It has taken years for Petra Cruz and her neighbors to make their mountainside sketch of concrete houses and pot-holed streets into a comfortable corner of the Mexican capital. In the mid-1980s, pushed by high rents and crowded conditions from other areas of Mexico City, Petra Cruz and the others either bought or illegally squatted on lots on the slopes of the city's southern fringe, tacking small houses to the rocky, volcanic earth. Still, after all this time, most houses here have no sewage service.
Tap water runs only one or two days a month, and it is often filthy when it comes.
Gang graffiti adorn neighborhood walls, evidence of the crime that always threatens. The system under the PRI wasn't great, Petra Cruz and her neighbors say, but at least it was understood. As Cardenas and other opposition politicians take office in an increasingly pluralistic Mexico, they face the challenge of making changes fast enough and deep enough to please a populace whose long experience with the old political system left them impatient and skeptical. Cardenas, who many Mexicans believe lost the 1988 presidential election to former President Carlos Salinas de Gortari because of widespread fraud, is assumed by many to have his eyes on the presidency three years from now. But first, he must make success as mayor of Mexico City.