Can Vicente Fox Save Mexico?
His swashbuckling style won the hearts of voters. He forced his country's leaders to hold an honest presidential election. His victory ended seventy years of unbroken one-party rule. Now comes the hard part.
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When the Coca-Cola executive withdrew to cattle, cauliflower, and broccoli, Mexico was at the tail end of its "revolutionary nationalist" epoch. The PRI, which had come to power after a treaty among the leaders who had survived the 1910 revolution, had, during the post-war years, worked what economists and historians had called "the Mexican miracle." Pursuing a policy of national economic self-sufficiency, its governments had owned and managed the grandest of enterprises—oil, electricity, airlines, railroads, telephones, mining, and steel—and through its holdings and high tariffs, had subsidized the development of Mexican-owned industries and commerce. It also limited foreigners to minority ownership in Mexican firms. Calling itself "the regent of the economy," the PRI-government had produced from 1943 to 1973 growth rates of 5 to 8 percent. The wealth that it created was shared with the economy's more humble participants through subsidies for food, building supplies, education, and medical care. Each sexenio, or six-year presidential term, brought modest increases in the standard of living of Mexico's urban middle class.
But corruption, vanity, mismanagement, and plain old ignorance were rife, and when oil—on which Mexico, a producing country, had bet its future—began to get cheaper by the day, the revolutionary nationalist game was up. On Friday 13 in August 1982, Mexico's finance minister announced that the country could no longer make payments on its dollar debts. A series of conferences with lenders in New York and Washington ensued, followed by devaluations, tariff-reduction agreements, and as the decade wore on, the wholesale privatization of state-owned industries.
What Mexicans called la crisis had begun. Within a decade, the number of government-owned companies was pared from 1,155 to 209. The number of employees at Pemex, the state oil monopoly, was cut from 212,000 to 150,000. Real wages declined by about 50 percent. The political consequence was the vitiation of the PRI's benign and paternal image. Its staunchest supporters had always been unionized workers in state-owned firms, and many of them were being laid off by closures and privatizations.
One who saw the debacle coming was Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, a former governor of Michoacán, a onetime chieftain of the PRI, and also the son of its most beloved and most populist president. In 1987 Cárdenas denounced the party's abandonment of revolutionary nationalism and struck out on his own. His 1988 bid for the presidency—it is now almost universally conceded—was a success. But PRIista election officials claimed that "atmospheric conditions" had produced a "failure of the computer system" and shut down the vote count. Three days later they handed the election to Carlos Salinas de Gortari. (Cárdenas remains the symbol of Mexico's long-suffering left opposition, the Partido de la Revolución Democrática, or PRD. Now the head of the Federal District—the equivalent of mayor of Mexico City—he ran for president again last July but finished behind not only Fox but also Labastida of the PRI. He was one of the few discordant voices after Fox's victory, refusing to telephone congratulations to the new president "because what is happening is a disgrace for this country.")
Shelving the PRI's revolutionary and nationalist rhetoric, Salinas welcomed foreign bankers and foreign investors to Mexico; their maquiladoras, he said, would give Mexico an Asian tiger's stripes. He dismantled Mexico's ancient ejido, or collective farm structure, opening family farms to international competition. His predecessor, Miguel de la Madrid, had silently pursued much the same course, but Salinas became the first Mexican leader to proclaim openly what most of Latin America calls neoliberalism.
"Neoliberal" is not a common term in American political speech, and it is confusing to us because the "liberals" who are its referents were the advocates of laissez-faire in the late nineteenth century, not the big-government liberals of the New Deal and their progeny. Sometimes it is called Thatcherism or Reaganism, and it stands for a litany of buzzwords: free trade, privatization, deregulation, globalization, the market, hard money, austerity programs.
As the PRI was turning rightward to neoliberalism, Fox was drafted into the PAN in 1987 by a mentor, Manuel "Maquío" Clouthier, an agribusinessman who was recruiting men of his kind for congressional races to support his own candidacy for the presidential seat. The late Clouthier, like most of the businessmen who came into the PAN after la crisis began, was an enthusiastic neoliberal: During his 1988 campaign against the PRI's Salinas, he famously boasted, "Salinas lifted his economic program from me." The PAN and the PRI didn't differ much on economic issues. Where the parties parted ways was that the PAN wanted clean elections and an unbribed administration, and it wanted the church to be freed from the strictures that Mexico has imposed upon it since the days of Benito Juárez.
Fox in his youth was apparently enamored of the Cristeros, those who supported the church in the virtual civil war that raged from 1926 to 1929 between forces led by the church and those led by the state. Guanajuato had been one of the key states in the Cristero Revolt. Today Fox collects books about the Cristeros, and on the campaign trail he sometimes leads his followers in a Cristero war cry: "If I advance, follow me! If I stop, push me! If I retreat, kill me!" He also promised to lift Mexico's legal ban on church ownership of radio and television stations.
