Los nuevos grupos de presión.

• Author: Qui
• Position: Congreso, M

With Mexico's increasingly democratic Congress, lobbyists are emerging to help companies, associations and individuals fight for their cause.

Last year, the consejo nacional de la Industria Maquiladora de Exportación--the maquiladora industry's chamber of commerce--learned that the Mexican government was proposing several financial reforms that would hurt its members.

One measure, for example, would impose a reimbursable value-added tax on maquiladoras' domestic suppliers. Members saw this as adding needless paperwork and hindering the development of already scarce Mexican suppliers. Yet the Finance Secretariat was proposing it, and the Congress was going to vote on it.

Faced with such an issue not so long ago, the group would have sent a delegation to the secretariat to lobby its case. But now, for the first time, Congress was involved. So the Consejo did what it never had done before: It hired a lobbying firm--newly formed Mexico City-based Grupo Estrategia Política, in which an ex-Consejo director, Gustavo Almaraz, is a partner. "The Consejo itself is a lobbying organization," says Humberto Inzunza, the group's president and owner of a maquiladora in Tijuana. "But due to the new realities, we want to learn to lobby in the Mexican Congress."

So, seemingly, does much of Mexico these days. Businesses, environmentalists, community organizations, chambers of commerce--most anyone with a cause or interest is seeing the need to lobby, and to lobby Congress more than any other institution.

Mexico is shaking off the authoritarian one-party state that has governed it for most of this century, and a more plural and democratic country is emerging. With it, too, a new political culture is slowly forming, characterized for the first time by negotiation and persuasion and democratic give-and-take. "In Mexico, the ways of legislating, and of doing politics, are in full transition," says Almaraz, who is also a former senator from Baja California Norte.

An important barometer of this has been the birth of a true lobbying industry. About a half-dozen lobbying firms have formed over the last few years. Silvia Hernández, Mexico's former tourism secretary, created a firm called Estrategia Pública Consultores early last year; Maria Emilia Farías, a former congresswoman, started a firm, Cabildeo y Comunicación, with several partners in December 1997. Antonio Ocarranza, former foreign press secretary to President Ernesto Zedillo, heads the Mexico City office of...