Ecology group leader Aridjis is among those who contend that the government misleads Mexico City residents about the levels of pollutants in the air. ”The reason information is hidden from us is political,” he says.
”The government believes that if the public isn`t aware that it is dying from pollution, it will be content, but if they really knew how bad it was, then they would panic. It is like the attitude toward a sick person-don`t tell him so as not to frighten him. But at the same time, if the sick person isn`t aware of his condition, he can`t get the treatment necessary to get well. This attitude applied to a population . . . is highly irresponsible and even criminal.”
The De la Madrid administration, however, contends to have done more to improve conditions in Mexico City than any previous administration and that it has done so despite the severe restrictions on its economic resources. Last January the administration announced its boldest and most concrete steps toward improving the quality of life in the capital. The measures, which received mixed reviews from ecologists, ranged from plans to ban polluting cars from the highways to improvising new ways of flushing toilets to save potable water.
Nearly a year later there is little evidence that the measures are being enforced. Automobiles, approximately 3 million of them, and buses that belch out more toxins than scientists can accurately measure, are responsible for most of the city`s traffic, noise and air pollution. Ecologists predict there will be 8 million cars on the road by the year 2000.
The average age of the cars on Mexico City`s streets is 10 years and, city officials say, most are in poor condition, exacerbating the pollution. In addition, the city is home to more than 30,000 factories.
City officials, even those considered to be the most concerned and most sincere by ecologists, admit that their task is Herculean. ”The solution is not just chemical or mechanical,” says Roberto Campa, a city official who coordinates the municipal government`s plans with the leading ecologists. ”We don`t have the ability to change people`s habits.”
Campa said that only 1,000 of the 6,000 city buses on the streets each day have motors equipped to function efficiently at Mexico City`s altitude. He said it would cost the already financially troubled city the staggering sum of $2.5 billion to fit the buses with proper motors, something that is simply out of the question. He says ”political restrictions” prevented the city from buying buses with the proper motors the first time around.
Late last year the state-owned petroleum company PEMEX introduced a new mixture of gasoline with a lower lead content. Although this has reduced lead levels to a small degree, Campa says, it has increased the ozone level in the atmosphere and started to cause other environmental problems. New cars, starting with 1988 models, will be fitted with pollution-control devices, but Campa says it will take more than a decade before this starts to have any impact because so few people can afford to buy new cars.
Campa was part of a group within the city government that tried to work out a car-pooling system for the capital with the help of computers. The goal was to reduce the number of cars, clear the traffic jams and reduce the pollution. ”It got so confusing we had to abandon the idea,” he says.
”Still, the only solution is to reduce the number of cars on the road and to do it only in a voluntary manner.”
A plan was proposed earlier this year whereby the government would issue stickers for cars that would designate the days of the week on which they would be allowed to enter the city. A week after the plan was announced, another city agency announced the idea was still only under study, and nothing has been done since.
But it is not just the air and the noise of cars that contribute to the problems, present and future, of the capital`s residents.
Consider the question of water. Because of the seismic activity in the Valley of Mexico and the soft and sandy subsoil (the city is built on a dried lake bed), it is impossible to keep pipes from cracking. This leads to the loss of millions of gallons of water and allows bacteria and other dangerous organisms to creep into pipes and thus the water supply.
The city pumps 35 cubic meters of water per second but consumes 40. As this shortage has grown more acute, people have dug their own wells, something that has led to a dramatic fall in the water table and the sinking of the city itself.
The pedestal of the renowned Angel Monument in the center of the capital`s main boulevard, the Paseo de la Reforma, used to sit on the street. But as the street has sunk and the pedestal, mounted on a pylon driven deep into the earth, has remained at its original level, a series of steps has had to be added to cover the distance between the new level of the street and the base of the monument.
At the moment only 25 percent of the water the city uses comes from within its boundaries. The rest is taken from rivers, some as far away as 250 miles, and pumped through ever-lengthening pipelines to the capital. As the unquenchable thirst of the growing population increases, the city will be forced to reach deeper into the interior of the country for its supplies and thus will come into conflict with local residents, who see their own water supplies being taken away.
”Each (Mexican) state will gradually want to maintain water in that state,” says Francisco Flores Herrara, vice president for development in the Mexico City government. ”We can live without electricity, we can live without transport systems, we can almost live without food or sleep,” he says. ”But we cannot live without water.”
The bulk of the city`s water currently comes from the Cutzamala River, which is about 190 miles west of the capital. Experts say that before the end of the decade, the river will be dry. After that the plan is to further tap the Amacuzac River in the state of Puebla, 250 miles away. After that, there are no plans. ”Many of us feel that in the 1990s Mexico City won`t have any
(potable) water,” Aridjis says.
But cars and lead, water and sinking sidewalks aside, Mexico City`s basic problem is simple-there are just too many people. According to urbanologists and population experts there is little hope of significant reductions in the number of people living in the Mexico City metropolitan area. At best, they say, the rate of growth may be slowed. ”At best we are talking about relative changes,” says urbanologist Negrette. ”We still have a big monster.” Negrette, a professor at the respected Colegio de Mexico in the capital, recently completed a study on population trends in the metropolitan area.
The good news, she says, is that earlier predictions that the city`s population would rise to 31 million by the year 2,000 have now been largely discounted. Nonetheless, there will be a minimum of 24 million living here by the end of the century, she has concluded.
