Project: Civil Society and Governability in Mexico

PROJECT: CIVIL SOCIETY AND GOVERNABILITY IN MEXICO

FORD FOUNDATION AND THE UNIVERSITY OF VERACRUZ

MEXICO CITY, INSTITUTIONS AND CIVIL SOCIETY 1998-1999

EXPERIENCES OF A CITY IN TRANSITION

CARLOS SAN JUAN VICTORIA

DIRECCION DE ESTUDIOS HISTORICOS

INSTITUTO NACIONAL DE ANTROPOLOGIA AND HISTORIA

MEXICO CITY, MARCH 2000

INDEX

1.  THE CONTEXT OF THE EXPERIENCE: the pradoxes of transition

The civil and social organisations and institutions of Mexico City began, in 1998 and throughout 1999, to explore a variation of the transition process that the country has been living since 1983. We say a variant because within a national process of change that up until now has been managed by technocratic elites allied to the official party, the PRI, the possibility that an historic opposition, Cardenism, emerged in 1997 to try another way of bringing about the kind of modernization and democracy that could resolve the paradoxes that until now had been created by the transformation of society and the State.

In 1983, the historical womb of a centralized state, ruled by corporatist pacts, protector of the internal market and stuck in its legitimacy to a history of great collective actors and social demands (workers and peasants), began a transformation that is still going today. This includes:

·  the promotion of institutions, values and democratic actors (particularly in the electoral arena) that concentrate democratic issues into the alternance of power. Simultaneously, social, economic and cultural inequalities are accentuated, creating obstacles for the construction of a political and social citizenry. Even the framework of rights already established in these areas are deconstructed.

·  A still imperfect consolidation of electoral democracy, the strengthening of the party system and the plurality of the Congress and various local government regimes (State and municipal). However, the centralization of a strategic sphere of decision-making at the margins of this democratic framework in the Federal Executive is also accentuated; for example, all the economic, social and foreign policy-making is orientated towards the growing and exclusive integration with the United States of America within the framework of the Free Trade Agreement.

·  A new plurality of new social and political actors, particularly the civil organisations, that takes place in conjunction with a transformation in ways of dialogueing, applying pressure, and negotiating; where the great historic actors are deconstructed, conflict and mobilization rejected as legitimate means of dealing with demands and support given to neocorporatism and a managerial and individualistic vision of democratic governability, at the same time as the spread of a new hegemonic principle in the relationship between State and society.

These are the paradoxes of the 1983-1999 transition.

2.  Mexico City: the new direction of local transition.

The variation experienced in Mexico City, with the greatest concentration of population, industry, financial services and urban infrastructure in the country, is made possible by a cycle of constitutional reforms achieved between 1995 and 1996 at the federal level. This reforms are chrystallized in 1997 by the election of a Mayor in a city that had previously been governed by a city manager appointed by the President of the Republic. At this time, the city’s own political-legal order begins to be constructed to replace the old system of government that was formerly regulated by federal bodies and laws.

The election in 1997 makes room for a centre-left coalition of social, civil and political actors that had created the conditions for the political and economic centre of the country to be permeated by a non-conservative culture. A culture of public participation and openness to pluralistic values, alternance of power, and inclusiveness; a culture reflected in an electoral platform whose title is also its emblem: a city for all. It is a document in favour of democratic institutionality, of inclusive politics, of a recuperation of social responsibility by the State, and of productive, not speculative policies.

It is a proposal that takes advantage of a local reform process that began in 1987 and social mobilizations that became energized by the earthquakes of 1985. In other words, a 10 year gradual process of change and of social and programatic consolidation of democratic demands. In a gradual way local authority was being won, albeit with federal controls that impeded and impede its final shape as a sovereign state within the Federation and the democratization of its political and social relations.

But this reaction of the society that gave its vote in 1997 to the inclusive option of A City for All, was also against the growing privatization of urban spaces, increases in the cost of services, worsening criminality, the arbitrariness of a powerful administration (managerial government and delegations) with wide margins of discretionality and that was governing via a network of agreements with elements of power and client-patron relationships with leaders of unions, street sellers, neighbourhood and transport worker associations, and petitioners for ground, housing and urban services.

In fact, the unexpected arrival of this coalition frustrated the consolidation of a local model of government with various key features:

·  To keep this enormous human concentration in a special political regime, where full power is not handed over to local authorities and federal controls are maintained. For example, restrictions on its local congress, the Legislative Assembly of the Federal District, to decide the size of public debt, or the fact that the President of the Republic appoints the public security chiefs.

·  To strengthen the centralization of power and government among political and administrative elites in agreement with social elites. The huge urban sprawl had a triple support for achieve a certain governability: the concentration of abundant resources to the detriment of other states and the principle of federal equality; an administration subject to the all encompassing, centralized and enormous presidencial regime that was vertical, impune due to the absence of accountability mechanisms and arbitrary in its decision-making; a network of pacts between the bureaucracy, powerful groups and the client-patron relationships with organized groups, traditional strong men and urban leaders. With this solid, authoritarian and expensive construction, the city was governed: its expansion, its urban concentration, its industrialization, its services and its extreme poverty.

·  The privatization of urban spaces, and increasing costs for staying and gaining access to the city, with the consequent tendency of displacing the poor towards neighbouring municipalities.

·  The imposition of the predominant ideology of a scenographic modernization that hides the pre-existing dominance of patron-client relations between the administration, social organisations and the general public, through the prestige of a supposedly new relationship between society and State, the new hegemonic principle that proclaims the virtues of a slim State and citizens organized for the common good.

