MEXICO CITY — The plan is as big as this mammoth city: Turn a seedy metro hub into Mexico City’s Times Square; clear swarms of feisty vendors and remodel the historic Alameda Central; illuminate the plazas and walkways of a park twice the size of New York’s Central Park.
Mexico City’s government is trying to transform one of the world’s largest cities by beautifying public spaces, parks, and monuments buried beneath a sea of honking cars, street hawkers, billboards, and grime after decades of dizzying urban growth.
Despite the challenges, the ambitious, multimillion-dollar program carried out by Marcelo Ebrard, former center-left mayor, and continued by his successor, Miguel Angel Mancera, is winning praise from urban planners and many residents. And it’s turning the metropolis into an experiment in how to soften urban sprawl....
Other completed projects include a once-neglected plaza with an Arc de Triumph-style monument to Mexico’s 1910 revolution, which has been remade at a cost of $28.6 million from a homeless encampment to an oasis where families frolic and children run through spurts of water gushing out of the pavement. The copper dome of what started out as the country’s Congress building is newly polished and gleaming.
Where did the homeless go?
Downtown, at the Chapel of the Immaculate Conception of Tlaxcoaque, the city has installed multicolored fountains that light up at night and replaced a parking lot with a larger plaza for pedestrians.
The city has also converted Gustavo I. Madero street in the historic center into a pedestrian walkway stretching to the Zocalo, the plaza that’s home to the National Palace and massive Metropolitan Cathedral. And under a popular bridge near the hip neighborhood of Condesa, the city made way for a taco joint and a playground.
‘‘A city where people go out to the streets is safe, happier, and raises the quality of life,’’ said Daniel Escotto, chief architect of Mexico City’s Public Areas Office, which was founded in 2008 to manage urban renewal. ‘‘We are renovating floors, facades, and adding plants and lighting and more elements that can shape this concept.’’ Yet in a city defined in many ways by its disorder, the plan is also being slammed by those who take pride in surviving the urban jungle.
‘‘Yes it’s safer, and it’s renovated, but what happens to the emblem of Mexico City?’’ said Baltazar Romeo, 47, a hospital worker eating a sandwich at the newly remodeled Alameda. Gone were the street performers who once dressed as the Three Wise Men during Christmas and charged tips for photos with children.
‘‘The city is becoming soulless,’’ Romeo said. One of the flagship renovation projects is the once-seedy, swarming Glorieta de Insurgentes roundabout and metro station in central Mexico City, which sees hundreds of thousands of commuters pour through every day.
The circular plaza was sunk to let pedestrians stream below busy thoroughfares and catch their trains or buses or just hang out. Around its rim careen cars in a roundabout that briefly merges two of the city’s biggest thoroughfares, the mighty Insurgentes and Chapultepec avenues.
When the plaza was built in 1969, the city’s top priority was moving an onslaught of cars and people from one point to another. Highways and beltways elsewhere went up to cope with the population boom, and sprawl spread farther out.
Once-famous and safe streets and plazas suffered from neglect by planners and became slum-like neighborhoods people avoided after sunset. A brown haze covered the new skyline as motorists became the focus of the new infrastructure.
The Insurgentes roundabout turned into a place to hurry through. Homeless people took over abandoned warehouses nearby while surrounding office and apartment buildings fell into disrepair. Many of the plaza’s shops became sleazy Internet cafes cowering beneath giant billboards.
‘‘It couldn’t be more hostile to public life or pedestrian life,’’ said Ken Greenberg, a Toronto-based architect and urban designer who recently visited Mexico. ‘‘The whole thing just has a kind of very harsh feeling of a highway right in the middle of the city.’’
Urban designers are now seeking to infuse the chaos with the glitzy excitement of Times Square or London’s Piccadilly Circus. Sixty-foot cylinders covered with circular screens streaming LED tickers have been erected. The crabgrass-filled flower beds and low benches used as skateboard launches have been bulldozed for a sleek open-air look bathed in white, patterned concrete.
The makeover is meant to create a more appealing space for commuters using bikes and public transit in a city that won infamy as the world’s most painful for commuters in a 2011 IBM survey....
What about the poor masses?
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Get a job, right?
"Mexico laying groundwork for entrepreneurial growth" by William Booth | Washington Post, November 04, 2012
MEXICO CITY — In an aggressive bid to move beyond low-wage factory jobs and toward an entrepreneurial economy, Mexico is producing graduates in engineering and technology at rates that challenge its international rivals, including its number one trade partner, the United States.
President Felipe Calderon recently boasted that Mexico graduates 130,000 engineers and technicians a year from universities and specialized high schools, more than Canada, Germany, or even Brazil, which has nearly twice the population of Mexico.
