The Securitization of Urban Space and the “Rescue” of Downtown Mexico City

Neoliberalism and the (Re)Conquest of Mexico City’s Historic Center: Mapping the Context

Since the 1980s, Mexico has witnessed the dismantling of the semiperipheral version of Fordism—which was driven by an import-substitution-industrialization-centered accumulation regime—and the rise of a national competition state under neoliberal auspices, promoting state-downsizing, trade liberalization, free-market principles, and active participation in international economic competition (Soederberg, 2005). Mexico City was severely affected by these macroeconomic transformations, which both contributed to a breakdown of the local manufacturing sector that had been central to the city’s economy throughout most of the twentieth century and robbed Mexico City of its national importance as the center of economic decision making. Between 1982 and 1989, for instance, the number of Mexican Top 500 companies located in the city declined from 287 to 145. While the local manufacturing sector recovered with annual growth rates of about 4 percent between 1993 and 1999, the economic recovery of Mexico City that took place during the 1990s was related less to the economic power of the manufacturing sector than to an overall urban economic restructuring that converted the local producer service industry into the city’s most important economic sector, with finance, insurance, and real estate-related services generating 19.0 percent of the city’s gross domestic product in 1999 (Parnreiter, 2002: 148–154). In other words, Mexico City’s economic recovery was more than anything else the result of “a deep tertiarization process, which for the urban region meant the shift from a national industrial metropolis to a transnational node for financial flows and specialized consumption” (Kanai and Ortega Alcazár, 2009: 487). These processes continued well into the new millennium. In 2004, Mexico City’s producer service sector, notably services related to finance, insurance, and business management, generated 76.5 percent of national value added. More striking than this is the fact that about 55 percent of national value added were generated in only three centrally located delegaciones or boroughs (Cuauhtémoc, Miguel Hidalgo, and Benito Juárez). In addition to this, by 2004, 73 percent of the foreign companies operating in Mexico had their headquarters in Mexico City (Parnreiter, 2011: 7–9). Such indicators clearly demonstrate that Mexico City’s economic recovery has been accompanied by the city’s rise to the status of a global city (Graizboard, Rowland, and Aguilar, 2003; Parnreiter, 2002; 2011). Mexico City now functions as a “command point” for an increasingly globalized world economy. It has become a key location for the finance sector and other specialized producer services that have largely displaced manufacturing as the leading economic sector, and it is a production (and innovation) site for these service industries as well as a market for their products (Sassen, 1991: 3–4).

This, however, did not happen “naturally.” Mexico City’s rise as a global city resulted from active policy interventions by local administrations that since the 1990s have implemented a neoliberal, entrepreneur-friendly mode of urban governance, which largely centers on a reorientation of the state’s responsibilities, in particular in the field of urban economic governance. The local state no longer conceived itself as the director of the local economy but as a facilitator, an agency responsible for the creation of an entrepreneur-friendly fiscal policy, an investment-friendly legal climate, and the provision of infrastructure for investment projects, with the goal of attracting new national and international investors (Hofmeister, 2003: Chap. 4). While some of these processes have been under way since Mexican neoliberalism became locked-in under the “technocratic revolution” (Centeno, 1994) of president Carlos Salinas de Gortari (1988–1994) and his successor Ernesto Zedillo Ponce de León (1994–2000), both from the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (Institutional Revolutionary Party—PRI) that ruled the country (and Mexico City through the federally appointed mayor) for more than seven decades, the democratization of Mexico City politics, culminating in the electoral victory of Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas of the leftist Partido de la Revolución Democrática (Party of the Democratic Revolution—PRD) in 1997, did not alter this situation. Even with a leftist party (which governs Mexico City to this day) in power—a party whose electoral success largely depended upon the promise of improving social welfare services for the urban poor—the centrality of neoliberal urban economic policies in the form of adherence to free-market principles, the creation of an investment-friendly environment, and the strengthening of Mexico City’s interurban competitiveness were firmly established, if not strengthened, under the PRD administrations, with their commitment to economic “productivity, profitability, and competitiveness” (Gobierno del Distrito Federal, 2001: 105).

