| | |  Editorials | Issues | September 2008 
Mexico City's Marcelo Ebrard Uses Spectacle to Court the Masses
 Manuel Roig-Franzia - Washington Post
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| | Mexico City Mayor Marcelo Ebrard occasionally bicycles - with police escort - from his penthouse to work, cultivating his man-of-the-people image. (Damian Milverton/Washington Post) | | |
Mexico City - The mayor's got his blue pinstriped suit pants tucked into his dress socks. Bike helmet strap hiked up snug.
And he's off.
Zooming. Penny loafers planted on pedals, long legs pumping, suit jacket flapping.
He blasts past the palm-tree shaded park and the early-morning taco vendors - trailed by his entourage of a dozen cycling bodyguards and city officials. B-list bureaucrats position themselves along the route, knowing this may be their only chance at face time with "El Jefe," Mexico City Mayor Marcelo Ebrard.
"It's great," Ebrard says, admiring his own neighborhood as he pulls up at a stoplight a few blocks from his center-city penthouse.
And he's off again, mid-sentence, chugging merrily into an avenue that is curiously, and momentarily, devoid of rush-hour traffic.
At the back of the pack, Raúl Abreu Lastra, a private think-tank director along for the ride, laughs and shakes his head.
"It's surreal," Abreu says. "It's like the Red Sea parted."
Welcome to a place many here call Marcelo-land. Happy place it is. In Marcelo-land, you can bike to work without risking sudden death in the demolition-derby gridlock. Never mind that this particular bike ride is cocooned by motorcycle escorts, a logistics van, and police at every major intersection - amenities not necessarily available to the average Mexico City commuter.
In Marcelo-land, "el presidente de Mexico" isn't the president. Ebrard and his political party - the Party of the Democratic Revolution - refuse to officially recognize President Felipe Calderón. They insist he committed fraud to get elected in 2006, a position rejected by Mexico's Supreme Court in a case that drew comparisons to the 2000 Bush v. Gore tangle. Nevertheless, Ebrard still won't allow himself to be photographed shaking hands with Calderón or even to address him as "Mr. President."
In Marcelo-land, there are artificial marvels such as beaches where there is no ocean, and a huge holiday ice rink on a plateau that virtually never sees snow. Poor girls get debutante-style coming-outs, sort of like the rich girls.
All this has been conjured, nurtured and promoted by Ebrard, the Mexican political world's master illusionist, a splashy creative force with a soap-opera star for a wife and a penchant for crowd-pleasing spectacles aimed at making this frequently unlivable city seem, well, livable.
This chaotic metropolitan area of nearly 20 million doesn't live up to Ebrard's hopes - it is a place plagued by some of the world's worst air pollution, chronic flooding, brutal traffic, corrupt police, drug-trafficking gangs, rampant car theft and a vicious wave of kidnappings. So, while he is setting about trying to fix those problems, Ebrard, 48, is also forever concocting set pieces, staging cities within his city, realities within his reality. They are productions aimed at Ebrard's best audience, the vast legions of the poor in Mexico City who swarm to each new incarnation in Marcelo-land for a taste of what this city's entrenched elite can fly elsewhere to get.
With each innovation, Ebrard needles Mexico's conservative ruling party, which controls the federal government but holds little sway and gets few votes in Mexico City, a place Ebrard says he wants to remake as "the most liberal city in Latin America." It is a goal he has set in motion by decriminalizing abortion and legalizing gay civil unions - both firsts in Mexico.
As Ebrard's popularity rises - and his 2012 presidential ambitions become more obvious ("Any mayor of Mexico City who doesn't want to be president would have to be a mediocre politician," he says) - he has made himself a national figure and increasingly a target of critics who say he uses the city as his personal political toy.
"Bread and circus. This is demagoguery," Mexican Rep. Beatriz Pagés Rebollar, of the rival Institutional Revolutionary Party, says in an interview.
