Despite switch from Luz y Fuerza to CFE, Mexico City's lights are flickering
By Elisabeth Malkin
The New York Times
The lights have been going out all over Mexico City. Food rots in tepid refrigerators. Computer screens pop and fizzle out.
When President Felipe Calderón dissolved the capital’s money-losing electric company and fired 44,000 workers two weeks ago, he promised efficient, modern service. But across the city and its vast suburbs, the power has gone out for a day or more in neighborhood after neighborhood.
In some cases, switches appear to have been deliberately turned off — evidence, officials say, that a few of the fired workers have taken matters into their own hands.
“This is a deliberate action to bother and affect consumers,” said Estefano Conde, a spokesman for the Federal Electricity Commission, the state-owned company that has taken over the service. “They want to generate pressure, to give the idea that we can’t handle it.”
Whether or not they are driven by sabotage, if the cuts persist, they could turn public opinion against Calderón’s agenda. He won broad approval for acting against the powerful electricity workers’ union, and many Mexicans now want him to move against other entrenched interests in business and labor that experts say stifle the nation’s economic growth.
First, though, he must prove that he can deliver on his promise to get the electricity company working. The government has argued it had no choice but to shut the company: it was spending twice what it earned in revenues, costing the government more than $3 billion a year in operating losses while outraging consumers with dismal service.
So far, consumers have seen little improvement. The skeleton crew of 3,500 people operating the company can barely cope with the usual problems in the ancient network, let alone sabotage.
The disbanded company, Luz y Fuerza del Centro, provided power to about 25 million people in Mexico City and surrounding states. The Federal Electricity Commission, or CFE, served the rest of the country, about 75 million customers, and has now become a national monopoly.
Critics say the decision was really aimed at crushing the company’s powerful union, the Mexican Electricity Workers’ Union, one of the country’s most combative.
