Among fanfares of sparks and music, President Felipe Calderon January 7 inaugurated the country’s new bicentennial monument, Estela de Luz, in Mexico City.
The new monument towers 104 meters above Paseo de la Reforma, at the intersection of Calle Lieja near the entrance to Parque Chapultepec. This measurement doubles 52, the number of years to complete a calendar round, an important synchronization cycle of two Mesoamerican calendars.
With 1,704 individually lit panels of translucent quartz running up each of its two faces, the monument looks like an old Atari game launching an orderly, squared attack on the otherwise cultivated urban beauty of Mexico City’s most famous street.
Calderon, addressing a crowd of high-ranking government officials and dignitaries, spoke of the monument as a symbol of unity for the nation. “For its symbolic importance and architectural beauty, this monument will be added to the majestic works so emblematic and admired by all Mexicans, such as the Angel of Independence, the Monument to Juarez, or the Monument to the Revolution.”
While the Carlos Chavez Juvenile Symphonic Orchestra filled the space between firework explosions with the monument’s own theme song, a small crowd of protesters referred to the monument by its unofficial name.
“The great monument to corruption and waste,” the Spanish-language daily Milenio reports them saying.The new bicentennial arches project was announced in January 2009. By September of that year Calderon himself broke ground on the winning, decidedly non-arched design by an architectural team led by Cesar Perez Becerril.
The project, supposed to have been finished in August 2010, ran into problems arising from inept planning and oversight of issues that should have been obvious before approval of the design. As a result, the government ended up footing a bill of over one billion pesos for what was supposed to have cost a fifth of that.
Construction of the monument was placed under the supervision of the director of the Department of Education (SEP) Alonso Lujambio.
According to Lujambio and others, the quartz called for in the design of the panels isn’t domestically available, meaning Mexico had to buy it from Brazil – and have it shipped to be cut in Italy – before being imported.
They also discovered a major error in the plans. The foundation would have to go 20 meters deeper to 50 total meters in order to properly support the structure. This would also mean a water pumping system and walls to contain the water when it rains.
Some, such as Ignacio Lopez, director of I.I.I. Services, a construction and real estate subsidiary of Pemex, have blamed, and plan to sue the architects for their unviable design. But worse than simple ineptitude are the accusations of deliberate price hikes in the construction of Mexico’s bicentennial monument.
Head architect Perez Becerril said as much in a June 12 presentation to a congressional committee. He provided documents allegedly proving Lujambio pressured him to keep quiet about corruption within the project involving SEP, I.I.I. Services, and the Gutsa construction company.
For instance, Perez Becerril claims in a missive on the subject, “It’s false that I ordered the supply and lamination of the quartz panels and the manufacture and transformation of the steel to be done in Brazil and Italy. This was a decision between Gutsa, I.I.I. Services, and SEP.”
The chairman of the congressional committee that heard Perez Becerril affirmed that Gutsa should not even have been able to bid on the project, as they had been disqualified by the Department of Public Services.
Lujambio denies the charges, calling for evidence of the alleged corruption. (As of January 12, Lujambio has resigned as director of SEP and gone to the United States for treatment of multiple myeloma, a form of cancer.)
During the inauguration of the monument, the president called it “a symbol of national history.” For some, that means a stately abstraction of two centuries of independence. For others, it represents another link in a long chain of shameless political corruption.