, head of the Center of Atmospheric Sciences at the National Autonomous University of Mexico: "There have been many cases in which inspectors found factories that were far in excess of the pollution standards. Then the next day they were found to be in compliance. There is no way they could have installed the necessary equipment in 24 hours."
La mordida (the bite) is the Mexican term for the system by which underpaid officials supplement their salaries. Those who actually extort money, by such simple methods as stopping motorists for imaginary traffic violations, are known as mordelones, or biters. The system is pervasive--and paralyzing. At a customs warehouse in the Mexico City airport, a clerk who types out forms to release confiscated goods has on his desk a plastic cup marked "tips." What goes into the cup helps him decide how long he will take to fill out a form.
It is customary in Mexico to blame all problems on the previous administration, and so it was only this year that victims of la mordida learned how sharp were the teeth of former Mexico City Police Chief Arturo Durazo Morreno. Once a semiliterate bank employee, Durazo allegedly took a cut not only of all police graft but of the drug trade and arms trade as well. According to officials who raided two of Durazo's palatial homes, he also sold police promotions and looted police uniform and gasoline funds. His total take: $12 million. He was arrested last June by the FBI in Puerto Rico and is now in Los Angeles awaiting extradition.
Such thievery by a chief of police seems excessive, but it appears to be inherent in Mexico's half-century-old political system, in which a new President is elected every six years but the same party remains perpetually in power. Each new administration means a shift in nearly 45,000 jobs, most of them appointive. Says Boston University Professor Susan Eckstein in The Poverty of Revolution: "The average minister or director finishes his term with two or three houses, two or three automobiles, a ranch and $100,000 in cash; and about 25 directors and ministers hold posts from which they can leave office with 50 times that amount in cash." Even the trash pickers who rummage around on the city garbage dump have to pay off the head of the scavengers' union.
Tales of corruption spice the offerings of Francisco Huerta, 55, who goes on the radio at 7 every morning and spends two hours letting some of his 1.5 million listeners express their criticisms of life in Mexico City. On one recent morning, Huerta's callers protested that taxi drivers were being forced to pay $150 bribes for new license plates, that railroad agents were selling space aboard trains without giving people tickets, that government officials in a nearby state were selling land reserved for farming to developers, and that anyone who complained was likely to be threatened. "Why should we continue to accept a rotten system?" demanded the last caller.
Huerta answers cautiously, for he was temporarily banned from the air two years ago. Mayor Aguirre has a representative in the control booth, ostensibly to follow up on citizens' complaints, but most of the follow-up is actually done by Huerta and three volunteer assistants. "The bureaucracy here is not used to being questioned," says Huerta. "We're not antigovernment, just trying to make the government more efficient."
That was also one of the goals of Manuel Buendia, 58, whose daily column appeared in the Mexico City Excelsior and 200 other newspapers. He made a variety of enemies by writing scathingly about the Durazo scandal, about corruption in the powerful Petroleum Workers Union and% also about allegations that the CIA had infiltrated the government. After receiving anonymous death threats, Buendia took to carrying a pistol and said, "They will have to kill me from behind, because if they attack me from the front I'll take some of them with me." One evening last May, someone shot him three times in the back, killing him instantly.
Many like to blame all of Mexico's political and social ills on the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI, pronounced Pree). It has won every national election since it was organized in 1929 and has consequently become far more institutional than revolutionary. It is the party of the bosses, the bureaucracy, the spoils sharers, the status quo. President Miguel de la Madrid Hurtado was freely elected in 1982, but he in effect rules Mexico City through the PRI machinery and an appointed regente, or mayor. Mayor Aguirre is an accountant by training and does not come from Mexico City, nor has any other recent mayor. There is no elected city council.
"Our mayors are outsiders who are imposed on us," says Lorenzo Meyer, a professor of contemporary history at the Colegio de Mexico. "Those who govern us do not feel accountable to us."
