UN EIGHT MILLENNIUM GOALS, A FLAG OVER ’RURAL CITY’ IN CHIAPAS

KYRA NUNEZ, INTERNATIONAL JOURNALIST BASED IN GENEVA
PHOTOS ERICK BECERRA

Nuevo Juan del Grijalva is the world’s first ever Rural City and it is sustainable throughout its 80 hectares of agricultural land in southern Chiapas, Mexico. It was conceived on the foundations of the eight Millennium goals adopted by the United Nations in 2000: eradication of poverty and hunger; access to education; gender equality; environmental sustainability; reduction of child mortality; improved maternal health; to fight HIV and other illnesses due to exclusion; and universal access to connectivity by 2015 which are enshrined in the State’s Constitution!

A natural hazard prompted a drama. The inhabitants of the Rural City were homeless as a result of a horrible landslide that took away family, friends and belongings in early November 2007. The hundreds of families from various places who were victimized by intense fl ooding were put in temporary shelters. Then Juan Sabines Guerrero’s government came with the idea of building from zero a city under the MDGs plus promoting dignified societies and governability.

In luxurious subtropical Chiapas, after crossing hills and dams and with the view of the majestic river Grijalva, one arrives at Nuevo Juan del Grijalva, a fantastic urban landscape designed by Chiapas Autonomous University supported by other Mexican institutes. It is here that “those eight objectives for development are made out with bricks, trees and water whereas just a couple of months ago they only existed on paper” expressed Magdy Martinez Soliman, United Nations Coordinator in Mexico during a recent visit to the place where children at the school center sang porras and waved fl ags from UN Member States.

After work and out from school, women and children walk in security in the streets illuminated with 228 solar energy lamps; visitors to Candelaria’s new home understand why she is so pleased with her new life: 60sqm of living space and a patio of 240sqm where one can keep chicken or pigs, and grow vegetables or fruits, the idea has been food self-sufficiency. All 410 houses were built with thermal material appropriate for the climate, with ecological stoves and strict child safety rules.

In the highly innovative tomato producing plant, women are impressive in their skills at growing tomatoes saladettes while others proudly announce that their packing cooperative is well into “good business”. Gender equality means work and salary. Men are busy at the dairy farm (Cheese, no words, runs its name) and at the cacao paste factory for chocolate bars. These are the men who a few months ago produced 1.5 million adobe bricks used to build their new homes!

Today, access to education is 100%, whereas before it was zero. Same goes for public health services at the modern Centro de Salud where one envisions as real the possibility for reducing child and maternal mortality. Of course, to create such a dream one has to give concessions: zero tolerance for alcohol, homes can’t be sold before twenty-five years, no place for unplanned immigration...

As a native of Chiapas I have wondered so often what would it take to assist and include rural and indigenous peoples into the society I come from; the one with running water, electricity, drainage system, with brick houses and with the choice of attending a school, selecting a profession, belonging to any political party, the church of the family preference or being treated in a hospital from various ailments. For long, the right answer was elusive. More than once I heard the typical “these people are poor, sick and excluded because they want to live that way”.

The newness of the concept of Rural City strikes a chord in my heart. Not that poverty is suddenly replaced with progress; Chiapas remains full with contradictions plus around thirty thousand dispersed communities – some holding no more than ten families. Nuevo Juan del Grijalva is amazing because nowhere else in the world have I seen so close the possibility of changing people’s life for the better; almost from one day to the next, inhabitants from eleven secluded rural communities passed from being at the bottom of exclusion to the top rank of inclusion. Right now they receive work and earn six times more than the daily salary fixed by the UN as a decent one. Here, gender equality is the driving force. Children receive first class attention. The aim is to push Chiapas to better ranking in the Development Index with a good quality of life, peace and social security, says Ms. Blanca Ruth Esponda, Head of the Government’s Cabinet. Nuevo Juan del Grijalva boasts of having reached already in a couple of months at least five of the eight MDGs. The cherry on the cake? It is a 100% environmentally friendly city and hosts a public transport station, hostel, library, cinema, and churches of various creeds plus a community hall.

The seven more rural cities being constructed as you read this article – Tecpatan, Ixhuatan, Jaltenango, Copainala, Berriozabal, Ostuacan and Mezcalapa – cost some 77 million US dollars each and have all answered another UN call: private sources’ participation in development programmes. Private companies and foundations joined hands and money with the official institutions Conavi, Seguro Popular and Oportunidades: banks such as Bancomer, and Azteca; the foundations Teletón, Carso, Gonzalo Rio Arrote; Telmex service televisions, cellular telephones and internet lines, other companies paid for drainage and toilets; CEBECH covers schooling from kindergarten to high school. Yes, of course, some of these are the tycoons of the cement and telecommunication or from the private health and education sectors but, why not? Critics say that “rural cities” break the link between campesinos and the land in order to convert Chiapas into a paradise for foreign investment. Criticism is and will always be there especially when a new phenomenon takes place. Nuevo Juan del Grijalva is a good test for a model according to United Nations standards; local impact with global effect. It could well work. UNDP will come back in a year’s time to check the situation, to balance results, to assert the validity of the concept of Ciudad Rural Sustentable.