MEXICO CITY — Juan Manuel Contreras, a church singer and laid-off electrical utility worker, had been honking his car horn and shouting through a megaphone out the window for the past half hour when he turned to me with a question one might only address to a newly arrived foreigner in Mexico.
“Is this your first battle?”
In Mexico, it was. Democracy here is practiced in the street and very much out loud. Seemingly every day someone is protesting something, chanting grievances, thrusting banners, announcing “yes we cans,” even if they probably can’t.
In the past month, Mexican soccer players wore brown paper bags over their heads to protest unpaid wages. Topless women with blue-paint handprints over their breasts marched for women’s rights. Jugglers, dancers and clowns raged against a new rule banning animals from circuses.
They protest Mexico’s oil policies. U.S. immigration rules. Rising subway prices. Education reform. They have marched in opposition to drug lords’ rampant killing and kidnapping, and in opposition to the arrest of said drug lords. They block toll booths. Airports. Highways.
There are thousands of protests each year in Mexico City alone: Hunger strikes. Prayer vigils. Caravans. Paseo de la Reforma, the main drag through downtown Mexico City, is as much an eight-lane highway as a canvas for creative protesting.
So when I heard chanting coming down my normally quiet, cobblestoned street in the Coyoacán neighborhood, I rushed outside to see what was arousing my neighbors.
“¡No parquimetros! ¡No parquimetros!”
Parking meters. Well. Not the most dramatic cause, perhaps, but a decent introduction to democracy Mexico-style.
The city government had made the opening gambit. In early February, at night, my neighbors said, a government contractor came in and started painting white parking spaces on the rustic colonial streets of Coyoacán.
The neighborhood is one of Mexico City’s oldest, an historic barrio where Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés once lived during the 16th century, Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera painted, Octavio Paz wrote essays and Leon Trotsky was stabbed with an ice pick. Tour buses regularly cruise by the brightly colored houses under the jacaranda trees and the bougainvillea.
Along with the new parking spaces, they began digging holes to install more than 300 parking meters, which would charge about 60 cents an hour throughout a neighborhood where residents have been accustomed to parking for free. Protest time.
The protest leaders started a Facebook page to organize demonstrations, post photos of their gatherings and pass along media coverage of their efforts. Fliers were slid under doors and windshield wipers. Both sides began gathering signatures – which stand about 10 to 1 in favor of stopping the parking meters.
When I went outside to join the march, I noticed the cause had been taken up by old and young alike. It is a diverse, well-educated group. There are agricultural engineers, climatologists, musicians. A young woman painted her arms and legs in anti-parking meter slogans. A man with thinning hair played a trumpet and a little boy who came up to his mother’s waist was banging a drum. “Neighbors, wake up, the parking meter is at your door!” they chanted.
Some of the complaints about the parking-meter plan are ideological, that the government is privatizing the streets at the expense of the neighbors. Others are aesthetic: “The parking apparatus is an ugly green color that has nothing to do with the architecture here,” Luis Manuel Menéndez, a pharmaceutical company owner, said during a protest. “This is horrible.”
Rodrigo Mejia, a 27-year-old IT professional who had joined a car-caravan protest, had more brass-tacks reasons for his opposition. “I live here and I don’t want to have to pay to park my car,” he said.
I was out of town during the early days of the battle, when neighbors tried to rip up some of the parking-meter bases that had been partially installed. On Feb. 28, residents blocked one of the main thoroughfares, Miguel Ángel de Quevedo, for more than an hour.
The next day, the government upped the ante, sending scores of riot police with black shields and plastic face guards to the neighborhood. The Facebook page lit up with photos and messages “No a la agresion!!!””No a la violencia!” According to witnesses, and the extensive coverage by neighbors’ iPhones, the riot police shoved and jostled some of the protesters, including the elderly.
“They hit me with their shields in my back and the heads of the screws cut into me,” said Andrés Muñóz, 55, a construction worker and a diabetic. “There was blood.”
Cab driver and fifth-degree taekwondo black-belt Pedro Jiménez, 55, got smacked on the arms and dropped to the pavement. “One of the techniques you learn is to be calm,” he said.
Neighborhood president Mauricio Toledo, who has been cast as resident villain in this drama (“Toledo, understand, the streets are not for sale!” and “Mauricio Toledo, he is a pickpocket!” are among the movement’s mantras) has said that the project was not his decision but that the parking meters will improve the neighborhood, raise revenue and will be installed. He has refused to engage the protesters (and declined an interview).
In the days after the street scuffle, the riot police stood guard at each sidewalk hole in the ground and construction surged forward. But soon, Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History weighed in, saying that because Coyoacán has been designated a “zone of historic monuments,” the organization needed to sign off before the parking meters could be installed. The project’s application was therefore “incomplete,” the organization said in a statement, and so the parking-meter plan would be “immediately suspended.”
The battle has now reached a stage of wary détente, pending a historical review. The protesters have won an audience with the local government, and the parking meter project is on hold, for now. Which does not mean protests have stopped. Nearly every evening, my neighbors gather to make human chains, caravan in honking cars, or march chanting through the streets. There are anti-parking meter signs hanging all over now, and residents clap and give the thumbs up when their protesting brethren march by.
The fighters believe they’re still a long way from victory. But at the very least, one said, “they can hear us now.”
Yes, we can.
© 2014, The Washington Post
