Guadalajara’s Mayor Mounts a Moral Crusade

GUADALAJARA — When a new set of ordinances takes effect here in Mexico’s second-largest city in coming weeks, soccer fans who swear in the stadium may be subject to arrest, fines and detention. So may players who make obscene gestures on the field, adults who curse on street corners and even a 12-year-old who shouts too loudly.

And if two people of the same sex kiss in public after the ordinances become law, they may be fined and jailed for violating new regulations governing “abnormal sexual behavior.”

In fact, under the 100 articles contained in the new ordinances, which local critics have dubbed the “Manual of Living According to Mayor Cesar Coll Carabias,” any acts “that cause offense to one or more people” will be illegal and subject to prosecution.

In pushing the new ordinances through the City Council during the closing days of 1996, Guadalajara’s Coll--who had already barred city employees from wearing miniskirts to work--called them an attempt to reinforce human dignity and reduce police corruption in this traditionally conservative city. The ban on “abnormal” public sexual conduct, Coll insisted, is merely an attempt to reinforce the city’s morally upright image.

In the opening weeks of a politically charged year for Mexico, every move that Guadalajara’s government makes has national implications.

Coll represents the most conservative, pro-Roman-Catholic faction of the National Action Party, or PAN, the country’s largest opposition group. Independent opinion polls show the PAN running well ahead of Mexico’s long-ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, in the run-up to Mexico City’s mayoral election--scheduled for July 6, and the first such vote ever--as well as in federal races that will replace the entire lower house of Congress the same day.

Major victories could boost the PAN’s chances of winning the presidency in the year 2000 for the first time. Although Coll is decidedly more conservative than most PAN politicians, his views represent an important faction of the party. And in many ways, analysts say, Guadalajara stands as one model of PAN governance: Coll’s efforts to reduce corruption and streamline government--cutting red tape for private business, for instance--have won high marks from his supporters and his critics, but his morality policies have provided the opposition with potential campaign ammunition.

Privately, officials in the PRI--which has long separated the church from politics--already are attacking Coll’s government as dangerously conservative, pointing to the new ordinances as evidence of a neo-fascist, evangelical current in the PAN that could curtail personal freedoms in the nation’s capital if the PAN wins the mayoral election there.

It is a charge reminiscent of a smear campaign against Coll when he was running for office two years ago: Anonymous posters and brochures carried pictures of him at campaign rallies with swastikas superimposed on the photographs. His victory brought the first opposition government to a city that had been ruled by the PRI since 1929.

During an interview last week at Guadalajara’s historic City Hall--the Catholic Church’s state headquarters during Spanish colonial rule--Coll conceded that his new ordinances may be used by the PRI as campaign fodder nationwide during the months ahead.

But he insisted that some of his official acts have been deliberately and deeply misunderstood. At the core of the new ordinances, he said, is an attempt not only to “promote human dignity” but also to define and codify public infractions and punishments to prevent police shakedowns.

“Before, police would arrest a drunkard on the street, take his money and let him out on the street again,” Coll said. “Then the police would catch him again, and since he didn’t have any money, maybe they took his watch. Now, a drunkard can only be arrested if someone files a formal complaint.”

The “abnormal sex” ordinance is among the most controversial of the new measures. Critics view it as an assault on Guadalajara’s gay population and say it and other provisions are part of an attempt to legislate morality.

Specifically, the ordinance bans “public practices that imply the development of an abnormal sex life.” A separate ordinance makes it illegal “to conduct sexual relations or obscene exhibitionist acts in streets, public places or vacant land.”

The vague wording has raised fears that the measure could be used selectively against homosexuals, who have been singled out for police abuses in the past. But Coll said that is not the intent of the law and insisted he is not trying to legislate people’s behavior.

“Regarding the sexual acts, there are many critics,” Coll said. “But you tell me, in what country is it permitted to conduct sexual acts in public places or on public town squares? The act of making love between a man and a woman, two women or two men, here in front of us on that bridge, well, it’s illegal. . . . If they want to do it in their homes or in a hotel, I don’t care.”