"Irresponsibility. Populism!" Rep. Obdulio Ávila, of Calderón's National Action Party, says in another interview. "He acts like he's the mayor of a little village. I could see all this if we were Paris, maybe. But we're a city with a lot worse problems than Paris. This is just a way of distracting from the principal problems of the city."
To which Ebrard says, "Be patient." Yes, the city has profound problems, he says, but he's asking for everyone to "have some fun" while he embarks on a vast infrastructure rebuilding program, cleans up downtown and expands the sorely overburdened subway system.
"I know I'm infuriating some people who have the money to go to beaches or go somewhere it snows," Ebrard says one recent afternoon over coffee at his dining room table. "We have a very classist tradition here."
To Ebrard's way of thinking, class divisions stifle the city, making it "old-fashioned," "boring," "depressing."
"Do you realize half the young people in this city can't afford to go to a disco or a club?" he says. "So I make these various symbols. Now people can go to a place where there is ice, and they can lie on the sand here in the city."
"Let's do something new," he says over and over. "Something cool."
Then he switches to English.
"Why not?"
'A Social Equilibrium'
It begins Easter week in 2007. The wealthy have fled the city for their condos in Acapulco or their lake houses miles away at oh-so-chic Valle de Bravo. The city has shrunk to its underprivileged core, its street vendors and housekeepers, its poorly paid shopgirls and struggling students.
Showtime for Marcelo Ebrard.
The newly christened mayor, in office for only four months, arrives at Mexico City's Villa Olympica, a relic of the 1968 Games, now transformed into a splishy-splashy, sand-in-your-toes, honest-to-goodness fake beach. Kids who have never seen the ocean are rolling around in 170 tons of sand spread out next to the pool.
Ebrard delivers his urban manifesto.
"We are going to create spaces where the people can have fun, even though there are those who are bothered by what we are doing because they can probably go to other beaches. But this is being done for the majority," he announces. "It is free and we're going to maintain it starting now and throughout the summer, it is for everyone, it's free, it's our philosophy: We all have the right, and we're making it a reality."
Someone places a lei around Ebrard's neck. His hair is coiffed in its usual comb-over - a "Oaxacan cheese" style, as they say here, because it looks like the lumped, swirled strands of cheese produced in southern Mexico. He sheds his ever-present penny loafers and traipses onto the sand.
He's still wearing his socks.
"That was quintessential Marcelo," Dan Lund, an American who has worked for decades as a pollster in Mexico City, says in a recent interview. "Here's this geeky-looking guy, looking a little like Clark Kent, with the big glasses; and people like him. That awkwardness gives him authenticity. The people who are making fun of him don't get this."
It rains twice that afternoon, but they can't keep the crowds away. Nearly 5,000 people show up at Marcelo's beach, the first of four he opens around the city at a cost of several hundred thousand dollars.
The ruling party establishment is not amused. A Mexican congresswoman, María de la Paz Quiñones of the National Action Party, calls for a federal investigation. She wants the sand analyzed. She's certain it's unsanitary and will be a breeding ground for "certain types of worms."
The worms never materialize, and Ebrard shrugs off the complaints.
"I've worked all my life with the press," says Ebrard's wife, Mariagna Prats, who has starred in soaps with names like "Wild Rose," "Angel Face" and "Hearts Pushed to the Limit." "They can destroy creativity. These criticisms of Marcelo are no different."
Ebrard is just getting warmed up.
By Christmas 2007, he has unveiled what is billed as the world's largest ice skating rink, all paid for by donations. It's 260 feet long, 131 feet wide - five times the size of the rink at Rockefeller Center in Manhattan. "Like we were in New York or Paris," Ebrard declares.
More than 400,000 people show up in the course of several weekends. Some wait in line seven hours for a chance to trip and tumble and slide along the ice, most strapping on skates for the first time in their lives.
