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One thing is for the CIA to organize a trip through the Sierra of Chihuahua or for a New York court to accuse a governor of drug trafficking, but for the US space agency to dare to say that the Angel of Independence is sinking like a clay doll is an intolerable attack on sovereignty. The information from a new NASA satellite, which confirms the damage caused by the quicksands that underpin Mexico City, has been the eccentric culmination of weeks where pressure from the United States has risen almost to suffocation.
The images from the new satellite, designed to fly over the Earth day and night, rain or shine, capture even the most subtle movements, without clouds or trees disturbing the great space eye. Well, its conclusion is not only that the capital is sinking, something already known and proven, but that it is doing so at an increasing speed. In the most critical areas, such as the airport area, the collapse exceeds two centimeters per month. That is, by the end of the year the airplane runway will have a bite the size of a pencil.
José Emilio Pacheco called the city the “monster of successive ruins,” an amorphous and chaotic animal with a tendency to devour itself. Jorge Ibargüengoitia called it the diabetic city, because of its uncontrolled growth without time to process so much binge. Both, surely the most surgical chroniclers of the city, also lived through the urban explosion of the former Federal District: in just three decades, from the fifties to the eighties, the population went from 3 to 14 million.
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Thus was also born the not at all innocent name of “urban sprawl,” a gigantic blot squeezed from the center to the peripheries, wiping out soil, water, and green areas. That is why the monster sinks. Because it is built on an aquifer and ancient lakes, and the drying of that water since colonial times, to feed the weight of a city of more than 20 million souls, is pushing the ground we walk on downward.
To respond to the moves of the CIA and the State Department, Mexico has put into motion the entire institutional machinery, from the Government to the Prosecutor’s Office. To confront NASA, my colleague Sara González turned to scientists from UNAM. Their thesis: the city is sinking, like many others, and moreover it is not sinking as fast as the US satellites say. “Los Angeles is sinking, the San Joaquin Valley is sinking, the Santa Clara Valley is sinking, it is not an exclusive problem of Mexico City. It is more dramatic here, but it is a relatively slow phenomenon. It is not that NASA is now reporting that there was a drastic change.”
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