The rate of population growth in the city itself has slowed, Negrette says. She estimates it now at 2.44 percent a year, compared with 35 percent during the 1960s and early 1970s. In part this is due to Mexico`s having managed to reduce its birth rate from the frighteningly high level of 34 per 1,000 seven years ago to about 28 per 1,000 today. This has been a difficult task in a country where religious beliefs and economics have always dictated large families.
Selling the concept of a smaller family has been essential and had to come before the technical aspects of birth control could be taught to the population at large. In a country where illiteracy rates remain high, radio has played an important role. In one advertisement mothers are told that modern medicines can keep babies alive and that they no longer need to have eight children in the hope that five will survive. In another a woman speaks about how difficult it was for her to talk to her mother when she was a little girl because mother was always washing or cooking or was tired. In the announcement the woman says she has decided to have just two children so she will have the time to talk to her offspring.
But Negrette also says that part of the decline in the city`s population is simply due to there being nowhere else to go. ”We are seeing more condominiums, more people living with three to five families in a single apartment.” What has happened, however, is that the rate of growth of nearby suburbs, most of them in the State of Mexico, has increased dramatically. As the decline began in the Federal District, the suburban areas grew at a rate of 11.81 percent a year and are still growing in some areas by as much as 15 percent annually.
A major factor in the rapid growth of the metropolitan area has been the daily flow of nearly 2,000 people from the rural parts of the country into the capital. Negrette estimates that as much as 65 percent of the city`s growth can be attributed to this migration and the birth of children to the new settlers. Since the city can barely cope with the housing needs of the lower- middle-class and the poorest established residents, it can do nothing for the newest arrivals.
The lucky ones among them have families already established with whom they can stay as a first stop as they look for work and housing of their own. A frequent first stop for many during the rapid growth years of the metropolitan area has been a place called Netzahualcoyotl City.
Just across the border from the capital in the State of Mexico,
”Netza,” as it is known, grew from a collection of crude shacks in the early 1960s to a city within a city. There are now more than 2.5 million people living in Netza alone.
Some still live in crude houses, without water, electricity or sewers. Others, who have spent 20 years or more building their lives, have improved their lot. Nobody, however, is getting rich in Netza. They merely survive and look for a way out. Meanwhile, the Netzas of the 1980s sprout on hillsides and in garbage-strewn gulches all over the metropolitan area, very often alongside new and grand houses of Mexico City`s well-to-do.
One such new settlement is growing on a hill in an area known as Bosques de las Lomas. Here upper-middle-class Mexicans, many of whom have been keeping their money outside the country during its economic hard times, have recently been building new homes. So many new dwellings have gone up in Bosques de las Lomas recently that established residents are complaining about declining water supplies, deteriorating telephone service and-perhaps most frightening of all-the erosion of the hillsides that once made the area so attractive. Bosques de las Lomas translates as Forest Hills.
Upon one such eroding hill sits the new home of Mexico City Mayor Ramon Aguirre, a multimillion-dollar futuristic dwelling that he will inhabit after his term expires in 18 months. A few blocks away is the elaborate private compound of former President Jose Lopez Portillo, a man who is widely believed to have stolen billions of dollars of public money during his term in office. Despite the wealth and, in some cases, education of many of the residents, the construction has ignored many basic environmental
considerations. Hillsides are gouged out for foundations, and the trees and bushes have been cleared to the point where rivers of mud form after each rainfall and where as-yet-uncut trees, their roots exposed, frequently fall into the streets.
This is in a neighborhood of wealthy people. But on a nearby hill, just a five-minute drive from these $500,000-and-up homes, live some of the newest arrivals in Mexico City. They, too, suffer from the erosion, and frequently their houses, alongside of which graze their cows and goats, simply collapse during rainstorms. During this year`s rainy season, which lasted from about May until the late autumn, reports of people being killed when their houses washed away in the rain came after each downpour.
A cartoon in the Mexico City newspaper UnoMasUno recently showed a teacher instructing her class on how rain was indispensable for growing food. She then asks the students what else rain does. One pupil responds: ”It is to cause landslides, floods, injuries and death. It is to cause traffic jams, knock out telephones, lights, traffic signals, roads, etc.”
Aguirre, who declined to be interviewed for this article (his spokesman said that the mayor was simply too busy) is among those considered by some as likely to succeed De la Madrid in 1989. He is known to be taking diction lessons to prepare for the campaign should he be chosen by the president as the ruling party`s candidate.
In a recent speech, however, Aguirre said that he was ordering strict controls on new settlements. ”We would be committing a serious error if we were to think that the city is not going to grow,” he told the Mexico City Rotary Club. ”But we are trying to restrict growth to areas where we can provide services.”
As experts look toward Mexico City in the 21stCentury, they do so with pathos and their fingers crossed. ”I fear a silent Mexico, a dead Mexico,”
says ecology leader Aridjis. In a Malthusian nightmare he predicts that the government will not do anything serious to improve the conditions in Mexico City until a disaster, one far worse than the 1985 earthquakes, strikes. The most frequently used example is that of the 1952 air inversion in London during which 4,000 people died because of the buildup of pollutants. ”It will take a major disaster, many dead, before the government acts,” Aridjis says. ”It will take money, but there is no money, nor will there be any money,” says urban expert Negrette. ”There are no other ways out in the medium term.”
”My vision, if tendencies remain the same . . . is a continued deterioration,” says city official Campa. ”The conditions of life will be almost unimaginable.
”But as an official, I can only be an optimist. My vision is of a city where the rural area is producing, where the farmers don`t starve and where they live a dignified life. Of an urban area where . . . the people live in their houses and work nearby and come here to the city only to pass through.
I guess we have to overcome our problems now before they overcome us.”