To make sense out of this seemingly paradoxical situation, one must keep in mind that since the PRD established its power in Mexico City, all local administrations have been confronted with either PRI or Partido de Acción Nacional (National Action Party—PAN) presidents at the national level, where, according to Mexico’s federal system, many of the city’s spending priorities and federal fiscal transfers (frequently discretionary) are determined. These national actors had little interest in improving the local mayor’s economic and political performance and financial resources, fearful that such success could be converted into political capital (Davis and Alvarado, 2004: 147–151; Mitchell and Beckett, 2008: 93; Müller, 2009: 86). While the democratization of Mexico City enhanced the city’s political autonomy, the price that had to be paid for this was that local administrations became increasingly dependent upon their own revenue-generating capacity, which, as is argued by Weber in another context, makes cities increasingly dependent upon economic activities promising the fast generation of revenue, in particular private real-estate markets (Weber, 2002: 190). Additionally, Mexico City’s urban policies, including infrastructure investments for its global city strategy, are dependent upon debt and credit and, in this regard, on international (mostly U.S.-based) rating agencies like Standard & Poor’s, Moody’s, or Fitch, whose ratings for Mexico City are displayed on the web site of Mexico City’s Ministry of Finance. Local bureaucrats and politicians are well aware of the impact of credit ratings on their own careers and their political projects and constituencies and therefore choose to accept “expert knowledge” with regard to the minimization of risk “predicated on a firm belief in the efficiency and necessity of U.S.-style neoliberal market reforms” (Mitchell and Beckett, 2008: 92). As a consequence of this (94, emphasis added),

Leftist mayors like Obrador and his successor, Marcelo Ebrard [both succeeded Cárdenas], find themselves caught between their political promises of local spending for needed social services and the all-important movement of bond values and ratings operating on a transnational scale. Their desperate desire to maintain strong relations with U.S.-dominated [rating] agencies frequently leads to municipal policies at odds with their stated mandates of poverty alleviation, including new “security measures” intended to drive drug-smugglers and sidewalk merchants out of particular neighborhoods.

This need to “drive drug-smugglers and sidewalk merchants out of particular neighborhoods” for the sake of good credit ratings and urban competitiveness is felt mainly in the area of Mexico City’s historic center. ¹ This area became the focus of an urban development strategy that aims at transforming this part of the city into an ideal location for (national and international) economic investments in the areas of real estate development, heritage tourism, and cultural consumerism (Capron and Mônnet, 2003; Linares, 2008: 180). The core of this strategy lies in the articulation and promotion of “historical heritage and local traditions alongside modern developments to improve the competitiveness of the megacity in the global economy” (García Canclini, 2008: 191). While this also included the partial “privatization” of the city’s central square, the Zócalo, where, following a commercial agreement between the local government and powerful economic actors, since 2003 all of the free open-air concerts and cultural events have been “organized by a private trust representing some of Mexico’s largest economic actors” (Kanai and Ortega Alcázar, 2009: 488). The core of this urban development strategy is the so-called rescue project implemented in 2001, “an entrepreneurial strategy characterized by public-private alliances established for the physical transformation of urban space at the expense of poor sectors of the urban population” (Crossa, 2009: 45).

Within these public-private alliances, Carlos Slim, an important real estate investor in the historic city center, took center stage in promoting redevelopment. In 2001, for example, he announced that he would invest more than 1 billion pesos (then about US$100 million) in the area over the next 10 years and was appointed head of the newly created public-private consulting council for the rescue project (see also Crossa, 2009; Delgadillo-Polanco, 2008). ²

In order to understand why this project contributed to the implementation of the above-mentioned “security” measures in downtown Mexico City, one has to consider that since the mid-1990s, the city has witnessed a “metropolization of crime” (Castillo, 2008: 181). The resulting prominence issues of crime and insecurity achieved in local, national, and also international public debates posed a serious threat to Mexico City’s image as a safe local investment location, in particular with regard to the historic center (Crossa, 2009: 48). The problem of crime and insecurity in this area has become increasingly entangled with the exponential growth of informal street vending, facilitated by clientelistic networks between street vendor organizations and local state authorities (Cross, 1998). This was largely a consequence of the socioeconomic dislocations that resulted from the restructuring of the city’s economic structure, which were accompanied by a dramatic informalization of employment and the impoverishment of large segments of the urban workforce (Nivón Bolán, 2004: 416). The most visible expressions of growing urban poverty and informality, such as informal parking attendants, squeegee cleaners, street children, panhandlers, petty criminality, and street prostitution, were concentrated in the public spaces of downtown Mexico City (PPDUCH, 2000: 36–38). Powerful and violent networks of drug traffickers and illegal arms traders also settled in the downtown, mainly in the Tepito neighborhood (Davis, 2007; Müller, 2009; Piccato, 2007).