The same holds true for the vast bureaucracy that controls an increasing proportion of Mexican life. Ten years ago, government officials managed about 25% of the economy; today they manage about 15%, ranging from oil production to banking to supermarkets and parking lots. Some 1.5 million bureaucrats now occupy 3,500 Mexico City buildings, and nothing seems to work very well. Four years ago, city officials proclaimed the establishment of block committees to express community needs, but those that exist serve mainly as organs of PRI patronage. About the only system that actually functions is amiguismo, roughly "friendshipness." Says Meyer: "When the water stops, our neighbor runs over to the waterworks and tells a friend, who sees to it that somebody turns on the right valve."
While the PRI is much criticized for its inertia and ineptitude, it has largely succeeded in one of its original purposes: to achieve conciliation in a violence-ridden land. Some 2 million had died in more than a decade of civil strife that followed the revolution of 1910, and it was the assassination of ex-President Alvaro Obregon that led to the founding of the PRI as a coalition of compromise. Yet it is emblematic of Mexico City that the severed hand of General Obregon is still on display in a jar installed in a monument at the site of the restaurant where he was assassinated.
For Mexico City, whatever its similarities to other great cities, is also uniquely itself, a special expression of its people and its traditions. "In the valley of Mexico [City] man feels himself suspended between heaven and earth, and he oscillates between contrary powers and forces," the poet Octavio Paz wrote in a study, The Labyrinth of Solitude. "Reality. .. exists by itself here, has a life of its own, and was not invented by man as it was in the United States . . . One of the most notable traits of the Mexican's character is his willingness to contemplate horror: he is even familiar and complacent in his dealings with it. The bloody Christs in our village churches ... the custom of eating skull-shaped cakes and candies on the Day of the Dead, are habits inherited from the Indians and the Spaniards and are now an inseparable part of our being."
The curse bequeathed to Mexico City by the Aztecs was the curse of human sacrifice. That ritual, in which a priest bent over the recumbent victim and cut out his throbbing heart with an obsidian knife, was central to the Aztecs' religion. The war god Huitzilopochtli required blood as the price of Aztec victory and the rain god Tlaloc required it as the price of the harvest; if these gods remained unpropitiated, the world would end. Exactly how many victims were thus sacrificed (and later eaten) remains uncertain, but it is believed that 20,000 prisoners were offered up on the altar of the Great Temple when it was officially dedicated in 1487.
Bernal Diaz, the chronicler of Cortes' conquest, was horrified on his first visit to the temple. "There were some braziers with incense," he wrote," and in them they were burning the hearts of the three Indians whom they had sacrificed that day . .. All the walls of the oratory were so splashed and encrusted with blood that they were black, the floor was the same and the whole place stank vilely."
The king of the Aztecs, Montezuma II, misguidedly believed Cortes to be a reincarnation of Quetzalcoatl, the fair-haired, white-skinned god who, according to Aztec legend, had sailed off into the east, vowing that he would some day return and rule. It was only because Montezuma offered no resistance that Cortes and his band of about 400 conquistadors were able to enter the royal palace, seize the Aztec king as a hostage and eventually do him to death.
Cortes destroyed the Aztecs' capital, tore down Montezuma's palace and replaced the rituals of human sacrifice with those of the Spanish Inquisition. In the debris of the ruined city, a Spanish friar found a poem describing the Aztecs' misery:
Broken spears lie in the roads. We have torn our hair in grief. The houses are roofless now, and
their walls Are red with blood. . .
But on the rubble of Tenochtitlan,
Cortes built a new city that later developed in the grandiose style of the Spanish Renaissance, the capital of New Spain. It is there to this day in the arcades and verandas along the cobblestone streets that lead off the Zocalo. But in the northeastern corner of that square, just to one side of the Spaniards' Baroque cathedral, some workmen digging a hole for electric cable in 1978 unearthed an 11-ft. stone covered with carving. Archaeologists arrived to explore the site. Today the buried Aztec temple stands open to view once more, blood-soaked altar and all. Just last April a group known as the Aztec Sun Cult gathered around for a ceremonial to mark the beginning of summer.
