Economist.com Cities Guide: Mexico City Briefing - July 2005

News this month

Gridlock

More bad news for Andrés Manuel Lopéz Obrador, the popular mayor of Mexico City. On July 10th, auditors announced that about $30m was unaccounted for from funds to build an elevated highway (or “Second Floor”) above the city’s ring road. The audit of money spent in 2003 also found that many of the columns propping up the new road were not as strong as they should be.
First proposed by Mr Lopéz Obrador in 2002 to help alleviate the city's traffic problems, the highway now boasts plenty of pillars with no road on top—it is anyone's guess just when it will be finished. This follows June’s inauspicious inauguration of the Metrobus, meant to improve transit on Insurgentes, the city’s main north-south thoroughfare, which has actually made traffic worse.

Money aside, the elevated highway has other problems. The finished sections are often clogged with traffic, and its inexplicably sharp turns and narrow shoulders make it remarkably unsafe, like a video game come to life. No one knows where the $30m went, though a common assumption is that contractors skimmed off the top. While apparently not personally corrupt, the mayor clearly has been unable to keep such abuses out of his administration. This all hurts Mr Lopéz Obrador, because he seems incapable of tackling the city's transport problem. Although he remains the frontrunner, this may harm his campaign for president in 2006.

Oops, they did it again

Mexico’s law-enforcement officials have not had a good few weeks. On July 2nd, authorities acting on the advice of America’s Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) arrested a man they said was Vicente Carrillo-Fuentes, a leader of the Juarez drug cartel. But after DNA tests, it became clear that the man was in fact Joaquin Romero Aparicio, an architect according to his relatives. Authorities countered that testimony from the DEA still linked him to the drug trade. But on July 10th, Mr Romero was quietly released, along with a friend who had been shopping with him.

This awkward blunder followed on the heels of another one in late June, when authorities arrested Amer Haykel, a British national, in the state of Baja California Sur. Only a day after the attorney general’s office crowed that Mr Haykel, who had some weeks left on his tourist visa, was a big, suspected terrorist, he was released. It seems the arrest, prompted by a list supplied by American authorities, was a mistake. While wrongful arrests are not unusual in Mexico, rarely are they trumpeted as triumphs. These mistakes hardly help the US's standing in the country.

A farewell to arms

It’s been a pretty quiet revolution. After flirting with armed struggle for fewer than ten days in 1994, the Zapatistas, a revolutionary front in the southern state of Chiapas, decided to lay down their arms (more or less) and become a lobbying group for Mexico's oppressed, especially Indians. Led by the mysterious, balaclava-clad Subcomandante Marcos, the Zapatistas moved another step closer to political legitimacy in late-June, when they announced that they were converting into a broad-based leftist political front. Mr Marcos, who seems to view himself as a modern Che Guevera, is often applauded for highlighting the plight of Mexico's indigenous population. He is also brilliant at PR, having kept the illusion of a guerrilla war going without actually having to fight.

Many have applauded this move, which comes after years of relative peace between the Zapatistas (who complain of being marginalised) and Mexico's security forces. But factions in the centre-left Party of the Democratic Revolution, which will put forward Mr Lopéz Obrador as its presidential candidate in next year’s election, remain apprehensive. It is unclear whether the Zapatistas will reinforce the left, lure away the extreme left, or simply alienate swing voters.

Racial intolerance?

President Vicente Fox seems to have a knack for offending African-Americans lately. In May, he stuck his foot in it when he said that Mexicans in the United States took jobs that “not even blacks” would. Sensitivities were further piqued on June 29th, when Mexico issued a set of postage stamps depicting Memin Pinguin, a 1940s black cartoon character. Memin is a troublemaker with exaggerated facial features.

Groups representing black Mexicans have written complaints to Mr Fox, and Scott McClellan, the White House spokesman, said, “Images such as these have no place in today’s world.” But most Mexicans see the stamps as a celebration of their popular culture. Though Mr Fox apologised for his statement in May, he is standing behind the stamps, which have already sold out. Mexico prides itself on its mestizaje, the racial intermixing of immigrants from Europe, slaves from Africa, and natives—a mix that is more prevalent here than anywhere else in the Americas.

Votes for all

There was a spot of good news for Mexico-US relations when, on the same day that the stamps were issued, the Mexican congress voted to give the roughly 10m expatriates living in the United States the right to vote in next year’s presidential elections. However, controversy still surrounds the plan, which will rely on postal ballots. Observers speculate that expatriate turnout could be quite low, because documentation requirements might scare off those who remain wary of American immigration authorities.

Catch if you can

August 2005

Francisco Gutiérrez

Until October 2nd 2005

This enormous exhibit chronicles the career of Francisco Gutiérrez (1906-1945), an artist from Oaxaca in southern Mexico. His range is impressive: there are lithographs and watercolours that could have come from Japan; a series of paintings of blue houses from the 1940s that seem to be the work of a softer, Mexican Picasso; and a lovely drawing of a young boy playing, which feels like an ode to both innocence and experience. Elsewhere, “The Lost” from 1938 looks like an industrialised Marc Chagall, while a woodcut of Sirens would make Homer regret his blindness.

Museo Nacional de Arte, Tacuba 8, Centro Historico. Tel (+52) 55 5512-1908. Open Tue-Sun 10.30am-5.30pm. Admission 30 pesos, free Tuesdays. See the museum's website.

More from the Mexico City cultural calendar