Confronted with these developments, which threatened the economic development potential of the historic center, local businessmen increasingly intervened in public debates in order to move the local government toward action. A strategy paper published in 2001 by the influential private business council, the Consejo Coordinador Empresarial (Business Coordination Council—CCE), stated (CCE/CESPEDES, 2001: 10–11):

The historic center is being lumpenized [lumpenizado] and occupied by the excluded, who view its run-down monumentality as an opportunity for cheap housing and protection for informal and delinquent activities. The housing conditions in the historic center and its competitiveness in attracting investment are deteriorating. . . . Informality nourishes and protects illegal, vandalistic conduct and irregular appropriation of public spaces. The law is a dead letter; the state is withdrawing from regulation. Chaotic transport, street commerce, political demonstrations and protest camps, rubbish, fiscal evasions, brothels and prostitution challenge and subdue the state. A culture of illegality is being reproduced and ever more firmly rooted, and so is a new mafia power that draws on old and new corporatist and clientelistic vices.

To combat this “urban decay” the paper called for strategic policy interventions including the development of police and social control strategies for offering security to the “merchants, consumers, tourists, pedestrians, and people working in the historic center” (CCE/CESPEDES, 2001: 41). The CCE’s call to action relied on a “consensus among the dominant actors and spokespersons [of the renewal effort] against popular uses of the center supposedly unworthy of the sacred character awarded by official history” (Capron and Mônnet, 2003: 126).

It was this context that paved the way for the securitization of urban space in the form of the import of zero-tolerance policing to Mexico City. In 2001 a group of local influential businessmen, many of them members of the CCE and among them Carlos Slim, invited New York’s former mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani to Mexico City to develop a proposal for a Mexican version of his crime-control “success story.” Slim offered to cover the costs of this initiative, an estimated US$4.3 million. The local administration praised this initiative and, together with the local police chief (and later mayor) Marcelo Ebrard, offered official support for the plan. In August 2003 Giuliani Partners presented 146 recommendations for a crime-fighting effort in Mexico City. The recommendations were largely inspired by the “broken-windows theory” and its accompanying “quality-of-life” rhetoric and were accepted by the local authorities (Arroyo Juárez, 2007; Davis, 2007; Mitchell and Beckett, 2008; Müller, 2009; 2012: 138–148; Wacquant, 2009: 167–170). However, while the report also included substantial police reform proposals, “only the easy part, a more repressive approach to low-level ‘nuisance offenses,’ was implemented with the introduction of the new ‘Civic Culture Law,’ . . . thus legitimizing a basically repressive approach toward the poorest population” (Uildriks, 2010: 220).

This repressive approach, for instance, is clearly reflected in the fact that the Civic Culture Law raised the number of punishable minor offenses (administrative infractions) from 22 to 43. The offenses were punishable by monetary fines of up to 30 days’ earnings of the minimum wage or by confinement for 6 to 36 hours. Officially meant to improve “the quality of life” and “harmonious cohabitation” of residents, the law overwhelmingly targeted activities related to the informal and marginalized economic survival strategies of the urban poor and other practices that threatened the preservation of neoliberal urban aesthetics. Just a week after the enactment of the law, Ebrard reported that up to 340 franeleros (informal parking guards) were being arrested daily (Noticieros Televisa, August 9, 2004). According to police statistics dating from June 2006, in 2005 a daily average of 231 persons were detained because of violations of the Civic Culture Law. In just the first half of 2006, that number rose to a total of 408.6 arrests, an increase of 76.7 percent. The most affected groups proved to be franeleros and squeegee cleaners, who received more than 8,000 citations for blocking public spaces (La Jornada, June 30, 2006).