Even more misunderstood, Coll insisted, are the anti-swearing measures, one of which is aimed not at the public but at professional athletes, actors and other performers.

“How can you prohibit swear words in a football stadium? . . . It doesn’t say that in the regulations,” he said. “It says that a boxer cannot cuss at the audience during a match. You paid for your ticket; there’s no reason for the athlete--or singer or whoever performs--to insult you.

“If a soccer player fails to make a goal, and the audience starts razzing him, well, they can make their noises, but the player doesn’t have the right to make obscene gestures and shout at the audience.”

But a separate, more general ordinance prohibiting “obscene or insulting acts that offend the dignity of one or more people” could be construed as a ban on public swearing.

On the larger question of what role the Catholic Church played in formulating the new legislation, Coll said: “Absolutely none.

“From the start, the PAN has based itself on Christian doctrine,” the mayor said, explaining the origins and philosophy of his 58-year-old party. “We don’t avoid them, we aren’t ashamed of them, and we don’t hide them.”

Yes, his is a rightist, conservative party, he added, “but we define ourselves as a humanistic party, a democratic party that respects the dignity of a human being. That’s why we say: ‘If you want to make love to another man, do it in your house. In the street or in the park, no.’ ”

Academics and analysts in Guadalajara say Coll didn’t need the church to help him create or promote the new ordinances because he is even more conservative than the church.

“It’s curious, but the laws concerning not swearing at soccer stadiums and not wearing miniskirts seem to be some absurd and personal wish of Mr. Coll. This attitude no longer exists in the church. Priests don’t worry about these issues,” said Jesus Gomez Fregoso, a professor at the Center for Religion and Society at the University of Guadalajara. “The Catholic Church worries about more profound issues than that.”

Jorge Zepeda, editor of one of the city’s largest dailies, Siglo 21, agreed that the new laws appear to be part of a personal agenda of the mayor and his wife, Maribel Alfeiran de Coll, an official in the city’s child welfare department. Maribel Coll has openly expressed conservative ideals that Zepeda said echo those of America’s “moral majority.”

Zepeda stressed that despite Guadalajara’s traditional conservatism, the city actually is “a sharp study in contrasts,” home to his irreverent paper, ribald rock bands with a national following and liberal poets and authors.

Still, most residents favor the PAN over the PRI, according to a poll commissioned by Siglo 21 and conducted earlier this month by Guadalajara University’s independent Center for Opinion Studies: Those who said they would vote for the PAN amounted to 42.7%, compared with 34.3% for the PRI.

Zepeda said many of the new ordinances are innocuous. “Some of the new regulations are very straightforward and very positive,” he said. “No one takes issue with those.”

For example, the ordinances outlaw excessive noise and disorder, graffiti on public buildings and monuments, allowing pets to attack people on the street, consuming narcotics in public, throwing dead animals into public places, damaging or cutting down trees on public land and abusing or attacking children, the elderly or the disabled on public sidewalks.

Other provisions, such as the ban on “abnormal” sexual conduct, are so ambiguous that even Coll conceded they may invite the corruption that he said he seeks to prevent.

Yet analysts agree that Coll’s greatest achievement during the former businessman’s term has been to sharply reduce the level of government corruption; extortion by city officials, they say, is largely an evil of past PRI governments.

And some agree with Coll’s assessment that Guadalajara is not necessarily an apt model for Mexico City. “It’s very different,” he said. “The population of Guadalajara has always been more conservative than Mexico City.”

Whether religious conservatism becomes an issue in Mexico City, Gomez said, “depends upon who within the PAN would govern. In Guadalajara, it’s a Coll issue. I don’t think that the PAN in general in Guadalajara shares his views.

“If the PAN-istas who would govern Mexico City are more normal than Coll, there will be no problem.”