SALON

Friday, Jun 29, 2012 1:36 PM UTC

Viva la diferencia

In Sunday's elections, it's likely the liberal Mexican capital will once again go against the grain

By , GlobalPost

Topics: GlobalPost, Mexico, elections, Latin America,

Viva la diferencia (Credit: Teseum)
This article originally appeared on GlobalPost.

MEXICO CITY, Mexico — Heartthrob Justin Bieber packed more than 200,000 screaming fans into the Zocalo square in the heart of Mexico City for a free concert promoted by the local government earlier in June.

Global Post

Paul McCartney packed a large number into the same place one month earlier. An outdoor ice rink, billed as the biggest on the planet, occupies the square during the Christmas season.

These spectacles — sometimes derided as circuses — arrive often in Mexico City, and have proved popular.

It’s also a prop in the local political picture, as Mayor Marcelo Ebrard and his left-wing Democratic Revolution Party (PRD) have played ringmaster promoted the “circus” as a way of winning votes among working-class and poor residents.

Ebrard cannot run for re-election, but his party and its allies are expected to retain Mexico City in a landslide in the July 1 local elections. That’s the exact opposite of other parts of Mexico, where the once long-ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) leads polls for the presidential contest scheduled for the same day.

“There’s almost a bipolar situation, with Mexico City going against the rest of the country,” says Jorge Zepeda, director of the online publication Sin Embargo. He attributes the party’s popularity as much to competent governance, in a city prone to earthquakes and water shortages, as ideology.

“The city, as immense and brutal as it is, functions fairly well in operational terms,” he says. The PRD holds a hammerlock on the Mexican capital, known locally as the Distrito Federal, or DF, and home to nearly 9 million residents. (Another 12 million live in suburbs belonging to Mexico state, which surrounds DF like a horseshoe.)

On Sunday, Mexicans will be treated to a feast of political choices. They have to vote for mayors, governors, lawmakers, and the president.

Mexico City’s leftist ways have also helped move left-wing presidential candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador into second-place — he packed the Zocalo for his finally rally on Wednesday — and pushed the PRI to campaign on populist proposals such as freezing prices.

The PRD has dominated local politics since 1997 and its administrations have been credited with beginning to turn around a city previously notorious for crime, corruption and contaminated air.

Its urban agenda has involved expanding mass transit, curbing pollution and promoting cycling.

The social agenda has included decriminalizing abortion, liberalizing divorce laws and legalizing same-sex marriages — all to the dismay of the local Catholic Archdiocese, whose spokesman accused the Ebrard administration of doing more damage than drug cartels.

“Part of the Mexico City legislative agenda still couldn’t be passed in a large part of the United States,” says Zepeda.

The turn-around has come as some provincial parts of Mexico have descended into drug and organized crime violence and turned Mexico City into an unlikely refuge for those seeking safety.

“Mexico City isn’t an attractive place for criminal groups,” says Miguel Angel Mancera, mayoral candidate for the PRD and two smaller left-wing parties.

Mancera, 46, a former Mexico City attorney general, told a recent gathering of foreign correspondents that having local police under a single command is an advantage, along with the benefit of 13,000 security cameras monitoring the streets. He says committing crimes and moving merchandise in a traffic-clogged city is difficult for the cartels.

More GlobalPost

Continue Reading Close

More David Agren.

Next Article

Related Stories

Featured Slide Shows

What To Read Awards: Top 10 Books of 2012 slide show

close X
  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 10
  • 10. "The Guardians" by Sarah Manguso: "Though Sarah Manguso’s 'The Guardians' is specifically about losing a dear friend to suicide, she pries open her intelligent heart to describe our strange, sad modern lives. I think about the small resonating moments of Manguso’s narrative every day." -- M. Rebekah Otto, The Rumpus

  • 9. "Beautiful Ruins" by Jess Walter: "'Beautiful Ruins' leads my list because it's set on the coast of Italy in 1962 and Richard Burton makes an entirely convincing cameo appearance. What more could you want?" -- Maureen Corrigan, NPR's "Fresh Air"

  • 8. "Arcadia" by Lauren Groff: "'Arcadia' captures our painful nostalgia for an idyllic past we never really had." -- Ron Charles, Washington Post

  • 7. "Gone Girl" by Gillian Flynn: "When a young wife disappears on the morning of her fifth wedding anniversary, her husband becomes the automatic suspect in this compulsively readable thriller, which is as rich with sardonic humor and social satire as it is unexpected plot twists." -- Marjorie Kehe, Christian Science Monitor

  • 6. "How Should a Person Be" by Sheila Heti: "There was a reason this book was so talked about, and it’s because Heti has tapped into something great." -- Jason Diamond, Vol. 1 Brooklyn

  • 4. TIE "NW" by Zadie Smith and "Far From the Tree" by Andrew Solomon: "Zadie Smith’s 'NW' is going to enter the canon for the sheer audacity of the book’s project." -- Roxane Gay, New York Times "'Far From the Tree' by Andrew Solomon is, to my mind, a life-changing book, one that's capable of overturning long-standing ideas of identity, family and love." -- Laura Miller, Salon

  • 3. "Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk" by Ben Fountain: "'Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk' says a lot about where we are today," says Marjorie Kehe of the Christian Science Monitor. "Pretty much the whole point of that novel," adds Time's Lev Grossman.

  • 2. "Bring Up the Bodies" by Hilary Mantel: "Even more accomplished than the preceding novel in this sequence, 'Wolf Hall,' Mantel's new installment in the fictionalized life of Thomas Cromwell -- master secretary and chief fixer to Henry VIII -- is a high-wire act, a feat of novelistic derring-do." -- Laura Miller, Salon

  • 1. "Behind the Beautiful Forevers" by Katherine Boo: "Like the most remarkable literary nonfiction, it reads with the bite of a novel and opens up a corner of the world that most of us know absolutely nothing about. It stuck with me all year." -- Eric Banks, president of the National Book Critics Circle

  • Recent Slide Shows

  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 10

Related Videos

More Related Stories

Comments

 0 Comments

Comment Preview

Your name will appear as username ( profile | log out )

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href=""> <b> <em> <strong> <i> <blockquote>

Salon is proud to feature content from GlobalPost, an awarding-winning international news site that focuses on original reporting from journalists stationed around the world. GlobalPost combines traditional journalistic values with the power of new media to offer a fresh perspective on global developments.

follow salon

Most Read

From Around the Web

Recommendations