By MARK STEVENSON
Associated Press Writer
May 22, 2005
MEXICO CITY -- Two years ago, artists and architects banded together to stave off McDonald's from opening on the picturesque main square in the southern city of Oaxaca. Now some of those same activists are under attack themselves, over their plan to evict another foreign invader -- the towering India laurel trees that shade the historic plaza. Opponents say the idea is political correctness run amok.
"This is almost dogmatic," said painter Francisco Verastegui, who joined the fight to oppose McDonald's [see Burger/Tamale War in our newsletter] but is leading the battle against the renovation project. "They're nonnative species, so we have to get rid of them? That's like botanical racism." His foe is a group of artists and architects who launched -- with little public consultation -- a vast remodeling project at the square that included talk of eventually replacing "foreign" laurels with native trees. Planted in the 1870s, the broad-limbed, dense laurels have shaded generations who come to the plaza to escape Oaxaca's hot, dry climate.
Bulldozers felled one of the laurels as workers were ripping up pavement in the square in late April. The project's planners called that an accident, saying they meant to replace the 11 laurel trees in the square only gradually, as they die off. But many people in Oaxaca no longer trust the would-be renovators, and started a Citizen's Committee to defend the trees and protest the lack of public consultation and cost of the plan, which includes repaving the entire square.
Founded in 1532, downtown Oaxaca is listed as a U.N. World Heritage site and a Mexican national historic area. The plaza is bordered by colonial-era arched walkways, government and church buildings and open-air restaurants. The trees shading the square are huge, some of them soaring 100 feet high. The designers of the renovation say they favor smaller trees, arguing the current ones dwarf the surrounding buildings and block views. But when workers showed up with chain saws to cut up the tree tipped over by the bulldozers, angry residents stood guard around the laurel and stopped them. The tree was later propped back up and may survive.
The fight -- which has left one of Mexico's foremost tourist attractions ripped up and roped off -- has become so heated that federal authorities stepped in, ordering the city to slow down and open the plan to more public comment. Authorities also found the project lacked permits required for such work in historic districts. Even tourists, who provide the city's lifeblood, say the new plan isn't befitting in a city that fought off McDonald's.
"I don't see the sense in this. There was this battle two years ago to preserve the historical aspects, and now they want to knock down these trees. It's illogical," said Gustavo Vazquez, an assistant professor of media at the University of California in Santa Cruz. He visited Oaxaca in April and was angered by the ripped-up square and half-felled tree. He said the renovation -- intended to boost tourism -- could do the opposite. "I would call on people to boycott the city if they knock down those trees," said Vazquez. "If it wasn't broken, why fix it?"
At the center of the battle is a small group led by artist Luis Zarate and architect Saul Alcantara, who drew up plans to change the plaza's pavement and layout and to "recover the spirituality of a native Oaxaca species" by replacing the laurels with natives trees. They say they never advocated cutting down the laurels, but rather want to plant native Higo del Valle or Ahuehuete species wherever a laurel dies naturally. "In the long term, our plan was to recreate the native vegetation of the Oaxaca valley," Zarate said. "Our culture is very much tied to the plants of the region." Alcantara conceded the plan was never submitted for public comment "on a mass scale," but he defended the process, arguing that "people in the artistic world knew about it."
The proponents have found themselves in what seems a replay of the McDonald's battle they fought, but this time aimed at them. Thousands of Oaxaca residents and visitors have attended demonstrations, painted placards and signed petitions against the renovation project. "The square isn't a canvas that belongs to any artist," read one protest banner hung in the plaza.
“One day, soon after the project started, we came here and it just looked like Baghdad,” says painter Francisco Verastegui, seated at a café table just a few feet from the corrugated metal barrier that now rings Oaxaca’s Zocalo, or main square.
“So we started watching them that night as they pulled up the concrete, and suddenly, as they were digging, the tree was knocked over,” he recalls. “So ten of us, mostly artists, surrounded the tree and stayed there all night. We know how the government acts, so we knew they would try to chop it up and claim that it had been sick or something. “We wanted the people to see what had happened,” says Verastegui, “And really, that tree became the trigger,”
Two weeks into an already controversial renovation of Oaxaca’s Zocalo, workers toppled one of the plaza’s massive 125-year-old Indian Laurel trees. While government officials say that the incident was an unintended consequence of a far-reaching plan to improve the touristic viability of the city, the fallen tree quickly became the flashpoint for a vocal grassroots campaign against the renovation. Organizers and supporters of the protest say that they are outraged not only at the destruction of the tree; they also call into question the project’s necessity and a lack of openness in its planning.