As a result of these zero-tolerance policing practices, the human rights commission complained about an increase in police activity and police abuse directed against sex workers, franeleros, and squeegee cleaners (Azaola, 2004; CDHDF, 2004). Despite the fact that local politicians and police chiefs often publicly distanced themselves from zero-tolerance policing and the Giuliani initiative in general, the impact of these tactics and their translation into a “quality-of-life” policing effort by the local authorities is undeniable, as the following passage taken from a 2009 interview with the police chief of the First Region (historic center) and his personal assistant demonstrates:

Many of Giuliani’s recommendations certainly shaped the security program for the historic center. It’s what we have just said about the broken-windows theory. That is to say, that as long as the space is clean and remains recovered, we will impede or prevent delinquency. . . . With regard to the recovery of space, it is the task of the Ministry of Public Security to permit the flow of traffic by means of the Civic Culture Law, which forms part of Giuliani’s recommendations to improve the urban environment, to make people aware that this space is a space for all, that is, it must be a habitable space, and that you have to respect it. . . . The Civic Culture Law is also applied in the case of the obstruction of public space by informal commerce and by franeleros in order to improve the traffic regulation in the area, thereby contributing to more secure spaces and making people feel that they are in a spacious place and can freely circulate, that a delinquent cannot hide behind a car.

While this passage nicely illustrates the spatial logic that makes zero-tolerance policing so attractive for the implementation of urban renewal processes and the accompanying commodification of urban space, a close look at its operation in the neighborhood called La Merced will demonstrate that, far from being a smoothly implemented top-down process, the rescue project is contested, negotiated, and resisted from below.

Urban Renaissance in the La Merced Area

Three aspects make the La Merced neighborhood (Figure 1) particularly interesting for assessing the negotiations involved in the local urban renewal processes. First, the area is of crucial importance for the expansion of the urban renewal project of the Ebrard administration. Under Ebrard, the spatial scope of the renewal effort extended beyond the historically better-off areas in the western parts of the historic center between Alameda Park and the Zócalo, where expensive hotels, offices, fancy boutiques, and jewelry shops can be found, to the more popular and run-down areas in the southeast of Perimeter A. Second, because about 40 percent of the heritage-protected buildings in downtown Mexico City are located in La Merced, it is an attractive site for the development of heritage tourism, a cornerstone of the local global city strategy. Third, the neighborhood is a paradigmatic example of an area where urban renewal and neoliberal globalization confront the presence of powerful networks of the “other”—the “illiberal” globalization processes and economic networks that are often linked to the informal and criminalized economies of the urban poor and that resist the renewal project by competing for the control and use of urban space (Davis, 2008). In La Merced these networks are in particular linked to street vending, human and drug trafficking, and prostitution, especially of minors.

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Figure 1.

The historic center of Mexico City, showing the location of La Merced. Map by Jerónimo Diaz.

La Merced is located southeast of the Zócalo on the former boundary between the Spanish colonial center and the indigenous boroughs. For centuries it has been the commercial and transshipment center of the city. Until 1982 its market—which covered up to 53 blocks—had been the city’s largest wholesale grocery and food market. Street vending and textile manufacturing also characterized the neighborhood (PPDUCH, 2000: 27). The construction of a new central market in the borough of Iztapalapa—located far from La Merced in the eastern part of the city—in 1982, the earthquake of 1985, declining investment by real estate owners, the increasing informal transformation of residential space into warehouses, and recurrent economic crises contributed to the social and economic decline of the area and converted it into the “last space of survival of the most vulnerable groups of urban society (indigenous migrants, homeless people, disabled or mentally ill persons, single mothers, street children, old people)” (Coulomb, 2000: 531). Notwithstanding these developments, and in contrast to the more affluent parts of the historical center, which have suffered massive depopulation since the 1970s, La Merced maintains a residential character. Today its residents belong to the most marginalized and poorest segments of the city’s population, with high percentages of indigenous migrants living in abandoned buildings that lack basic infrastructure (PPDUCH, 2000: 36–38, 42). For centuries the area has also been the main red-light district of Mexico City. Today networks of human trafficking and forced prostitution operate in the area, which according to the Attorney General’s Office is a multibillion-dollar business linked to drug and arms smuggling in Mexico. According to a grassroots sex-workers’ organization, these mafia networks manage about 30 illegal brothels in the area and constitute a permanent source of violence and slavery-like exploitation. In order to keep their business running, these illegal entrepreneurs are said to pay an estimated US$450,000 a month to the police and the municipal authorities (La Jornada, March 23, 2009). They have informally closed—and literally appropriated—public streets in order to convert them into “catwalks” (pasarelas) (La Jornada, May 16, 2008). Although no exact number exists, street prostitution in La Merced has increased significantly since the 1990s, and it is estimated that between 2,000 and 3,500 sex workers offer their services here (Revista Contralínea, 2008).