There are few commemorations for the more than two centuries of Spanish rule. Not a single statue in Mexico City honors Cortes. There are no commemorations of the U.S. invasion of Mexico City in 1847 either ("From the halls of Montezuma ..."), except for six tall white pillars marking the spot where six young Mexican cadets leaped to their deaths from the heights of Chapultepec rather than surrender to the charging U.S. forces. The Castle of Chapultepec itself is a memorial to the showy reign of the French-sponsored Emperor Maximilian, but that brief empire ended before Benito Juarez's firing squad in 1867.
Mexico City today is still a battlefield for the long and violent struggle between its European and Indian traditions. Officially, the government continually emphasizes the splendors of the Indian heritage. The National Museum of Anthropology, with its lavish display of Aztec and Maya masterpieces, is one of the world's finest. On the walls of public buildings all over the city, the superb murals of Diego Rivera, Jose Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros insistently portray an idyllic Indian culture overwhelmed by brutal conquistadors and rapacious priests (and, later, by potbellied, top-hatted U.S. plutocrats). Yet social snobbery still sets high value on European features and a light skin. Newspaper ads offering jobs to secretaries are apt to request aparencia agradable, or "agreeable appearance," meaning no Indians. And when Jesus Sanchez, the patriarch in Oscar Lewis' celebrated The Children of Sanchez, got angry at his wife because she was playing his radio, the worst insult he could fling at her was, "You're such an Indian, such an imbecile."
This state of internal conflict, of old rages unresolved, has strongly impressed many observers, both Mexican and European. "In Mexico City, there is never tragedy but only outrage," wrote Carlos Fuentes. Paz, more stoic, suggested that "we admire fortitude in the face of adversity more than the most brilliant triumph." Outsiders can become exasperated. Kate, the heroine of D.H. Lawrence's The Plumed Serpent, "felt that bitter hopelessness that comes over people who know Mexico well. A bitter barren hopelessness."
"Aztec things oppress me," she said.
"There is no hope in them."
"Perhaps the Aztecs never asked for hope," the General said.
"Surely it is hope that keeps one going?" she said.
"You, maybe. But not the Aztec, nor the Indian today."
This is a fairly widespread view, but it can be argued that the whole tidal wave of peasant migration into Mexico City is nothing but a tidal wave of hope, irrational, irrepressible hope. Listen, for a moment, to Jose Toribio, a young Mixtec Indian from the rugged mountains of Oaxaca state, as he sits in a Mexico City cafe and shovels pasta soup into his squirming son Pablo, 3. "I came to find work so that they could eat," he says, gesturing toward his wife Logina, who sits breast feeding her one-year-old Benito under a grubby, red acrylic shawl.
"I'm looking for work as a bricklayer," says Jose. He speaks only broken Spanish, his wife none. In Oaxaca, he was a jornalero, a day laborer, and there was little work. He has not found anything here yet, so he and his family spend their nights dozing in shop doorways. But he thinks he has a chance for better things in this great city. "It is a pretty place, but there are a lot of buses," he says. "It is very dangerous."
Not only are there no jobs for migrants like the Toribios; there is no housing either. Overall, 26% of the city's families, each averaging 5.5 people, live in single-room homes. Rents in the downtown slums have been frozen since World War II, which means that some families pay only 250 a month. But middle-class apartment construction also lags far behind what is needed, about 800,000 units.
The rural migrants cannot wait. The slums in outlying parts of the city were largely constructed by squatters, who built so hastily (on somebody else's land) that they were known as paracaidistas, or parachutists. There was--and still is--a lot of double-dealing by the operators who helped organize such invasions: fraudulent deeds and building permits bought and sold.