But it remains an open question whether the soaring number of skilled graduates will transform Mexico into the ‘‘country of engineers’’ that Calderon envisions, or they go to work in low-level managerial jobs at assembly plants owned by foreigners — jobs that have come to define their profession.
‘‘This idea that Mexico is a country of engineers is a mirage,’’ said Manuel Gil Anton, an expert in education policy at Colegio de Mexico.
Gil compared Mexico to a Starbucks franchise — its workers are able to deliver a fast cup of coffee but cannot create by themselves the business model and products that make Starbucks a global brand. He said most engineers in Mexico become underachievers, not inventors or entrepreneurs. ‘‘They turn knobs,’’ he said.
But this may change as more engineers graduate and if incoming President Enrique Peña Nieto can make good on his promise to remove impediments to growth and turn Mexico into a kind of warm-weather Canada.
Related: New president sworn into office
Many analysts who study emerging economies — such as the MISTs (as Mexico, Indonesia, South Korea and Turkey are known) — say that Mexico is in fact laying the groundwork.
Mexico already posts a trade surplus with the United States and is building communications satellites and corporate jets.
In the past decade, Mexico has doubled the number of its public two-year colleges and four-year universities.
During Calderon’s six years in office, even as the drug war raged and the recession pushed millions of Mexicans into poverty, the government built 140 new schools of higher learning, with 120 of them dedicated to science and engineering. Capacity was expanded at 96 other public campuses.
I have to say no one seems to care much about them.
Private colleges — such as the pricey but popular Monterrey Institute of Technology with its 31 campuses in 25 cities — are experiencing a boom.
‘‘Mexico is now one of the top producers of engineers in the world,’’ said Oscar Suchil, director of graduate affairs at the public National Polytechnic Institute, where 60 percent of its 163,000 students are studying engineering and paying just $12 a semester in tuition.
These aspirational students, many from humble backgrounds, want desperately to build something — for themselves and their country — and join Mexico’s growing middle class, which now accounts for half of the population....
Ours is shrinking big-time up here.
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So what are they exporting to AmeriKa?
"US cities are hubs for Mexican cartels" by Sari Horwitz |
Washington Post, November 11, 2012
CHICAGO — Chicago’s Little Village neighborhood is home to more than 500,000 residents of Mexican descent and is known for its Cinco de Mayo festival and Mexican Independence Day parade.
But US authorities say that Little Village is also home to something else: an American branch of the Mexican Sinaloa drug cartel.
Well, they had a little help getting here.
Related: U.S. Government Brings Drug War to U.S. Cities
Not really a secret anymore. And who benefits? The banks that launder the loot and the intelligence agencies reaping black profits for their black ops.
Members of Mexico’s most powerful cartel are selling a record amount of heroin and methamphetamine from Little Village, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration. From there, the drugs move to the streets of south and west Chicago, where they are sold in assembly-line fashion in mostly black neighborhoods.
‘‘Chicago, with 100,000 gang members to put the dope on the street, is a logistical winner for the Sinaloa cartel,’’ Jack Riley, the DEA’s special agent in charge of the Chicago unit, said after touring Little Village. ‘‘We have to operate now as if we’re on the Mexican border.’’
Also see: To counter gangs, Springfield adopts tactics from war zones
It is not just Chicago. Increasingly, as drug cartels have amassed more control and influence in Mexico, they have extended their reach deeper into the United States, establishing inroads across the Midwest and Southeast, according to American counternarcotics officials.
An extensive distribution network supplies regions across the country, relying largely on regional hubs like this city, with ready markets located off busy interstate highways.
One result: Seizures of heroin and methamphetamine have soared in recent years, according to federal statistics.
The US government has provided Mexico with surveillance equipment, communication gear, and other assistance under the $1.9 billion Merida Initiative, the antidrug effort launched more than four years ago. But critics say north of the border, the US government has barely put a dent in a sophisticated infrastructure supporting some $20 billion a year in drug cash flowing back to Mexico.
The success of Mexican cartels in building huge drug distribution and marketing networks across the nation is a reflection of the US government’s intelligence and operational failure in the war on drugs, said Fulton T. Armstrong, an ex-national intelligence officer for Latin America.
‘‘We pretend that the cartels don’t have an infrastructure in the US,’’ said Armstrong, also a former staff member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and now a senior fellow at American University’s Center for Latin American and Latino Studies. ‘‘But you don’t do a $20 billion a year business . . . with adhoc, part-time volunteers. You use an established infrastructure to support the markets. How come we’re not attacking that infrastructure?’’
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Fast and Furious has been quietly forgotten.
After reading the thing for decades it could be any morning.
