There is a big question about whether Mexico City Mayor Miguel Ángel Mancera will measure up to expectations and achieve greatness.
Regardless of what he says, one can see in his eyes that what he really wants is just to become the president of Mexico.
I’ve always said that those who want to be presidents are made of a special fiber.
Because anyone can have ambitions. We may like power very much, with its advantages and that rewarding feeling when one has it. However, can you imagine all you need to do to get all the power in our country?
In that sense, the environmental contingency and the crisis that is still ongoing regarding the contamination problems of the megalopolis, have served to demonstrate what is the city’s actual capacity to formulate solutions and confront such events.
Especially when you have a federal government that is apparently very comfortable with this mayor. Because the relationship between President Enrique Peña Nieto and Mancera – considering that former President Felipe Calderón almost never saw eye-to-eye with former Mexico City Mayor Marcelo Ebrard — seems to be an uninterrupted honeymoon that has lasted all these years, in the name of institutions.
But the moment of truth for our country, a place that has the best laws but the worst implementation of them, came when the battle against the environmental contingency proved once again that we can achieve the best designs on paper but that on practice we commit the greatest errors.
Without a doubt, it was impressive when Mancera explained that he had declared the environmental contingency because he had access to indicators that allowed him to know when the air became our greatest enemy or the murderer who would kill us like the gas they used in concentration camps.
And in that context, the question is clear: What is everybody else doing about it? Because, ultimately, not being the capital and not being in the center of the country has many disadvantages, but also some advantages. One of them is being able to looking away when there are such problems.
That being so, it is necessary for the federal government to implement vehicle verification centers throughout the country.
And we have to understand that one thing is the territorial division and the federal pact, and another thing altogether is articulating environmental policies to identify where and how to counteract the deterioration of the air inside a planet that we can’t seem to stop annihilating.