When the squatters built shacks on government land, the police often knocked the sheds down. When they invaded private land, the owners hired guards. Many slums still do not legally exist; others have won grudging government acceptance.
"The real problems arise when people begin to demand water and other services," says Alejandro Suarez, an architect who counsels groups of people trying to build their own homes. "Then the political game begins, the constant negotiation. The government tells these people, 'We can't give you what you're asking for. You're illegal.' " At the same time, it expects them to vote for the PRI in exchange for services.
In an ideal world, the problems of Mexico City could be solved: overpopulation could be checked, even if harshly, as is being attempted in China; air pollution could be reduced, as in California; government could be decentralized, as in West Germany. But as T.S. Eliot once wrote, "Between the idea/ And the reality,/ Between the motion/ And the act/ Falls the Shadow." In Mexico City, there is the shadow of ideology, both religious and secular, the shadow of corruption, the shadow of inertia--and always the problems growing faster than the solutions.
Take the birth rate. Almost any plan to raise living standards would include government support of birth control, but Mexico is torn between its quasi-socialist political traditions and the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church (not to mention the Latin tradition of machismo).
More than 90% of Mexicans are nominally Roman Catholic; yet anticlerical laws forbid the church to own property, operate primary schools or comment on public affairs. The result is a series of compromises, and the constitution bows to both sides of the birth-control controversy by decreeing that "each person has the right to decide in a free, responsible and informed manner about the number [of] children."
The U.N. has given Mexico $24 million since 1972 to finance birth control, and the government has willingly spent it on educational family-planning programs. Partly as a consequence, the city's estimated birth rate dropped from 42.6 per 1,000 in 1970 to 31 per 1,000 in 1980 (that was largely offset, however, by a corresponding drop in the death rate). Abortions are still banned, unless the mother's life is endangered or she has been raped, but about 1 million women have them performed illegally every year. About 10,000 of these women die. Says Gynecologist Alejandro Hernandez: "The knowledge of contraceptives here is minimal."
Decentralization, similarly, is an idea that wins nods of approval but very little action. The current crowding fills Mexico City with not only 28% of all Mexicans but two-thirds of the nation's students.
More than half of the country's industry is concentrated there, and seven out of ten banking transactions occur there. Yet every new plan to spur the transfer of business and government out of the capital is largely a recycling of some previous unfulfilled plan. "There have been about five decentralization programs in the past 20 years, and all of them failed because there was no political will to carry them out," says Social Democrat Sanchez.
Government authorities answer that they now screen all proposals for new factories near the capital and offer tax incentives for moves elsewhere, but that is clearly not enough. No corporation is eager to move to a remote outpost; until some do, there are no jobs to attract workers. That applies to the government too. "Why does Pemex (the national oil monopoly) have headquarters here when not a single barrel of oil is produced in Mexico City?" asks Pablo Emilio Madero, head of the opposition National Action Party. "The same with the Agriculture Ministry. It should be in a farming area, not here."
The government has done a bit more about the capital's pollution problems. The Mexican Senate last December proclaimed factory pollution emission limits for the first time, providing fines of up to $90,000 for first offenders and prison sentences for repeaters. A program called Plan Texcoco is supposed to halt the erosion and dust storms along the old lake bed. Pemex oil officials announced a voluntary reduction in the amount of sulfur in diesel fuel sold in Mexico City. But these are only first steps, and there is little sign of substantial progress. The reason: one of the darkest shadows that falls across Mexico City is that of the foreign debt.
When the oil boom reached its height during the 1976-82 regime of President Jose Lopez Portillo, the government, the business community and ordinary citizens all succumbed to an economic mentality that made it seem perfectly reasonable to borrow large sums against the prospect of future oil royalties. (Mexico's estimated reserves of 72 billion bbl. are the world's fourth largest.) When that prospect faded as a global oil glut began to develop in 1981, it turned out that Mexico's international debt, most of it owed to U.S. private banks, had soared. From $36.6 billion in 1976, the figure has now reached nearly $90 billion, approximately $1,200 for every man, woman and child in the country. The $9.8 billion annual bill for interest alone devours nearly 50% of all Mexico's earnings from exports; each percentage point by which U.S. interest rates rise adds another $900 million to that burden. In short, it is a debt too great to pay, and while protracted negotiations for new terms continue, Mexico simply cannot afford to do what needs to be done in Mexico City or anywhere else.
