Crusading Mayor Targets Encroaching Estates of Wealthy Squatters

By Kevin Sullivan and Mary Jordan
Washington Post Foreign Service

MEXICO CITY -- The bulldozers came at noon to the lovely chateau at the edge of Chapultepec Park, smashing hard into a wall built by one of Mexico's richest
men. The pharmaceutical magnate had erected it to keep the park's masses off his "Gone With the Wind"-style lawn -- which, it turns out, he didn't really own.

He had simply appropriated it from Chapultepec Park -- cherished here like Central Park in New York -- where more than 2 million people a week come to picnic,
paddle in the lake, visit the anthropology and art museums or wander the zoo.

Other millionaires have encroached on the park, too, according to this city's crusading populist mayor, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, who is banishing them like
Robin Hood with a sledgehammer. With the poor cheering and the TV cameras rolling, Lopez Obrador has sent men with heavy equipment to take back land he
says the rich have stolen from the people.

"We don't owe anything to any special interest group -- not businessmen, not journalists, not bankers, not politicians -- nobody," Lopez Obrador said. "We don't
have to lick anyone's boots. We just have to deliver to the people."

So in the past two weeks, the mayor has started taking back land from super-rich squatters. Armed with new aerial photographs of the 1,600-acre park -- one of
the largest urban parks in the world -- the mayor's office is investigating the houses, tennis courts and gardens of at least 15 politicians and business moguls.

Among those being investigated are a sister of former president Jose Lopez Portillo and the Saba family, which Forbes magazine has said is worth more than $1
billion.

The mayor has even managed to get back eight acres from a buffer zone around Los Pinos, the presidential residence, which is in the park. When he recently sent a
letter to President Vicente Fox describing how a former president had illegally appropriated that land, Fox returned the land. Now the mayor is building walkways in
that area and opening it to the public.

In a country where 54 million of its 100 million people live in poverty, bashing the rich is an extremely popular sport. Lopez Obrador, who political analysts say is
preparing for a presidential run in 2006, has tapped into that sentiment with gusto. Since his election as mayor in 2000, he has positioned himself as a man of the
people, a regular guy who drives an old Nissan and cuts the Mercedes set down to size.

He has handed out cash to hundreds of thousands of poor older people, made buses and the subway free for the elderly, and even brought Mexico's largest circus to
the city's central square with free admission.

But nothing has captured the public imagination here as much as taking back the park, which has dominated the evening news nationally since he started smashing
two weeks ago.

"It's great that he's taking property from the rich. He's on the side of the poor like me," said candy vendor Federico Contreras, 28, who works near the park gates.

Lopez Obrador, 49, of the left-leaning Party of the Democratic Revolution, or PRD, is only the second elected mayor in the capital's history. A single dominant
party, the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, dominated all politics in the country from 1929 until 2000, and PRI presidents appointed their own mayors.
Lopez Obrador was once part of the PRI but broke with the party in the 1980s.

"For 70 years the PRI did whatever they wanted, and now Lopez Obrador is doing something for Mexican families," said Manuel Aguilera Hernandez, pushing a
stroller and bringing his family out of the Chapultepec Zoo after spending a day in the park.

Some critics say Lopez Obrador could incite a class war with his constant talk of "rich and poor." Political analysts say that Lopez Obrador has not been nearly as
aggressive in pursuing thousands of vendors who have illegally taken over public sidewalks and streets. Some of these illegal vendors hang their goods on the
windowsills of some of the city's most historic downtown buildings, including the Supreme Court.

In an announcement this week, the Supreme Court said it was so annoyed by the vendors, who block the entranceway to their ornate downtown building, that it had
arranged for office space elsewhere where it can meet when the mobs grow too disruptive.

Sociologist Arturo Alvarado, of the Colegio de Mexico, said he thought that Lopez Obrador should be more consistent in attacking both rich and poor who break
the law.

"But everything is now done with eyes on elections," he said, noting that poor voters far outnumber the rich.

Claudia Sheinbaum, the city's environment secretary, who has been overseeing the Chapultepec project, said people are encouraged about the government's efforts
to reclaim the stolen parts of the park because in the past "nobody did anything to people with connections."

"I would not like to see this as a class struggle, but it is important for us that nobody is above the law," she said.

So far, the wealthy families involved have said nothing publicly, despite the throngs of television reporters at the doors of their mansions trying to get comments --
even from their maids and uniformed doormen.

Columnist Raymundo Riva Palacio said that Lopez Obrador has shrewdly balanced his attack on the wealthy who stole corners of the park by maintaining close ties
to others among Mexico's elite, including Carlos Slim, Latin America's richest man.

Slim is the major private investor behind another crusade of Lopez Obrador, the renovation of the city's historic center. Slim and other investors are benefiting greatly
from spectacular tax incentives for buying and renovating in the district.

"All of this is making him a very viable politician nationally," Riva Palacio said.

So the smashing continues at Chapultepec Park, where for a few dollars, a child can ride a pony near the castle where the emperor Maximilian once lived. The park
was an exclusive enclave in those 19th-century days of the emperor.

These days it's the people's park. On Sundays, when most of the attractions in the park are free, it becomes Mexico's back yard -- the most crowded park in the
Americas, filled with people playing soccer, rowing boats or walking through the gardens.

"It's not fair that certain areas of the park were reserved for rich families," said Anabell Salinas Gaona, a student teacher who came five hours on a bus from her
home in Puebla to visit the zoo.

"This is part of our national heritage," she said.

                                               © 2002