San Francisco Chronicle
November 29, 2000
Chronicle Foreign Service

When Vicente Fox takes the oath of office as the new president of Mexico on Friday morning, the hopes of millions of people like Enrique Luna will be there with him.

Luna is a 48-year-old taxi driver in the city of Nezahualcoyotl, a massive working-class suburb of Mexico City. He works at least 12 hours a day, he said, to bring home 2,000 pesos -- $220 -- a week.

Luna believed Mexico needed a change, after 25 years of economic decline that has hammered the working classes. So on July 2 he voted for Fox.

"What we in the working classes, who brought him to power, really hope is that he brings investment so that there's better jobs, so that people see an improvement in their pocketbook," Luna said. "We have work, but it's poorly paid."

Fox takes power amid the greatest of expectations. His election on July 2 was a historic event, greeted with elation by much of the country. It ended the rule of the world's oldest state party, the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which had governed Mexico for 71 years.

It also marked the first time in Mexico that a presidential succession took place through the ballot box. Since the PRI took power, presidents here have always chosen their successors, who then ran virtually unopposed or won with the help of state-engineered fraud.

To voters across the country, Fox represented the emergence of a new, vigorous Mexico whose destiny would no longer be intimately linked to the government. A rancher and former president of Coca-Cola de Mexico, he galvanized people from across Mexico's political spectrum.

There seems no end to the urgent demands for his attention. Fox takes over a country that has been ravaged by years of economic crisis. It has suffered from inept and corrupt government and a fetid justice system. Its environment is blighted. Its education system is tattered. Millions of Mexicans must go to the United States to earn a living.

Moreover, his Mexico is a country used to depending on the government for everything from eyeglasses to money for religious fiestas.

It is also a country of deep contrasts. Many parts of the north boast full employment: Ciudad Juarez, Tijuana, Monterrey. But another Mexico lies wasting away in neglect -- 15 million people don't have drinking water, and 64 percent of the population lacks telephones. Even the economically healthy parts of the country are growing too fast for services to keep up, creating shantytowns and strains on the environment.

Fox has declared that he will thoroughly reorganize and modernize the national government, shaking from it the inefficiencies and inertia built up by 71 years of one-party rule.

"He also wants to modernize the relations between the citizenry and the government to permit more individual initiative, more entrepreneurs, so that people are less dependent on the government for every little thing," said Luis Rubio, a political scientist and director of CIDAC, a Mexico City think tank.

Reinventing Government

To accomplish all this, Fox will have to invent a new way of doing politics.

In the past, every president used the PRI's deep control of the country and the government to impose his decisions on Mexico. But the country is different now, with political parties, Congress and the media less obedient.

"He's going to have to develop new ways of convincing people that are based on credibility and legality, but in a country where legality isn't very developed," Rubio said. "That's the real challenge."

Fox understands that his success depends on his ability to get consensus. Since his election, he has gone out of his way to meet with groups that might be disposed to fight him: opposition parties, congressmen, PRI governors, unions. He even offered three cabinet positions to the center-left Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), though he was turned down.

He has promised to devote one day a week to working with Congress. This is a major break with the past -- under the PRI, Congress was servant to the president. But one of the changes in Mexico is a stronger, more plural Congress eager to set policy and check presidential power.

The left has criticized Fox even before he takes office because he hails from the conservative, Catholic and business-aligned National Action Party (PAN).

Yet, in the interest of achieving consensus, he has been flexible when it comes to PAN social doctrine. In late July, the state of Guanajuato's PAN- controlled state legislature voted to make it a crime for a rape victim to get an abortion, creating a national controversy that promised to divide the country. Though Fox is Catholic and believes abortion should be illegal, he returned to the state and convinced the governor there to veto the law. The divisive issue quietly faded.

Fox says getting credit in the hands of the working classes, which have been shut out of the banking system for years, is a top priority. As governor of Guanajuato, he created a micro-credit bank to get small loans in the hands of poor women, based on the experience of the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh. He says he will do this nationwide as well.

The five months since his election have dulled a bit of the luster that his election created, as the hard realities of governing have slowly become clear.

In the campaign, he frequently insisted a 7 percent annual economic growth rate was necessary to absorb all the young people entering the workforce. But that goal has quietly changed. Fox now says he'll achieve such growth by his third year in office.

Fox's Business Approach

Still, the Cabinet selections Fox announced in recent days were a sign of the total renovation he plans for Mexican government. The Cabinet is made up of several business executives -- from the airline, telephone, banking and cosmetics industries. One columnist called it "Fox and Company."

The inclusion of so many executives in the Cabinet is a radical departure for Mexico.

Under the PRI, Cabinet ministers have almost never had business experience. The regime demonized the business class. Executives, for their part, came to view politics, indeed even such things as raising money for libraries or low- income housing, as strictly the government's job.

Government agencies under the PRI became inefficient, at times technologically backward, overstaffed by people who are underpaid.

The big question is how executives used to having orders obeyed will function in the political world of competing interests and demands. But Fox is clearly betting his business-world Cabinet can whip the federal government into shape.

"He's looking for people who are used to meeting goals and not interested in accumulating power," Rubio said. "On the other hand, there's no one in the Cabinet who's a political operator, who knows how to negotiate. He needs that, too."

Fox's arrival at the presidency ends life as the PRI has known it.

For all its 71 years, each successive PRI president refereed internal disputes, chose his successor, chose each party president and often chose candidates for different offices. Obedience to the president was how groups that shared little ideological common ground coexisted in the same party. Without a president in power, the PRI is headless. Those same groups may find they cannot live together.

"They're going to have to face reality," said Jose Antonio Crespo, a Mexico City political scientist and student of the PRI, who recently returned from a trip through Eastern European countries studying how former communist parties adapted themselves to the loss of power.

"There are no rules. There's no one to give orders. Within the party, there are very different groups. It's not going to be easy for them to agree on the rules."

Fox may find his job easier simply because the PRI is no longer in power. Much of what the PRI did was wasteful and inefficient simply because it had a monopoly on power and no one to hold it accountable.

Picking Cabinet ministers according to their area of expertise -- a former telephone and airline executive, Pedro Cerisola, as secretary of communications and transportation, for example -- promises efficiencies.

What's more, for some initiatives there is wide support. Giving Mexicans living abroad the right to vote is one of these.

Out in Nezahualcoyotl, Luna has modest goals for the Fox administration.

"I hope that he achieves what he promised in his campaign. That he doesn't fail us," Luna said. "That he be honest, though I know he's an honest man.

"I think that you have to have faith and that it's not just up to Vicente, but it's up to the rest of us Mexicans as well to work hard. I hope that at the end of his term the foundation is really set for the development of Mexico.

I don't expect miracles. Work and more work is the only answer."

Fox's Proposals

Economic goals include: Reducing poverty by 30 percent, creating more than a million jobs each year, opening the oil and electricity sectors to private investment, revamping the tax system, forming a common market with Latin America and the United States and Canada, establishing a "micro-lending" program to provide credit to the poor.

An overhaul of the police forces that would split the powerful federal attorney general's office into police and prosecutors' offices, and create a new federal force similar to the United States' FBI.

A reorganization of the armed forces and an order banning soldiers from peacetime policing or anti-drug work.

Formation of a congressional "Transparency Commission" to start digging into 71 years of dirty laundry, such as a massacre of student demonstrators in 1968, the assassinations of a Roman Catholic cardinal in 1993 and a presidential candidate in 1994, a banking scandal in which loans to powerful Mexicans were never repaid and then were absorbed by the government as part of a $100 billion, taxpayer-financed bank bailout.