This applies not only to the government but to major corporations that have been hit hard by recession and the devaluation of the peso. Imported machinery has become prohibitively expensive, and the interest demanded on borrowed capital is more than 50%. At Cementos Anahuac, which sprays its dust all over its neighborhood, production is down 60%, and the company lost $272,000 last year. Yet the equipment necessary to solve the factory's pollution problem would cost almost $3 million. Says Operations Manager Salvador Carrillo: "You can't ask us to invest money we don't have."
Ni modo is a term often applied to various aspects of life in Mexico City. It means literally "No way" or, more generally, "Nothing can be done." That way lies the breakdown of a great city.
Whether other ways exist or can be found depends a great deal on President De la Madrid. Despite his involvement with the PRI system, he started his regime on a note of high rectitude: "Our problems are so grave that only with a moral renovation will we be able to solve them." Traditional rhetoric? Perhaps, but the beleaguered President can already point to a few improvements in the illnesses that afflict his city and country alike. Corruption is still commonplace, but the government has at least started prosecuting a few high officials of the Lopez Portillo regime, notably Police Chief Durazo and Jorge Diaz Serrano, former head of the Pemex oil monopoly, who is now in prison awaiting trial. And as a cheering sign of the times, Mexico City drivers found this year that they could renew their auto registrations without the traditional $25 "gratuity."
Inflation is still eviscerating ordinary people's salaries, but some officials talk hopefully of reaching a mere 40% by the end of the year. Such a deflationary policy requires real belt tightening. One of the reasons that the authorities can claim that nobody starves in Mexico City is that government subsidies held the price of tortillas, the basic food of the poor, to 3-c- per lb. But seven weeks ago, the subsidies had to be reduced, and the price rose to 4-c-. Overall, according to one estimate, real living standards have dropped 15% in the past three years. The Mexican poor are often stoic rather than radical, but stoicism has its limits. "The day people have nothing to put in their stomachs," says a priest in a slum in northwestern Mexico City, "that will be the day of uprising."
Whatever gains De la Madrid has made so far have been token ones, small moves that buy time. How much time can be bought depends a good deal on what financial terms he and the other major Latin American debtors can negotiate with Washington. No one in Mexico is talking openly of default yet, but borrowers throughout the continent badly need some form of extension on the billions of dollars they cannot repay.
When De la Madrid went to Washington in May, he and President Reagan disagreed sharply and openly on U.S. policies in Central America. For such a disagreement to jeopardize Mexican recovery and revival would be folly indeed. Mexico City alone is more than twice as populous as El Salvador and Nicaragua combined; it is afflicted with more than twice as many problems --and it is only about half as far from the Texas border.
There are limits, of course, to what Washington can or should do. It can assist in negotiating an extension of Mexico's debts and a limit on the interest rates charged. It can further encourage U.S. industry to build plants in Mexico, and it can deal sympathetically with Mexican immigrants to the U.S. But such steps are merely help, not a solution. That requires not only economic development and political reform but a greater effort toward population control, and it must come from the Mexicans themselves. Other wise, ni modo.
-- By Otto Friedrich.
Reported by Ricardo Chavira and David DeVoss/ Mexico City
*According to the U.N., greater Mexico City, which sprawls over about 890 sq. mi., will stand first in 1985 with 18.1 million, followed by the Tokyo-Yokohama complex, 17.2 million; S`ao Paulo, 15.9 million; New York and northeastern New Jersey, 15.3 million.
With reporting by Ricardo Chavira; David DeVoss