Even some of Fox's own supporters were afraid that he would go too far in his support of the church, perhaps calling for an end to abortion in cases of rape and incest. But Fox's reverence for the Cristeros was no more potent than the respect some white Southerners still have for Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson: They identify with the tradition and culture of the South, but only as long as it is benign. Fox is divorced, in violation of church doctrine, and late this summer, when Guanajuato's PANista legislature passed a measure forbidding abortion even in cases of rape, Fox maneuvered his successor as governor into vetoing it, backing away from a campaign pledge to defend "the right to life from the moment of conception until the moment of natural death."
From Clouthier and the PAN, Fox learned the neoliberal routine, such as deference but not obedience to the bishops and the courage to take a stand against PRIista regimes. In 1988 the PAN elected him to the Chamber of Deputies, Mexico's congressional body, where his apprenticeship in national politics began. Before his three-year term was over, he established himself as a power within the PAN—and as a rebel as well.
Meanwhile, neoliberalism was becoming disreputable almost as fast as it was being implemented. During the Salinas sexenio, Mexico's economy headed back toward high-rates growth, but its distribution of wealth was skewed even more, in part because Salinas eliminated food and housing subsidies. "Economic differences grew more profound," Fox has written, "and the businessmen who were [Salinas'] friends were made immensely rich, at the same time that 40 million Mexicans saw their status in life plummet."
Much of the apparent economic improvement that Salinas wrought was owed to an overvalued peso. He left his successor, neoliberal economist Zedillo, the thankless chore of devaluation. The result was that 1995 was the blackest year for the Mexican economy since the Great Depression. Some 17,000 Mexican companies collapsed under the twin burdens of debt and competition brought on by the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), and Mexican agricultural production fell 50 percent.
The country's pride of sovereignty suffered too. "The debt crisis," says Canadian political scientist James Rochlin, "and the imposition of the neoliberal model that followed essentially took economic and political power out of the hands of Mexicans. It implied the evaporation of revolutionary nationalism, which, in many ways, had served as the ideological magnet of national identity." Though Zedillo's administration in time revived macroeconomic performance—in August Mexico paid off its debt to the International Monetary Fund, for example—labor statisticians calculate that purchasing power for working-class Mexicans declined by nearly 75 percent during the Salinas-Zedillo decade, despite a 14 percent increase in productivity. By the time Vicente Fox had completed his Congressional term, la crisis had become a seemingly permanent feature of the economy.
During the political crisis of 1994, a circle of Mexico City intellectuals held about a dozen salons in the prosperous suburb of San Angel, exploring new approaches to politics. The San Angel Group, as the strange-bedfellows salon came to be known, was convened by Jorge Castañeda, a leftish professor and journalist and the son of a former Mexican secretary of foreign relations. His circle included novelist Carlos Fuentes and others who, like him, were newly disillusioned with Cárdenas and the PRD, but it also drew upstarts from the PRI and the PAN. Fox took a seat in the circle. He not only attended the meetings of the San Angel Group but also several international gatherings of Latin American regional leaders, called by Castañeda and Roberto Mangabeira Unger, a Brazilian law professor at Harvard. The Unger meetings culminated in a long statement called "A Latin American Alternative," whose gist was the criticism that neoliberals had elevated the market from an instrument to "the status of a religion." Fox signed the manifesto despite disapproval from his sponsors in the PAN.
The influence of Unger and the San Angel Group on Fox's thinking is evident in a 1995 book that Castañeda wrote summarizing the San Angel experience. The Mexican Shock calls for a "transition regime," with a plural, or multiparty cabinet, aimed at reseeding elective and appointive offices with personnel from outside the PRI. It prescribes a remedy for neoliberalism's effects but does not call for the strategy's repudiation. Castañeda's blueprint also notes, "The transition government would also have to take a firmer stance with the United States regarding migration."
Lines from The Mexican Shock are now standard speech fare for Fox. "I will head a plural government of transition," he pledged during the campaign. "Neoliberalism is roundly failing in all of Latin America," he also declared, as if the Unger meetings were still in session. "It is not possible to solve the migration problem," he warned Americans during an August trip to New York, Washington, and Dallas, "if we don't solve the gap where a worker in Mexico earns $5 a day and a worker in the United States makes $60 a day."
Fox's oblique criticisms of the free market sometimes jar the right-of-center supporters of the PAN. His responses to such criticism disquiet them even more. "The one who governs is Vicente Fox, not the PAN! The one who screws up or makes mistakes is Vicente Fox, not the PAN!" he declared shortly after his July 2 win. His record is no great comfort to them either: As a federal deputy, Fox voted the party line only half of the time. But that is because he wants to wear a populist instead of a plutocratic face.
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