These interrelated developments contributed to an urban environment that was perceived as a serious obstacle to the urban renewal efforts of the Ebrard administration. In order to transform the area into a more “inviting” neighborhood, in 2007 street vendors were expelled from the area. Street prostitution is still widespread, but sex workers complain about abuse, police harassment, and removal from the upgraded areas of the neighborhood (El Universal, July 12, 2009). Several run-down heritage-protected buildings have been—illegally—demolished ³ by the local authorities in order to construct market halls for former street vendors. In order to “protect” these efforts, a securitization of the neighborhood, inspired by Giuliani report, was initiated: new police stations were opened in the area, and in 2007 the precinct mayor announced his intention “not only to improve the cityscape and police interventions in terms of crime prevention, but also to eradicate prostitution” (Revista Contralínea, 2008).

In May 2008 the local tourism secretary announced a government plan for the area and openly acknowledged the investor-oriented focus of the plan. According to him, the government was pursuing the “rescue” of La Merced in order to “attract private investors” and to “dignify and transform the area into a focal point of investment in tourism, real estate, and commercial development, together with neighbors and formal merchants.” The stated goal was to provide conditions in which the neighborhood’s “buildings and churches that date back to the sixteenth to the nineteenth century can be admired once again” and to “incorporate La Merced into the city in a more visible, productive and dignified way, making it an enjoyable place.” In order to pursue this goal, the government was to reclaim public space and private property being used as warehouses, restructure the Merced market, eradicate prostitution and street vending, combat the drug trade, and reconstruct community ties in the area (La Jornada, May 16, 2008).

In 2008, the restructuring of the built environment of the eastern part of Perimeter A was initiated: Urban infrastructure was renewed, public spaces redesigned, pavements renewed, rubbish bins and CCTV cameras installed, and facades repainted. A central concern of this transformation of urban space was the promotion of heritage tourism. The area is part of a pedestrian “cultural corridor” that links many historic sites in the city. In interviews, local authorities stated that they were preparing a tourist guide and tourist signposting systems for the area in the hope that federal and private investment to rehabilitate real estate would follow and that new cafés, restaurants, and heritage-tourism-related services would soon begin to operate in the area. However, according to an employee of the tourism agency, while the newly created Historic Center Authority would like to begin immediately with the tourism promotion, his office vehemently opposed this plan and insisted that it was “still necessary clean up the area before you can send a tourist there.” According to him, the continued presence of street prostitution, homeless people, and criminal activities were “factors that constrain tourism” and had to be removed first. Consequently, the local tourism office would “insist on limiting the effort to the touristy parts of Perimeter A and leave the other areas for a second stage” (interview, June 2009). To understand the persistence of these “obstacles” to urban renewal, we have to take an even closer look at the implementation of the renewal effort at the street level.

The Difficult Expansion of Urban Renewal

Examination of the implementation of urban renewal in La Merced makes it clear that these processes are challenged, contested, and mediated by a number of factors, among which the most important seem to be the presence of illegal actors and the existence of informal structures and practices of negotiation linking these local actors with state authorities (see also Crossa, 2009). The government officials interviewed for this article were well aware of the fragile and contested nature of the project and the resulting negotiations over urban space in the neighborhood. For instance, the head of the real estate development department of the Historic Center Trust explained that construction work in the vicinity of the catwalks and illegal brothels has not been easy: “We had to make huge efforts to renew the streets, materials and tools were frequently stolen, construction workers were knocked down and engineers assaulted” (interview, May 2009). Aware of its powerful competitors, the promoters of urban renewal seek to confront their illegal rivals in terms of a territorial and property-oriented logic, aiming at the physical displacement of criminality and the expansion of a “frontier of legality” and frequently leading to what the interviewee called the “cockroach effect”:

We started with these public works to make these persons aware that legality is approaching. We installed street lighting. These are signs and signals of what is developing here and of what [activities] will not be able to develop here any longer and what has to move to some other place. You will tell me: “Well, they will move to the other side of Circunvalación [a highway dividing Perimeters A and B and the Cuauhtémoc and Venustiano Carranza boroughs] and that there are more prostitutes in the Venustiano Carranza borough and that this is the cockroach effect.” Well, that’s right. . . . It is a very hard, a very difficult, reality. We attacked the Hotel Universo [confiscated in March 2009]. This is where, I do not say that this is the only place, but it is a very large space where terrible networks, terrible persons operated. We try to act against them, demonstrating our firm commitment. These initiatives are meant to make them understand that they either change business or go somewhere else.

