The New Influence Peddlers.

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 Exportacion--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 Politica, 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 Hernandez, Mexico's former tourism secretary, created a firm called Estrategia Publica Consultores early last year; Maria Emilia Farias, a former congresswoman, started a firm, Cabildeo y Comunicacion, with several partners in December 1997. Antonio Ocarranza, former foreign press secretary to President Ernesto Zedillo, heads the Mexico City office of Texas-based Public Strategies. Jose Antonio Crespo, a political scientist and newspaper columnist, is a partner in Lobbying y Cabildeo de Mexico, which formed in April.

Dozens of grassroots groups are also getting into the act. Mexico's first feminist lobby, known as El Consorcio, is just now organizing. Meanwhile, Mexico City-based Movimiento Ciudadano por la Democracia has held dozens of workshops for non-profit groups on how to lobby.

The PRI lobbying era. Lobbying is a profession Americans love to hate. Yet in Mexico, the new market for the profession is one of the best indicators of the country's new democratic openness and the formation of a new political culture.

The Mexican lobbying industry was born two years ago--specifically, on July 6, 1997. On that election day, for the first time in decades, the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) lost control of the lower house of Congress, known as the Chamber of Deputies. That event fundamentally changed Mexican politics.

Until then, what passed for lobbying was perverse practices rooted in the supreme power of the president and the PRI's uncontested dominion over the country. The Senate and the Chamber of Deputies had done little more than rubberstamp whatever the all-powerful president proposed. So businessmen and associations, like the Consejo, met exclusively with their friends in the executive branch. For them, doors were most always open. They'd explain their problem to the secretary of health or agriculture. Soon a law would be making its way from the executive branch to the Congress for passage.

The poor and powerless often had no such access and had to resort to mass protests and public hunger strikes. The rule was that unless you made a spectacle or nuisance of yourself, the government ignored you. Hence, endless marches clogged traffic in downtown Mexico City. One debtors group once brought an elephant to a demonstration.

However, in September 1997, opposition-party congressmen, now with a combined majority, took office ready to enact their own legislation. With that, the Chamber finally became an actor in Mexico's political life. Suddenly, more people had to be persuaded of a law's merits before it could pass.

Probably the first firm in Mexico to respond to the new niche was Burson-Marsteller. Even before the election, the public relations firm formed a lobbying division in its Mexico City office, realizing that this would be a Congress like no other.

It was clear that most business groups were unaware of how the new Congress would affect them. A good many businessmen couldn't even name their congressman. "One of the first acts we organized was a seminar on divided governments, to show what happens when there's one party in the executive branch and another party in Congress," says Aliza Chelminsky, director of Burson-Marsteller's Mexico office. "People don't understand what the role of the congressman is or what the different commissions deal with."

Rookie status. As the Chamber's opposition coalition showed itself to be independent, if not always fully united, others saw the need for lobbyists and filled the niche. "We understood that the new times required someone who could guide the private company in a radically changing atmosphere." says Ignacio Zamarron, a partner with Hernandez in Estrategia Publica Consultores. "Before, private companies would head to the executive branch. You met with the finance minister or commerce minister. That was enough. There wasn't even much need to deal with the media. This [lobbying] company wasn't necessary then. There wasn't a market for it."

Today, the industry still shows the signs of its rookie status. No Mexican lobbying firm is three years old yet. Moreover, many Mexican companies still don't understand the need for lobbying.

"[Companies] ask us for presentations," Cabildeo y Comunicacion's Farias says. "When we get to the question of money is when the problems begin. If Mexican companies are willing to pay an attorney $100 or $125 an hour, they're not willing to pay a lobbyist. It sounds like just going to breakfast a lot."

Farias's firm was hired by Amprofon--the recording-industry chamber of commerce--to lobby for changes to the law regulating merchandise piracy. From November to April, when the law was passed, Farias and her partners spent 20 hours a week on just that issue, attended countless meetings in Congress and met with 20 or 30 key congressmen.

In the end, their success was in getting the word "piracy" added to the crimes regarded serious enough to require bail. They also changed wording in the penal code to require police to pursue merchandise pirates as a matter of course, the way they do drug smugglers, and not simply wait for a complaint of piracy to act.

It was a major policy shift, one that the music industry has wanted for years. But it was accomplished by small changes to three obscure sections of the penal code--changes so minor they hardly seemed representative of the effort they took to achieve.

Still, initially Amprofon almost decided it didn't need a lobbyist. It only quickly relented when the executive branch proposed the law without association input. Rambunctious radio. Being a young industry, Mexican lobbying has developed a flexibility perhaps absent in countries where the profession has more history. Several firms, for example, see lobbying legislators as only one part of an overall strategy to influence decision-making. These firms have expanded their services to include advising companies on building alliances with grassroots groups or unions. Often, these firms themselves don't lobby at all, but rather tutor executive clients on how to effectively present arguments, who in which branch of government to see, when to place an ad in a newspaper and when to appear on a talk show--and with what message.

This so-called "public strategy" is necessary because Congress isn't the only part of Mexico that has changed. The government is less able to impose decisions than in the past. Neighborhood and grassroots groups are more organized and vocal.

Above all, the media are now more independent and must be lobbied like any congressman. Newspapers are far more rambunctious. Morning radio talk shows, especially, have become important vehicles for forming public opinion. And more than ever, politicians are paying attention to the media.

"Before, Mexican politics were a little like Kremlinology," Public Strategies' Ocarranza says. "Nobody knew what happened, who wrote the decisions, why something happened. The government didn't have any need to present a case. The media was not strong enough to punish the government for not providing that kind of information. That is no longer the case. Government officials are fearful of looking as if they haven't properly explained or justified their line of action."

These are the new rules of Mexican politics. Things are more open, more fluid, more democratic and, for business, not nearly as easy Many business associations will soon find they need full-time lobbyists to handle the job the association president used to do part time.

Moreover, most observers believe that even if the PRI wins the presidency and takes back a majority in both houses of Congress in next summer's elections, Mexico will not return to the old way of doing politics. "The monolithic world is behind us now. We're in a world that's more complex, richer, more plural:' Estrategia Publica Consultores' Zamarron says.

So an activity entirely new to Mexico will likely stick around as well. "You're talking about something that's very new," Grupo Estrategia Politica's Almaraz says. "Before you had very clearly defined rules. Things are very dynamic now. About the only thing we can count on in the future is that we'll have more clients."