“Projects like this are always polemical,” says architect Rafael Gómez Ruiz, the city’s registrar for its historic center. “But the tree was an unfortunate event. It suddenly brought all this negative attention a project that has always intended to conserve the values, history and heritage of the Zocalo.”
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Oaxaca’s sixteenth-century Zocalo, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, is the symbolic heart of the state and a source of great pride for the community. Locals and tourists linger at its tree-shaded benches, and its sidewalk cafes are popular spots to meet friends for a cool drink. When McDonald’s tried to open a restaurant on the square in 2002, a massive public outcry quickly scuttled the plan.
As the traditional seat of the state government, the Zocalo has long been the scene of political protests and sit-ins, and a weeks-long occupation of the square by public school teachers had become an annual event. Due at least in part to the protests, the state and city launched an expansive overhaul of the historic center that has included moving the government to the outskirts. The former governmental palace is now awaiting conversion to a museum.
COMMUNICATION BREAKDOWN
“I don’t understand the motives of the opponents,” says Carlos Melgoza, the head architect on the renovation effort. “This is a project that offers so many possibilities to make the Zocalo more beautiful and attractive. But here in Oaxaca, everything becomes magnified and becomes political.”
The protesters say that this lack of understanding is endemic to the power elite developing the project. “The people who are involved are so arrogant that they would do a project like this without even considering what a whole group of citizens think, or how it would affect them,” says Marietta Bernstorff of the Citizens’ Vigilance Committee, the organizing body behind the protest.
“What they should have done first of all was hold a ‘consulta ciudadana’ (public forum),” says Santiago Olguín, a social anthropologist and member of the vigilance committee. “Then, they should have had a competition for designs and taken bids on the project. And after that, they should have announced the costs of it, obtained the necessary permits from INAH (the national archaeological institute), and undertaken an ecological impact study. They did none of that.”
“The fact is, we did hold public forums on the project: one at the (modern art museum) and another at a local restaurant with members of the established business community,” says the citys’s Gómez Ruiz. “I think the public outcry results from their being uniformed. So that said, yes, I think we probably could have done a better job of publicizing the project.”
Opponents also question the necessity and expense of the renovation. They point to infrastructure problems such as road disrepair and an aging water system – many homes in the city go for days without water during the dry season – as areas in greater need of attention. And they express skepticism of a high-priced beautification project in a state that ranks among the nation’s poorest.
BACKYARD POLITICS
“These are people with expensive, nouveau riche tastes,” says Verastegui. “And they want to turn Oaxaca into a modern city; they want to make it into a mall. They are using the Zocalo as their own back yard.”
In fact, say the activists, the back yard metaphor can also be taken literally. The state’s tempestuous and controversial ex-governor, José Murat, a man who faked his own assassination attempt during his last months in office, has recently bought a home adjacent to the city’s Alameda, a shady park on the northwestern corner of the Zocalo that is also slated for renovation.
Murat’s PRI party has controlled the state for 75 uninterrupted years, during which time it has relied on corruption, intimidation, vote fraud, and violence to maintain its hold on power. Members of the vigilance committee attribute much of the current controversy to a growing conflict between an established authoritarian regime and an increasingly disenchanted populace.
“I think that anybody who gets into power for so many years assumes that we’re all just going to be silent,” says Bernstorff. “And so now the government is having a hard time dealing with people who are a little bit more aware, not as fearful, and can’t be bullied anymore.”
“This stems from our poor leadership, and we’re tired of it. They never do anything to help Oaxacans,” says Faustina Sumano, one of a number of vendors from the local Benito Juárez market who have added their voices to the opposition. “There are other, more urgent needs in the community. For example, here, our market is in disrepair, and now we hear people saying that maybe next they’ll evict all of us without warning. You really don’t know what they could do.”
The grassroots protest movement is reaching the ears of those in high places as well. Work on the Zocalo renovation was temporarily halted this week by INAH officials who wanted to assess the impact of the project, and Francisco Toledo, Mexico’s most famous living artist and the prime mover in the 2002 anti-McDonald’s campaign, wrote a letter to a local newspaper distancing himself and his Pro-Oax organization from Luis Zárate, an artist who helped draw up the plans for the renovation.
Members of the citizen’s committee are not surprised by the growing criticism that the Zocalo project is attracting.
“There comes a point where those in power take things a step too far,” says Bernstorff. “And in this particular case it took a tree that is so symbolic to knock us all over the head and say, ‘Wait a minute, are you willing to give up your rights and your history to a bunch of very wealthy, very powerful men?’”
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