Beyond the official “law and order” rhetoric, the policing-related underpinning of the local renewal effort is most of all an act of symbolic communication and negotiation between the local authorities and illegal actors. It is not about law enforcement proper; rather, it is a symbolic show of force that aims at intimidating illegal competitors for the use of urban space and pressuring them “to change their business or go somewhere else.” In this regard, it is no surprise that a sex workers’ rights organization has criticized the activities of the local authorities as mere symbolic interventions (La Jornada, March 28, 2009). Such processes contribute to an apparent spatial selectivity of the urban renewal effort reflecting the informal power of illegal actors to challenge the official vision of the future of the neighborhood. The catwalks continue to exist next to renewed streets and rehabilitated buildings, as do most of the illegal brothels. Moreover, historically important streets on the southern edge of La Merced, such as parts of Roldán Street and Santo Tomás Street, have been left out of the renewal process. In the mental map of local residents, however, these are the most unsafe areas of the neighborhood, “where you know that it is very dangerous for everybody to go there and look, they did not renew, they did not touch these streets, only a small part. I did not understand why they left out all the rest. . . . Those areas where the brothels and drugs are most strongly present have not been touched” (interview with local resident, May 2009).

In the local urban renewal process, these negotiations involve not only illegal actors but members of the neighborhood’s informal economy. According to official discourse, the “liberation” of the streets of Perimeter A from street vending has been an exemplary success. It is represented as the outcome of a negotiated solution accepted by 15,000 vendors, who were to be relocated in market halls. Yet street vendors working in the neighborhood have a different opinion on this subject. In their eyes, the physical relocation benefited only their leaders and, to a lesser degree, the most affluent vendors, who were relocated in well-located market halls. In interviews they complained that the government still tolerates leaders’ imposing their own system of fees for occupying space and for related “services” in the market halls (interview, July 2009):

When López Obrador removed us from the streets he offered us economic help, supposedly with the idea of calming us down. . . . It was a bit more than 5,000 pesos each, split into three payments, each check around 2,000 pesos. But [name of the leader] kept 600 pesos of each check for herself of all the thousands and thousands of street vendors. If you refused to give her the money, she would take away your work space. So what do you do? The government knew of all of this. . . . And if you are a merchant and the market hall does not pay off for you, finally you will abandon it and look for another place, and they [the leaders] will stay with the market halls, although these spaces have been created for us. These spaces are a big lie that the government used to get us off the streets. We are the most affected because we do not have a space to work if we do not have the money to pay the fees the leaders charge us.

In an informal conversation, a member of the agency in charge of the negotiations, the Sub-Secretariat for Precinct Programs and the Restructuring of Public Space, confirmed the existence of these practices: “The market halls have been handed over to the leaders. Nothing else was possible, since we could not negotiate with and treat individually tens of thousands of street vendors.” As a result, he went on to explain, “we cannot do anything about it when leaders charge vendors money in the halls, but we tell street vendors that the leaders have no right to do that and that they should make a formal complaint at the public ministry” (interview, July 2009). To put it in other terms, in order to achieve its goal of removing the “undesired” presence of informal economic activities from the streets of La Merced and other parts of downtown Mexico City, the local administration tolerated the continuation of frequently highly exploitative and coercive leader–street-vendor relations in exchange for the leaders’ commitment to get their people “off the streets.”

Street vendors unwilling to do so frequently decide to sell their goods as so-called toreros, traveling vendors equipped only with small blankets or plastic bags that can be picked up and hidden when the police approach. However, according to street vendors, toreo is a very exhausting, precarious, and risky activity. As one torero explained, the police patrol sometimes passes by every 15 minutes. This not only increases the possibility of being arrested but also threatens to make street vending impossible (interview, May 2009). Moreover, as many street vendors stated in interviews, even after the negotiated removal of the street vendors, local leaders maintained control over “their” streets and continued to charge traveling vendors daily fees. The member of the Sub-Secretariat introduced above openly admitted that “although leaders and government struck a political agreement, leaders still give the opportunity for toreo, and many police and municipal inspectors of public space are still willing to turn a blind eye to the toreros and claim their bribes.” In fact—and this is another manifestation of the negotiations that shape the selectivity of urban renewal—in some parts of Perimeter A toreo is “tolerated” by the police. As the following passage taken from an interview with a street vendor indicates, local police officers not only frequently abuse their authority but also are more than willing to negotiate over legal enforcement measures and the presence of toreros on the streets of the neighborhood in exchange for monetary incentives (interview, May 2009):

