The Interior Circuit: A Mexico City Chronicle (12 page)

Ebrard saw the central focus of his government, he told me, as “human development,” encompassing education, work, civic liberties, health, the environment—all those initiatives to help alleviate big-city alienation, to collectively form “a network that protects people.” He said, “Mexican society is too unjust. Mexico’s inequality is a scandal. The other day I was reading Alexander Humboldt, and I think about this the same way he did when he wrote, Mexico City is a beautiful city, I met many scientists while I was there, and if I hadn’t had to return to Germany, I’d have stayed there. It would be my favorite city, but the only thing I didn’t like and that preoccupied me is the poverty, which is overwhelming.”

The ambitious restoration of downtown Mexico City, the old “Historic Center,” to its architectural splendor of centuries past was begun under López Obrador; co-initiated and partly bankrolled by Carlos Slim, the Telmex magnate—Telmex, a privatized former state company, provides the world’s most unreliable and costly cell phone and WiFi service—considered the world’s richest man; and continued under Ebrard. I never thought the old downtown was so bad, but it wasn’t a part of the city where tourists wanted to stay over. During the daytime every downtown street was choked with traffic, pedestrians, vendors, and beggars; the buildings, many dating from the seventeenth and even sixteenth centuries, were mostly in terrible shape, and universally begrimed. At night the center emptied, and its dark, deserted streets were considered dangerous, though urban pioneer types, especially artists, found gigantic apartments and studios to work in, and we all liked going to the old cantinas, and there was something of a club and rock scene. Now those same streets are vibrant and illuminated at night. Several streets have been turned into pedestrian malls. Resplendently restored buildings preen as if posing for their Condé Nast
Traveler
portraits. Tourist dollars matter greatly to Mexico’s economy, and given the number of elegant new hotels and restaurants, it seems that the tourists are there and spending. On weekends the downtown streets fill with Mexicans, many from the surrounding working-class neighborhoods, families, young people, with their bags of Salsa Valentina–doused
chicharrón
and purple cotton candy, strolling and just hanging out like the residents of a European city, enjoying the Sunday calm of their beautiful ancient streets and plazas, which on weekdays are still centers of business, crowded and hectic. One tourist-friendly measure taken by Ebrard was to clear the arcades and streets around the Zócalo of the street vendors that had previously made them nearly impassable, famously shouting back at one vociferous protester, “
Aquí no vas a trabajar, cabrón!
” (“You’re not going to work here, jerk!”) The street vendors were mostly from the nearby market for stolen, pirated, or counterfeit goods in Tepito, a neighborhood notorious for crime. The vendors still come though, posting lookouts with mobile phones to warn of approaching police patrols; they pack up their merchandise in tarps and blankets, disappear in an instant, and return as soon as the police have moved on.

Ebrard has held posts in city government since 1989; a protégé of Manuel Camacho, who was then the PRI mayor, he left the PRI with Camacho to form a new, now defunct party, in 1995. Under López Obrador, Ebrard was chief of police, and then, after 2004, his secretary of development. While Ebrard was mayor, a new police academy was inaugurated, and police were now required to have a secondary school education. The city now has a police force of 90,000. As measured by statistics, crime did go down while Ebrard was mayor, but a better proof is how safe people actually feel in their daily lives. Throughout the 1990s, it was Mexico City rather than the country itself that was known for crime, especially for kidnappings and murders. But now people from violence-ravaged Mexico move to the DF in order to feel safe. In the late 1990s, not a week seemed to go by without my hearing about someone I knew being kidnapped in a taxicab and taken to an ATM for a maximum-amount withdrawal. Sometimes, after being pushed down onto the floor of the cab and driven to a garage, the victims were kept over two days, for two withdrawals, and usually the kidnappers beat them up, often badly. A friend of mine, forced to kneel facedown on the floor of a taxi, endured repeated knife jabs to his buttocks during the many hours he was being driven around while his sadist kidnappers were waiting for midnight to pass so that they could drain his ATM account’s maximum daily amount again.