"The rink was the clearest example of creating this illusion," René Cervera, Ebrard's longtime friend and chief of staff, says in an interview.
"We did it, and you saw these rich kids getting out of expensive SUVs and joining the kids who have much less. All of these things that Marcelo is doing - the beaches, the ice rink - there's a goal behind them. It's about equality. It's about finding a social equilibrium."
Not Walled Off
It's a weekday afternoon, and Ebrard has sneaked home for lunch. Frying tortillas scent the air. A housekeeper fusses wordlessly in the kitchen.
Ebrard lives in a distinctly nouveau Mexico City pad. The rented two-story penthouse has walls of brushed concrete. The trim is stainless steel. A spiral staircase leads to an upstairs loft where a fur is tossed across a minimalist bed with no headboard. His wife's abstract paintings - flamboyant slashes of red and blue and black - line the walls.
It is a far cry from the walled, colonial-style mansions of the Coyoacan neighborhood, where many of Mexico's political elite live, or the even higher walls surrounding the even bigger mansions up on the hillside by Chapultepec Park.
"You'd go to these houses and you'd wonder, 'How does a public servant afford it?' " Ebrard says.
Flipping to English for a moment, he says: "Disgusting. You'd think, 'Something is wrong here.' "
Living here, in the heart of the Hipodromo section of the hip Condesa neighborhood, furthers the mystique Ebrard is trying to develop. He wants to send a message that he is connected to the city, not removed from it.
"If I live in a fortress, how is Mexico ever going to change?" says Ebrard, now upstairs on his deck overlooking the park.
He lopes back downstairs. He's on to the science conference he's sponsoring next month, which will feature one of his favorite authors, Alvin Toffler, of "Future Shock" fame.
"Do you know how many patents we had in Mexico City last year?" he says. "One hundred forty. That's nothing. We need new ideas."
Spreading the Wealth
A few days later, more than a thousand people line up in the wee hours outside the cavernous Mexico City Sports Palace. It's a Marcelo Ebrard kind of crowd.
Inside, Nayeli Salas, a 25-year-old motorcycle shop clerk, takes a seat in a sea of plastic folding chairs. Salas rode a bus two hours through Mexico City traffic to be here to collect a housing credit check as part of a program that grants government-backed private loans to people who would not normally qualify for bank loans. She makes $50 a week. The check she'll get this morning is going to allow her to start building a house. She knows whom to thank.
"He's the one who gave us the ice rink," she says.
Across the hall, the crowd buzzes. Over the heads of the audience, Ebrard's Oaxaca Cheese 'do comes into view. At more than six feet, he's taller than almost everyone in the hall.
Ebrard's staff has staged a small eco-fair with booths about sustainable energy and other innovations. The crowd waiting for subsidy checks has been mostly brushing past it all morning. But Ebrard is going to check it out.
"It's like I'm doing an ad for this product," he says, holding up a solar panel brochure.
The cameras go snap, snap, snap.
A woman rushes up and pleads urgently in Ebrard's ear. He turns to an aide and motions for her to write down the woman's name and contact information. A desperate plea for a job? Trouble with dirty cops?
"Her son plays soccer and got moved down to a lower division," the aide says. "She wants him to see what he can do to move him back up."
Ebrard finally makes it to the stage. The functionaries seated next to him assume a classic macho stance, legs spread wide. Ebrard sits with his knees pinched together on a chair that is entirely too small for him, heels out, toes of his penny loafers touching.
When it's his turn to talk, it's all us-vs.-them.
"You pay [your housing loan obligations] better than the people who have access to bank loans," he says.
Outside, he squeezes his long frame into a Honda Civic hybrid, one of only 20 or so imported to Mexico each month, he says.
"You know the average income in the city is $13,000 a year, but half of the people make less than $3,600?" he says.
"That's teeny," he says in English.
The traffic is stalled, so there's time to dream.
"I'd like to have a carnival," he says, "a Mardi Gras-style carnival." |
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