Pete Hamill - Piecework

In the 1985 earthquake there was almost no damage in the Lomas; the same could not be said for the other end of the Reforma, the area called Tlatelolco. In the heady days of the 1960s, a vast development of state-financed high rises was built here. But even the most modern architecture could not hold back the ancient Mexican gift for the tragic. In 1968 in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas, where a small Aztec pyramid, a colonial church, and a modern building symbolically shared a space, the government chose to save the Olympics by killing more than five hundred protesting students. I remember interviewing some of the survivors; they were in flight, hiding in safe houses, trying to leave the country. Many of their friends were dead, others in prison. Suddenly they had grown up. But if the massacre was bad, nobody in Tlatelolco was prepared for the utter destruction caused by the 1985 earthquake. This is where that fourteen-story building fell over on its side. When I arrived two days later, an army of human beings was digging in the dust of broken plaster and twisted beams. One of them, without announcement, was Placido Domingo. Members of his family lived in the building. Today there are blank spaces where the buildings were.

“Life goes on,” an old Mexican woman shrugged, when I went by the project. “You can do nothing about some things.”

That fatalism is one of the most attractive qualities of the Mexican character. You see it on the faces of prizefighters at the Arena Coliseo when, bleeding and beaten, they refuse to quit. It is general among those trapped in the coiled traffic. There is a hopeless patience among those on line at the Correo Mayor, the central post office on San Juan de Letran (a broad street that nobody calls by its new name of Avenida Lazaro Cárdenas). This is another amazing building designed by the Italian architect Adamo Boari, who began, but did not finish, the Palacio de las Bellas Artes, the grand old museum across the street. Neither suffered any damage in the earthquake while their more modern neighbors were crumpling into broken piles. And the fatalism is most apparent in the way so many Mexicans have reacted to the appalling economic crisis that has afflicted the country since 1982. Income, purchasing power, and the value of savings have been cut by at least 50 percent; Mexico remains peaceful.

My wife and I were in Mexico once when the government allowed a 32 percent devaluation of the peso against the dollar. We arrived on a Sunday, with the peso fixed at 1,700 to the dollar; by Wednesday it was 2,300 to the dollar, and the afternoon papers were screaming that it might go to 6,000. We sat down to breakfast in Sanborn’s knowing that our meal would cost less when we finished than it did when we ordered. Our hotel was $35 a night when we checked in; when we checked out it was $22. Everywhere else on earth the U.S. dollar was weak; in Mexico it retained its old swaggering power. And although there were scare headlines, much talk on TV shows, great muttering and complaining among ordinary citizens we talked to in the street, nobody did anything.

“What can be done?” a mechanic named Esteban Torres said. “The government people knew it was coming, so they all bought dollars ahead of time. The rich keep their money in Texas. The middle class, they keep it in dollars, under their mattresses. The poor don’t have any money anyway. So what can be done?”

Fatalism is combined in this city with a deepening cynicism. In the 1988 presidential elections, thirty-seven of the city’s forty election districts were won by the opposition candidate, Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, who headed a coalition of leftist parties. They voted against mismanagement of the economy that had eroded the value of their work, against the pollution of the air, and most of all, against the endemic corruption.

Most Mexicans can recite personal examples of bureaucrats holding up business licenses for small (and sometimes large) mordidas; traffic cops extorting money for real or imaginary infractions; telephones magically installed after months, even years, of waiting, by the simple expedient of passing money across a desk. Much of the corruption involves low-level bureaucratic members of the ruling Party of Revolutionary Institutions (PRI), and even some of its most ardent acolytes admit that their candidate, Salinas de Gortari, probably lost the election to Cárdenas. But after days of counting and recounting, of unexplained computer breakdowns, of charges and countercharges, Salinas was declared the winner by the smallest margin in modern Mexican history.

Even then there wasn’t much talk of revolution, There were protest marches, angry rhetoric, insults cast back and forth, but no guns fired in anger. After taking office the Harvard-educated Salinas moved quickly to repair his soiled image: He arrested the boss of the corrupt petroleum workers’ union; he jailed one of the hottest players in Mexico’s corrupt stock market; he moved against some of the drug kingpins in northern Mexico, arresting several hundred corrupt cops in the process. Most important, he arrested and indicted the killers of Manuel Buendía, who was Mexico’s most influential newspaper columnist when he was shot in the back and killed five years earlier. The “intellectual author” of the crime turned out to be the man placed in charge of its investigation by Salinas’s predecessor. These moves were at once practical and symbolic; Salinas was proving he had the right to govern by actually governing. And in Mexico City the fatalists began to suspend their disbelief.

“He has some set of timbales,” said my friend Ricardo Hernandez. “Everybody is surprised. But still …we’ll see, we’ll see.”

(By early 1995, only weeks after completing his six-year term as president, Carlos Salinas found his reputation in ruins. The economy had collapsed. There was an unresolved armed rebellion in the southern state of Chiapas. Salinas’s older brother, Raul, was in prison, charged with being the “intellectual author” of the murder of a high-ranking official of the PRI. The man Carlos Salinas had appointed to investigate that murder was in an American jail awaiting extradition to Mexico. The victim was his own brother and the Mexican government wanted to try him for covering up the truth about the crime. At the same time, American investigators had discovered more than $10 million in his Texas bank accounts. Carlos Salinas went on one of the shortest hunger strikes in history, about four hours, to demand the restoration of his own reputation; the entire country mocked him, and he soon was forced into exile. In Mexico City, one of my friends shrugged, smiled bitterly, and said: “They’re all the same. Poor Mexico.”)

Most “Chilangos” (as Mexico City residents are called) have long felt that they have little control over the management of the city. The mayor (or regent, as he is called) is appointed by the president and doesn’t have to submit his performance to the approval of the voters. The last mayor is now in charge of the National Lottery. The new mayor, Manuel Camacho Solis, is a forty-three-year-old economist with an M.A. from Princeton. He is very good on television, speaking with a merciful minimum of nationalistic oratory. In several minor disasters (the explosion of a fireworks factory, a subway crash), he took personal charge on the scene, giving orders with a bullhorn like a Mexican Fiorello La Guardia.

His job has been made easier lately as a result of Salinas’s ardent courting of Japan (the president’s children attend a Japanese school in Mexico City). A few months ago the Japanese government promised to send teams of antipollution technical experts to Mexico City and pledged one billion dollars in credits over three years to help clean up the city’s most critical problem. That amount is only one-third of what Camacho Solis and Mexican environmentalists believe they need; they hope to get the rest from the World Bank and the International Development Bank. But for the first time in twenty years, there is some hope. Meanwhile, of course, children still die and birds fall from the sky.