It happened to me one night, the driver, barely a block from where I’d gotten into his VW Beetle cab, pausing at a corner to fling the door open and let two men in. One sat next to me and the other crouched down on the floor where the front passenger seat had been removed—standard in those VW taxis—and pointed a pistol at me. But precisely because I’d known that I’d be hailing a street cab, I’d left my bank and credit cards at home, so, after driving me around awhile, they just took what cash I had and my purple rain parka, and let me go, ordering me to walk straight ahead and warning me that that if I looked back they’d shoot me. It was a long, chilly walk home. Another night, walking through Parque México on Avenida Michoacán, I saw a taxi idling by the curb with its
libre
light on, and two burly men hiding shoulder to shoulder behind the trunk of a nearby tree, apparently believing that it screened them from the view of whatever hapless, probably drunk, passenger might come along and think himself incredibly fortunate to have found an available taxi just waiting there. When the men behind the tree saw me looking at them they grinned hideously, like embarrassed criminals in a cartoon. I didn’t call the police, because those two men probably were police. Now it’s been a long time since I’ve heard of a friend being kidnapped in a taxicab; I’ve heard of only one, in fact, late at night when he was very drunk, over a year ago. Police patrol the Condesa and Roma and many other neighborhoods on foot and on bicycles, and police cars endlessly circle. It’s also been a long time since I’ve heard of anyone I know being mugged in the street, though of course this still happens. Likewise, if not nearly so frequently as before, express taxi kidnappings still happen, and the kidnappers are still usually police or in league with them, their favorite targets being prosperous-looking women outside shopping centers and malls. Many people now phone taxis or go to taxi stands, especially at night, but the street cab fleet is more rigorously monitored than before. In 1998, 163 cars were stolen daily in Mexico City, but last year that number was down to 45, the lowest in thirty-five years. There are now some sixteen thousand security cameras posted around the city and in the subways, all monitored at a central police command center, the C-4. When I interviewed Marcelo Ebrard, he cited the security cameras as an important factor in the city’s drop in crime, and added an interesting observation: the security cameras also watch over the police.

When I asked Ebrard why, in his opinion, Mexico City had so far been spared the carnage endured by so much of the rest of the country, he gave explanations I’d never heard before. When Calderón deployed the military to ostensibly fight the cartels, he said, the violence only increased. “But here there is no war,” he said. “You don’t have the army here. If we’d said to the
narcomenudeo
, the street trade in drugs, ‘We’re going to kill you,’ there would be a worse war here than the ones now going on elsewhere.” He also said, “We have a different culture here. This is a city where people’s values have been changing more rapidly than in the rest of the country over the last forty years. Why? Because here you have the largest and the most universities, and that changes everything. It increases the number of people who think, criticize, discuss. They become more sensible and tolerant.” In the DF, he told me, 61 percent of young people of standard eligible age are enrolled in one sort of university or another. Nationally the rate is 28 percent. To keep public high school students in school and relieve them from the humiliation of having to beg their strapped parents for pocket money, the city provides fifty-dollar monthly stipends in bank cards; as a reward for good grades, the amount can go up to ninety dollars. “And all that explains a lot of things,” he said. Mexico City, he told me, has fifty universities, though it is also true, he acknowledged, that most of these are private and that poorer students don’t have nearly enough options for a public university education. Expanding the public university system, he said, should be a national priority, and it requires massive investment. That is the federal government’s responsibility, but, said Ebrard, “the city could do it, if they gave us more money. They take everything. We’re the goose that lays the golden eggs, and they take the eggs.” Mexico City provides 46 percent of all the country’s federal tax revenue. In terms of dollars, for every tax dollar the city contributes, it receives only seven cents in return. “That has to change,” he said. “They should give us fourteen cents, which is still a good deal.” Increasingly it’s a challenge to the city to provide the services it does. “It isn’t the city’s growth,” said Ebrard. “The city has grown hardly at all; it’s the surrounding areas that have grown.” Every weekday the city’s population of nine million more than doubles because of all the people who come in from México State and elsewhere, mostly to work; the city government provides services, transportation, water, electricity, health care, and so on, for people who don’t pay taxes to use those services. The DF, said Ebrard, is, of course, a very complicated city, and a complicated city to govern. “It’s like the government of a country,” he said. “It has twenty-three different secretariats, and you can’t give the same detailed attention to all of them. You need to apply logic, and decide what things are most important, what needs to be looked at every week, every month, every six months. The water situation is a grave challenge. Public security is always a delicate matter. Human development. Sustainability. The renewing of the economy. But the first thing a city needs in order to function well is transportation. If transportation is good and is inexpensive for people to use, that’s the basis of a city.”