3.  THE HEGEMONIC PRINCIPLE OF THE STATE-SOCIETY RELATIONSHIP

According to the Directory of Philanthropic Institutions of the Mexican Centre for Philanthropy, there were 1419 civil organisations in 1997, of which 53% were registered as civil associations, 27% as private charities and 2% as civil society. These are inaccurate data that varied from one source to another, but that do not alter their microsocial dimension.

In this small myriad of organisations, the foundations, global organisms like the World Bank, and well known intellectual and political national sectors, placed their bets on an era of political and social transformation. A change in the relationship between State and society. The so-called “Washington Consensus” has made a special effort to press for the remaking of the State by privatizing, down-sizing and deregulating. Priority concerns with national sovereignty and social issues, as in the Mexican case, are substituted for a strong will to promote the market and stimulate integration.

At the same time, there are two phases in which existing society is reinvented with the concept of “civil society”. Firstly, in the moment that the defensive sovereignties of the benefactor States, both nationalist and socialist, are dismantled; and that coincides with the dissection of the big social actors. In this historic juncture dominated by the eighties, “civil Society” appears as a new actor that through its mobilizations promotes the liberal State, the market economy and electoral democracy. It is an actor of the transition that was celebrated and promoted in the so-called “third wave of democratizations”. In the second phase, of consolidation or democratic normalization that is imposed in the nineties, the former actor for political transition is converted into a possible “partner” of a slimmed down State without social responsibility in order to take on humanitarian tasks and promote social development.

During this last phase, the promotion of a State-society model for “consolidation” or “democratic normality” by the World Bank, IDB, Synergos and Civicus is note-worthy; management models for the supply of public goods and the control of demand, in addition to the characterization of civil society as private institutions that offer public services. From this nucleus the National Consultations (Brazil, Colombia, Argentina) are born, trying to place themselves within this “democratic normality”, define its impacts, establish a regulatory and promotional framework that would make them “partners” of the new state for the production of public goods.

Mexico stands out in this process since despite initiating a subsitute for the coporatist concept of “people” in 1983 for a new vision, that of the “society” in constitutional articles 25 and 28 dedicated to planning, and to substitute corporatist pacts with “citizen referenda”, it is reticent to regulate a specific sector that appears to be associated with external powers, leading to the freezing during this sexenio of the law for the creation of civil organisms. In the National Development Plans, however, positive roles begin to be established for this “civil society”, both for participation in Councils at a ministerial level, in consultations and in the reconciliation section of the Panning Law.

This hegemonic principle of joint State-civil society has been applied by the National Action Party in its government of the states and by the official party, the PRI, that is sensitive to this idea due to its old client-patron relationships with some charitable institutions.

Beyond the programatic coincidence, this hegemonic principle has helped to bring about modification in the political arena. It converges with internal processes where social and political actors struggle to create a presence for themselves in the country’s political relationships, increasingly surrounded by a political system monopolized by the parties, thus openning a peculiar space for dialogue. It is an undefined space, with regulations, that tries to be occupied by different figures from “civil society”, but also powerful elements that are prepared to take advantage of any space that is available for applying pressure.

The centre coalition that wins the government of the Federal District with Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas - where those that join him are the nuclei that have a past linked to the official party, people that break off from the PAN and a contingente from the centre left that participate in the Minsitry for Internal Affairs, the Ministry of Urban Development and Housing, as well as the Ministry for Social Development and a majority of the political delegations - pushes a politics of change in specific sectors, of coexistence in some areas with old consolidated powers such as the Union of Workers for the Federal District, with its PRI roots. With other interest groups where reconciliation is difficult or they are [negatively] affected by policies for democratic change there is a policy of confrontation.

Various initiatives are deployed for reconstructing the relationship with society, in particular links with another notion of civil society, one that is wider and more complex, where private organisms exist to provide services, but also development promotors and organisms with the capacity to carry out initiatives with political impact; but above all a wide range of social and political traditions of struggle that seek to democratize the social and political relationships in the nation. These sectors can be exemplified by the Forum for Mutual Support (FAM), an elite organism among humanitarian associations, Convergence of Organisms for Democracy, with development promotors, and Alianza Civica, with experience in promoting and carrying out political initiatives. On their left wing, these groups come from a different kind of paradigm for the relationship between State and society that I will summarize according to the following characteristics:

·  A geneology tied to the democratic social movements of the sixties, seventies and eighties, with a perspective of strenthening social democratic figures and promotors of social and poltical change.

·  They share various situations of condensation, the forging of values of identity and instruments for coordination. The following stand out as examples: the Mexico City earthquake in 1985, the stopping of the war in Chiapas, the National Meeting for Civil Organisms in 1995, and the Cárdenas electoral campaign of 1997.

·  As of 1994, various of its sectors became actors in the transition as social movements capable of pushing democracy beyond poligarchic deals or the party bureaucracies.

·  They have disequal experience of working with popular social organisations in promoting as yet embryonic development initiatives. They also have more interest than capacity for influencing public policies.

The new government establishes three programatic areas for a possible coming together of avantgard ideas: integral political reform that will consider a citizen participation board, and the redesign of social policy, in large part urban development and interest in exploring new models for dialogue with civil organisms. Two main areas are established: the recuperation of the State’s sense of social responsibility that seeks to reorientate a neoliberal interventionism based on promotion of the market and new financial and business elites; and an integral political reform that prepares the way for an effective transition to democracy that is not only electoral but a reform of the whole political regime and its relationship with society.