For example, I put a blanket on the pavement, I lay out some blouses and I watch out, I mean, I feel I can never fall asleep. I always look from where they [the policemen] might arrive: “Yes, feel free to have a look, mister, yes, take a look.” You respond and you watch out again; you cannot be distracted because suddenly they arrive to get you, because they do. . . . The day they caught me, they pulled me out of a shop, although they are not allowed to trespass in a private establishment. I mean, the government violates the law as it pleases. . . . They got me into a police car. . . . The only thing I told him was “You know what? Don’t touch me.” Because they take you or your merchandise and steal it. I said to him, “No, don’t touch me, you’ve already won.” I said to him, “I’ll get in the car myself,” and I picked up my merchandise and got in the car myself, because the people who resist are torn or even beaten, like animals. And they take you to the civil judiciary. This time I managed to get off at the car, I mean, I made a deal with them because it was Sunday. It’s said that Sunday’s judge is very bitchy, so I said to them, “Don’t be mean, let me get off.” I told him, “Look, it’s late.” It was six o’clock. “When will they get me on the list?” Because you have to wait for your turn, one by one they write down your name, what you sell, where you sell, where they caught you, all this, and your entrance hour is the time you are registered, the 24 hours count from that time onward in case you do not pay the fine. If you pay the fine it also depends on the judge. They say that some judges charge you less: “What do you sell?” “I just sell hair clips, I earn very little.” “How much?” “Only 50 pesos a day.” So your fine will be less, let’s say, 100 pesos. Some judges are very good people. If you manage to arrange such an amount, you get out, but if they charge you 500, you won’t. Who can pay 500 pesos if what you have in your pocket is hardly enough to cover your expenses? . . .

And how was the deal that day? Well, I paid them 100 pesos and they let me go.

As this example clearly demonstrates, another important factor, which represents an additional obstacle for a sustainable “breakthrough” of the local urban renewal effort, stems directly from the institution that should be expected to serve as the ultimate guarantor of its success: the police. Far from being a simple instrument in the hands of the local government, the local police force has historically been characterized by a high degree of autonomy (Martínez de Murguía, 1999; Müller, 2012). This autonomy facilitated the emergence of an extralegal culture inside the local police (Azaola, 2006), which found its expression in the existence of corruption networks that pervade the entire police apparatus (Davis, 2006) and that affect and frequently overdetermine the everyday practices of the local forces and the entire apparatus of the administration of justice. As a former member of the local police apparatus explained in an interview, practically everyone who comes into conflict with the law in Mexico City can negotiate—mostly through bribery—the outcome of this conflict. In his words, “The law does not cost 10 pesos, but for just 100 you can buy your liberty” (interview, June 2007). As long as these structures persist inside the local police apparatus, the contribution of the local police force to the success of the renewal efforts at the local and street level can be expected to be “a matter of negotiation” whose result cannot be determined beforehand.

Postscript 2012

Almost three years have passed since we conducted the fieldwork for this article. Since then some things have changed in La Merced but others have remained the same. The pedestrian “cultural corridor” has been completed, more facades have been embellished, streets have been repaved, and a few historical buildings have been renovated. The run-down popular Roldán market hall, which had a catwalk next to it, has been renovated and remodeled, and the catwalk has been removed. In the market hall a gallery and a multipurpose room opened their doors to a new, “external” public. However, the local renewal effort has not (yet) been accompanied by large private investments in the area as in other areas of the city center. New cafes, restaurants, and heritage-tourism-related services have not been established in the area. Street prostitution and toreo are still tolerated, which means that the local authorities continue to be willing to turn a blind eye to them in exchange for bribes. Government institutions have not yet reached a consensus on the feasibility of promoting La Merced as a tourist attraction. Today the Historic Center Authority is promoting several sites of interest in La Merced on its web site, but the local tourism office has not included La Merced in its guides and maps. The major socio-spatial impact for the still mostly low-income residents—whose numbers are in decline—is probably the construction of a Metrobus line through the neighborhood. In our view, this scenario demonstrates the difficulty and complexity of urban renewal and its corresponding securitization of urban space in neighborhoods such as La Merced, where illegal and informal economic and political networks compete and negotiate over the production, control, and use of urban space and its neoliberal “upgrading.”