Distrito Federal mayors leave their mark on the city by doing something about the maddening traffic congestion. For López Obrador, it was the touch-the-sky elevated traffic lanes, known as the
segundo piso
(“second floor”), erected over eight kilometers within the DF of the Anillo Periférico, the fifty-eight-kilometer expressway that rings Mexico City, circling through parts of México State—the Circuito Interior is the inner-ring expressway—packed with dense traffic at almost any hour and freewheeling nevertheless, unless bottlenecked to a complete stop. Instead of using public funds to extend the
segundo
piso
, Ebrard raised private investment for the construction and turned those new stretches into private toll highways. That public money went into public transportation. Ebrard’s government contributed the Metrobús, a rapid transit bus system whose four lines run both ways down the inner lanes of major DF thoroughfares. The smooth-running, sleek buses, linked by accordion-like bends, arrive within minutes and often within seconds of each other, packed with riders, at long, covered station stops every several blocks. The Metrobús makes life easier for the innumerable people who need to cross the city to get to and from work or school. I take it all the time. Ebrard’s government also built the new Number 12 subway line, which runs from Tláhuac to Mixcoac, transporting passengers from some of the DF’s southernmost and poorest areas in swift ultramodern new cars with a police guard in every car. One regular rider, a working mother who before had depended on buses and
peseros,
told me that the new subway line had cut her daily commute from two and a half hours each way to forty-five minutes. Ebrard is especially proud of the bicycle-sharing program, which he describes as an “ideological initiative.” Cars are isolating, he said; cars are competitive, because people want the biggest, the newest, the most expensive; cars are the enemies of pedestrians—but bicycles are “ideological.” Bicycles look alike. “You can’t have a two-story bicycle, though someone will probably build one. They don’t run over people. On a bicycle you feel vulnerable, along with the people walking. Bicycle riders tend to relate to other bicycle riders.”

On July 11, 2012, Ebrard inaugurated a new fleet of modern buses, each equipped with air-conditioning and security cameras. The mayor drove the first bus himself, transporting some thirty passengers, mostly press and security people, for 3.8 kilometers, down Viaducto Río de la Piedad, until he mistimed a turn without braking onto the Eje 4 East, causing his rear tire to jump a curb and ride half a meter onto the sidewalk. Then, headed back to the Autodromo bus base from which they’d started out, Ebrard missed a turn and went the wrong way, “leaving his security detail disconcerted,” according to the report in the newspaper
Reforma
. Ebrard pulled over, parked, and ceded the driving to the “transport impresario and leader Fernando Ruano, who recalled his beginnings as a microbus driver, and with one maneuver corrected the error, though he invaded the lane of the Eje 4 Metrobús, made an illegal turn, and went through a red light.”

4
Driving Lessons

IF RICARDO TORRES HAD GRADED
me for my class in learning to drive with a standard transmission in Mexico City, maybe I could have pulled a D. Maybe I would have passed by just that much, because I did manage to complete the route around the long, anvil-shaped housing project several times, Calle Huatabampo to Orizaba, a left onto Coahuila, through an intersection of five converging streets and whizzing traffic for another left onto Tonalá, and back onto Jalapa. But I stalled a couple of times, jamming the gears, bringing time itself to an explosively jolted and humiliating halt, and putting an incredulous snarl on the wearied face of my driving teacher. The diagram of the gears on the shift’s knob had completely worn off, so that sometimes, when I meant to slide the shift into fourth, I dropped it into reverse. Maybe if I practiced just about forever, I’d one day be ready to head out into Mexico City traffic. But how could I do that now, if I’d be constantly looking down at the stick shift, not even trusting myself to divine fourth from reverse, and stalling? How might I do, driving stick shift, nervous in aggressive and impatient traffic, never knowing where to go? Ricardo didn’t want to find out. If my intention was still to learn and practice driving in the city under his tutelage, he suggested we do that with an automatic transmission. With so much stop and go, said Ricardo, automatic was more practical for city driving anyway. With a secret sigh of relief I let go of my dream of dexterous road mastery, car synced to hand, engine purring at my touch, darting in and out of traffic as I traversed the complex arteries of the
Guía Roji
. Sometimes it really is just too late for some things. How would I do now if I tried to learn Mandarin? That’s been a daydream ambition of mine ever since, maybe a decade ago, I’d read a piece in the
New York Times
about a woman who for years met with her Mandarin teacher in a teahouse-restaurant in Chinatown, sitting with her tutor for hours, sipping tea and slurping delicious dumplings, pronouncing and drawing Mandarin characters, until she finally became fairly fluent. But where would I ever find the time to do that, and, supposing my brain was even up to the task, how many years would it take me to learn? For now I would have to settle, hopefully, for being an adequate automatic transmission driver in Mexico City traffic.