Mexico City Is 'Crowdsourcing' a New Constitution. But Will It Change Anything? Diego Rabasa - The Guardian
go to original June 4, 2016

Commuters in Mexico City, where the average journey to work takes one hour and 21 minutes. (Bloomberg)

The impossibility of defining Mexico City, a place where more than 20 million people converge every day, is one of its essential characteristics. From above, you can see pockets of wealth and luxury right next to settlements of extreme poverty; densely populated tenement buildings and large monochromatic swathes of shantytown punctuated by green foliage and, during spring, thick purple flower clusters.

Such contrasts reflect the overwhelming diversity of inhabitants of a city in the process of creating its first political constitution – a reform which, initially at least, was received with deep skepticism. The most important challenge will be to include this kaleidoscopic population in an initiative that aims to reshape the political, economic and social structures of one of the biggest and most chaotic cities in the world – where the average commute is one hour and 21 minutes.

In part, the new constitution is the result of a decades-long struggle that gained momentum when the population spontaneously organized to make up for the incompetence of both federal and local government following the catastrophic 1985 earthquake that killed many thousands of people.

The new constitution is also one of the last cards the city’s mayor, Miguel Ángel Mancera, can play to revitalize his beleaguered image. The recent proliferation of violent practices associated to drug cartels, dangerously high pollution levels reminiscent of the 1990s, rampant impunity and corruption, and Mancera’s close relationship with Mexico’s president, Enrique Peña Nieto – who is especially unpopular in the capital – are all factors in his administration’s deep unpopularity.

Read the rest at The Guardian

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