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Children Get a Taste of Civic Duty
By Pilar Franco MEXICO CITY (IPS)-
Some 12 million Mexican children will have an opportunity this Sunday to take part in early citizen training as they cast ballots on the same day as the adult electorate chooses a new president.
The Child and Youth Referendum 2000 is an attempt to enrich the population's democratic development in Mexico, which has been governed by the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), uninterrupted, for the last 71 years. The balloting will also provide information on the children's perception of their society.
The Federal Electoral Institute (IFE) has invited children and adolescents, ages six to 17, to take part in an unprecedented exercise - the largest of its kind - to strengthen civic values. The initiative is intended to encourage citizen participation in public social policy to resolve problems affecting children throughout the country, according to the IFE, which is entrusted with supervising all electoral processes.
In the July 2 elections, the most closely monitored in Mexican history, the 60-million-strong electorate is called to cast ballots to elect a new president, 500 seats in the Chamber of Deputies and 128 in the Senate. That same day, 12 million minors are invited to vote at the 15,000 ballot boxes to be set up in parks, plazas, sports facilities and cultural centres throughout the country.
The United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) and non-governmental organisations are also working on this civic education project, which organisers hope will foment democratic attitudes and educate Mexico's future voters.
The organisers of the referendum - questionnaires targeting age groups six to nine, 10 to 13 and 14 to 17 - have prepared 45,000 volunteers to manage the balloting sites set up similar to those for the general elections. As a result, the largest Spanish-speaking registered electorate will go to cast their votes accompanied by a legion of children and adolescents, who will make their voices heard on issues covering daily life, their needs, rights and obligations. But the road to providing civic education for future voters has been arduous.
The child population of Mexico distrusts elected officials more than do their counterparts throughout Latin America, according to a UNICEF report released this month. The study, performed at the end of last year, shows that 40 percent of the Mexican children surveyed do not see national politicians as leaders - 15 percent more than the regional average. On a ranking of one to three, Mexican children place their mothers first and the president last. Like children in the rest of Latin America, minors here have little admiration for political leaders, while their idols tend to be pop singers and sports figures. In Mexico, where distrust in institutions reigns, these children's opinions merely reflect those held by society as a whole, Ana Fernández, a political culture expert at the Autonomous Metropolitan University (UAM), told IPS. The Mexican minors ''only echo the problem of acute lack of trust in politicians, a widespread social evil. Efforts must be made to win confidence beginning now,'' said Fernández. In this sense, Sunday's parallel balloting represents ''an important practical exercise in civic education,'' which will also provide ''a clearer profile of what children are thinking,'' affirmed the researcher. ''The core of this experience will not be to uncover the problems of Mexican children, which have already been fully identified, but to give minors a voice and make them participants in a civic party, a sort of game,'' she explained.
Mexican children have demanded, according to the UNICEF survey, that above all, the government must deliver on its promises, such as aid for the poor, more employment, greater attention to young people and solutions to the problems of education and corruption that plague the country.
In their definition of an ideal nation, 30 percent of the children polled said they want a country ''without bad people,'' 20 percent dream of a Mexico free of pollution and nine percent asked for ''a better economy and country free of poverty.'' Mexico's first experience of holding a referendum for the nation's children was in 1997, when girls and boys spoke out about their rights.
The children who voted in that referendum ranked education as the number-one right. A UNICEF study shows that more than a million Mexican children and adolescents - ages six to 14 - do not attend school. The same study indicates that last year approximately 5.3 million students completed secondary school, of whom 2.8 million continued on to higher education.
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