Nutty? Mexico’s noisy passion for population relocation
Today, Mexican daily El Universal reports on the Mexican government’s ambitious plans to relocate populations that are vulnerable to hurricanes, flooding and other natural disasters. 188 of the country’s approximately 2500 municipalities (analogous to American counties) have been identified as risk-prone. By next year, a complete list will be ready, and gradual relocations will begin. The idea is to move populations away from coasts and river banks, and toward urban areas.
The federal government’s plan mirrors the concept behind the state of Chiapas’s own development program, Rural Cities, announced with great fanfare last year, and allegedly launched a few months ago. The program is supposed to encourage dispersed populations in the state to move to urban centers, newly created by the government, where service provision will be easier due to population concentration. The program is putting a particular emphasis on populations living on or near the Grijalva river, which flooded last year and left hundreds of chiapanecans living in refugee camps.
Both the state and federal government should be applauded for focusing on marginal populations living in risky areas. But they should also be admonished for continuing to talk up grandiose plans without even minimal attention to the details of how they will be implemented. Relocation of families is, in any country, a dicey prospect which, to be successful, implies a series of complex social and economic interventions which few governments are capable of bringing to fruition.
In Mexico, the proof of the government’s limited capacity to deal with relocation is already manifest, even before any new programs are undertaken: the director of Rural Cities in Chiapas has acknowledged that the government is inexcusably tardy in providing housing to those displaced last year in Ostuacán, in spite of the fact that serving this community is supposed to be the model for the government’s relocation strategy. In Baja California Sur, hundreds of families have been waiting almost two years to be relocated after their homes were destroyed by Hurricane John.
If the government cannot deal with a few hundred families that are already displaced and desperate for relocation, how does it plan to relocate thousands of families in hundreds of municipalities? It is not immediately clear what is holding up the relocation efforts in BCS and Chiapas: probably a mix of corruption, incompetence, and rejection on the part of local communities of the terms on which the government wants to buy land for relocation. Whatever the reason, a frank conversation about how to actually implement a relocation, and at least one successful case of relocation might seem like relevant prerequisites for undertaking a major relocation program.
But, so far, the Mexican government’s relocation programs look set to follow an old pattern in Mexico: politicians talk a lot about the right things, but nobody follows through on implementing them. Mexicans have an expression that describes this state of affairs: “a lot of noise, few nuts.”  It’s not too late to start demanding more nuts to go with all the noise emanating from on high.
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