http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=30074

MEXICO:
Activists Sceptical About New Anti-Poverty Programme
Diego Cevallos

MEXICO CITY, Aug 30 (IPS) - For Mexico's poorest 50 municipalities, which are overwhelmingly home to indigenous people, the battery of social programmes implemented in the past 30 years have meant little to nothing.

The government of Vicente Fox pledged Tuesday that this would change - a promise that ran up, however, against scepticism on the part of activists who work on behalf of Mexico's indigenous people.

Fox and the governors of the states where the most impoverished municipalities are located announced in an official ceremony Tuesday that they had joined together in a common front to improve the living conditions of the around 600,000 people living in those districts, most of which are located in mountainous areas in southeastern Mexico.

The comprehensive new programme will include aid in education, health, employment, nutrition, road construction, piped water and electricity.

In the 50 municipalities in question, 92.4 percent of the population is indigenous. Half of the local residents have no income at all, and the other half have incomes of less than 100 dollars a month.

Although social assistance programmes have been in effect in those areas since the 1970s, "far from improving the situation, things are much worse now, because the strategies applied were erroneously focused, politicised, corruption-ridden and based on patronage," said Abel Barrera, director of the Tlachinollan human rights group.

Tlachinollan is active in the mountains of the state of Guerrero, where Mexico's poorest municipality, Metlatónoc, is located.

In a telephone interview from Guerrero, Barrera told IPS that like the earlier programmes, the new one "was designed without consulting indigenous people or taking into account their cultures, and is based on welfare-type schemes that provide assistance on an individual basis, and sometimes in exchange for political support."

"These are programmes launched for the media, to impress the United Nations. But we have already seen that they don't really work," he added.

In the municipality of Metlatónoc - which is next to Coicoyán de las Flores, the second-poorest district - more than 70 percent of the population is illiterate, similar to the proportion of people who are illiterate in the other 49 municipalities.

In these areas, half of the population speaks only indigenous languages.

The announcement of the new social programme came shortly after U.N. agencies and government reports pointed to a drop in poverty in Mexico, although the studies did underline that in some areas, especially indigenous districts, the poverty rate did not decline.

A report on human development in Mexico released by the local office of the U.N. Development Programme in July states that the country's indigenous municipalities have development levels similar to those found in the poorest nations of Africa.

According to official statistics, 75 percent of the indigenous population has not completed primary school - twice the national proportion - and more than 30 percent is illiterate - three times the national rate.

The large majority of Mexico's indigenous people, who number around 10 million out of a total population of 104 million, live below the poverty line.

The conditions in the poorest indigenous districts "drive down Mexico's poverty and human development rates, but that is going to change, even if it takes some time," said Xóchitl Gálvez, the head of the governmental National Commission for the Development of Indigenous Peoples.

In the view of the Tlachinollan human rights group, in the government's relations with impoverished indigenous people, "everything is reduced today to programmes designed from the centre, that do not take into consideration the demands and proposals of indigenous peoples."

"What makes us indignant is that the fight against poverty has been reduced to the distribution of chemical fertilisers, shovels and hoes, to food aid and charity payments, which have only made indigenous people more dependent on the charitable hand of the government of the moment," the group said in a public statement.

This "undermines ties within the communities because the support is delivered on an individual basis, fuelling internal conflicts and fragmenting community organisation," it added.

But the Fox administration says the aid will provide the boost needed for impoverished indigenous people to finally pull out of poverty.

Since 2001, the government has been providing support to the poorest parts of the country through 52 different social programmes. But so far, their impact has been marginal. For that reason, the strategy now is to integrate all of the programmes under one umbrella, and bring together the state and municipal governments in their administration, said Gálvez.

The proportion of people living in extreme poverty in Mexico dropped from 16.2 to 11.7 percent of the population between 1992 and 2004, while the overall poverty level fell from 44.2 to 37 percent of the population in the same period, according to the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC).

In Latin America, Chile has already met the objective of halving the proportion of people living in extreme poverty - one of the eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) adopted by the international community at the U.N. General Assembly in New York in 2000.

Brazil, Ecuador, Mexico, Panama and Uruguay are also in a position to do so by the 2015 deadline, according to ECLAC.

The statistics provided by the Mexican government indicate that extreme poverty, which according to the local methodology includes people with incomes of 52 dollars a month in rural areas and 70 dollars in urban areas, dropped from 20.3 percent in 2002 to 17.3 percent in 2004.

The Fox administration attributes the reduction in extreme poverty to the country's economic stability as well as Opportunities, a social assistance programme that provides funds and nutritional and health aid to 25 million poor people at an overall cost of 9.5 million dollars a day. (END/2005)