July/August 2005 Nonviolence in the Arena The City as Social Experiment: Mayor Mockus Bogotá Antanas Mockus had just resigned from the top job at the Colombian National University. A mathematician and philosopher, Mockus looked around for another big challenge and found it: to be in charge of, as he describes it, “a 6.5 million-person classroom.” Mockus, who had no political experience, ran for mayor of Bogotá. He was successful, mainly because people in Colombia’s capital city saw him as an honest guy. Bogotá was choked with violence, lawless traffic, corruption, and gangs of street children who mugged and stole. It was a city perceived by some to be on the verge of chaos. With an educator’s inventiveness, Mockus turned Bogotá into a social People were desperate for a change, for a moral leader of some sort. The eccentric Mockus filled the role. He put on a Superman costume and acted as a superhero— “Supercitizen.” People laughed at his antics, but the laughter began to break the ice of their extreme skepticism. Mockus, who finished his second term as mayor this past January, focused on changing hearts and minds, not through preaching, but through artistically creative strategies that employed the power of individual and community disapproval. He also spoke openly, with a lovely partial self-mockery, of his own failings, not suggesting that he was more moral than anyone else. His presentation made it clear that the most effective campaigns combine material incentives with normative change and participatory stakeholding. The only son of a Lithuanian artist, Mockus burst onto the Colombian political scene in 1993. Faced with a rowdy auditorium of young people from the School of Arts, he dropped his pants, mooning the students to gain quiet! The gesture, he said at the time, should be understood as “a part of the resources which an artist can use.” The fact that he was seen as an unusual leader gave the new mayor the opportunity to try extraordinary things. For instance, he hired 420 mimes to control traffic in Bogotá’s chaotic and dangerous streets. A pedestrian running across the road against the rules would be tracked by a mime who mocked his every move. Mimes also poked fun at reckless drivers. “It was a pacifist counterweight,” Mockus said. “With neither words nor weapons, the mimes were doubly unarmed. My goal was to show the importance of cultural regulations.” When there was a water shortage, Mockus appeared on TV programs taking a shower. Turning off the water as he soaped, he asked his fellow citizens to do the same. In just two months people were using fourteen percent less water. Usage further decreased when people realized how much money they were saving because of economic incentives approved by Mockus; water use is now forty percent less than it was before the shortage. Most important to Mockus was his campaign about the importance and sacredness of life. “In a society where human life has lost value,” he said, “there cannot be a greater priority than reestablishing respect for life as the main right and duty of citizens.” Mockus sees the reduction of homicides from eighty per 100,000 inhabitants in 1993 to twenty-two per 100,000 inhabitants in 2003 as his major achievement. He also noted that traffic fatalities dropped by more than half during the same period, from an average of 1,300 per year to about 600. Contributing to this success was the mayor’s decision to paint stars on the spots where pedestrians (1,500 of them) had been killed in traffic accidents. “Saving a single life justifies the effort,” Mockus said. One time, he asked citizens to put their power to use with 350,000 “thumbs-up” and “thumbs-down” cards that his office distributed to the populace. The cards were meant to approve or disapprove of other citizens’ behavior; it was a device that many people actively—and peacefully—used in the streets. He also asked people to pay ten percent extra in voluntary taxes. To the surprise of many, 63,000 people voluntarily paid the extra taxes. A dramatic indicator of the shift in the attitude of Bogotános during Mockus’s tenure is that, in 2002, the city collected more than three times the revenues it had garnered in 1990. Yet the fifty-one-year-old Mockus doesn’t like to be called a leader. “There is a tendency to be dependent on individual leaders,” he said. “To me, it is important to develop collective leadership. I don’t like to get credit for all that we achieved. Millions of people contributed to the results that we achieved…I like more egalitarian relationships. I especially like to orient people to learn.”
Maria Cristina Caballero writes for the Harvard News Office. |
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