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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Last summer, during a tour of South America, the president-elect tried to explain his ideology: "If the left is for distributing wealth and attending to poverty, marginalization, and human development, and if the right is for generating wealth, I define myself as the sum of the two." It was a comment worthy of Luis Echeverría, Mexico's president from 1970 to 1976, who once blurted, "My government is neither capitalist nor socialist but just the opposite." Unlike Echeverría, Fox did the math behind his "sum." "If zero is the extreme left and ten is the extreme right," he continued, "I would be a four and a half, which is the center-left." Principled PANistas flinched and gasped, but Fox's closest allies in the party were unfazed. The president-elect may have spoken unorthodoxy, they reasoned, but on matters of economic principle, he wasn't retreating from the neoliberal point of view. Vicente Fox wants to lower tariffs, not raise them. He hasn't, and won't, declare any moratoriums on debt. Far from assailing bankers and investors in the United States, he has scolded the smart alecks who hold norteamericanos in doubt. "Look, nobody becomes president of Mexico without the goodwill and support of the president of the United States," he told reporters in August. "That is just the way it is."
Where Fox does depart from neoliberalism is on free trade. He has called for the adjustment of trade agreements, including NAFTA. "If we keep on going as we are now," he has written, "the destiny of Mexico in the NAFTA treaty will be to live with the a permanent depression of salaries so that we can export or attract investments." But he's also promised to restructure Mexican regulations "to make foreign commerce the motor of the economy." He has pledged to open to foreign investment the two biggest industries that remain in the government's hands, oil and electricity.
Under the influence of the San Angel Group, perhaps, he has vowed to revive parts of the government's withered social budget, but he is considering raising funds for these measures by applying Mexico's 15 percent sales tax to food and pharmacy items, not by tariffs or taxes on luxury goods—a regressive measure if there ever was one. And however much he may jawbone or sweet-talk the United States about raising maquiladora wages, he hasn't threatened to invoke a remedy within his reach: increasing the Mexican minimum wage, which neoliberals would find to be an unwarranted government interference in the market.
Despite his apprenticeships on the left and the right, and the winning formula that he concocted from mixing the two, ideology remains a sideline with Fox. Theoretical preoccupations are not in his nature. He has the small-businessman's view that politics and ideology are at best necessary evils of democracy—that a non-ideological or pragmatic solution exists for everything. Fox "thinks that what he provides is, more than anything, administrative skills," says Adolfo Aguilar Zinser, a member of the San Angel Group who is now a Fox aide. In choosing his cabinet, Fox has called upon the Korn/Ferry International head-hunting firm of Los Angeles, Aguilar notes, "as if he was recruiting a CEO of Ford." During Fox's visits with world leaders, Aguilar reports, "the first thing he asks is, 'How do you handle taxes?' He very seldom asks about politics."
Carlos Salinas, self-exiled in Ireland, is the most hated man in Mexico today, a veritable candidate for lynching. He and all of his allies are reviled not because he was regarded as a saint by the gringos or because he stole an election but because he and his henchmen got rich while Mexico's masses grew poorer. Fox understands that the first thing he has to do is promise to improve the citizenry's standard of living.
Dallas public relations consultant Rob Allyn, whose firm counts among its clients Phil Gramm, Kay Bailey Hutchison, and Ron Kirk, counseled Fox during the campaign and came away calling him "the most market-savvy candidate I ever met in my life." Fox's genius lay in repackaging an unpopular economic program for an audience that was cynical, saturated, and confused. He concocted a light, clean, effervescent, and relatively inexpensive candidacy, and then sold it on television, just as he once had sold Coke. Pepsi was outselling Coke by two to one when he came into the company; by the time he left, the proportion was just the reverse. Now he will attempt to work the same miracle with neoliberal programs.
Two dangers face Vicente Fox as he assumes the presidency, either of which could deliver Mexico to further decline and even to chaos. The first is the specter of assassination, a possibility so real that it's hardly speakable in Mexico today. Mexico's constitution provides for no vice president. If Fox were felled, his immediate successor would be chosen by a committee of the badly divided Mexican Congress—and that's the second danger to his regime. All Mexican presidents since 1929 have essentially ruled by decree: They proposed laws to Congress, which almost always passed them. When a law was challenged, Mexican courts rubber-stamped presidencialismo in much the same way. Mexican presidents had almost no opposition worthy of the name. But that will not be true for Fox. Even now, PRIistas hold more gubernatorial offices than any other party, and the party showed new life in September's municipal elections in Veracruz state, winning back the local dominance that it had lost to the PRD. Nor does Fox have a congressional majority; instead, he will have to practice coalition politics. He won the presidency by a plurality, with 43 percent of the vote. Carryover seats left the biggest bloc of votes in Congress in the hands of the PRI—59 of 128 Senate seats, 211 of 500 seats in the Chamber of Deputies. To get his programs passed, Fox will have to play a game of bipartisan, maybe even multipartisan, politics, with a PRD that is hostile to his program and a PRI whose stance is, at this point, simply unpredictable. Fox himself has forecast, "We will pass from exacerbated presidentialism to parliamentarianism." Democracy can be very messy.
To expect that the PRI will simply disappear as a force in Mexican politics is to overlook its historic role. "The PRI, for all its faults," freelance journalist Sam Quiñones has noted in the Houston Chronicle, "was not created out of whole cloth and imposed upon Mexico. Rather, it grew naturally from Mexican culture and society. The PRI is the modern expression of the ossified, top-down, hierarchical tradition left the country by the Aztecs, the Spanish, the Roman Catholic Church, and the dictator, Porfirio Díaz." It is, in other words, damned near a part of the Mexican national character, something like American Puritanism. It won't quietly fade away.
Shortly after his election, the guanajuatense, as Fox is often called in the Mexican press, met with Ernesto Zedillo to work out an amicable transfer of power, and thus far both parties have stuck to its script. Leaders of the two parties jointly drafted a federal budget proposal for 2001 and are jointly negotiating government reforms. In a way, the PRI-PAN alliance is nothing new. Three years ago the PRI lost its traditional majority in the Congress, yet Zedillo was able to pass his economic initiatives, thanks to the PAN. Zedillo has repaid the favor in part by ordering the Mexican treasury to place 15 executives and 170 lesser-ranked employees of the Fox transition team on the federal payroll. Nor are negotiations with the PRI new to Fox, who faced a PRIista majority in the Guanajuato legislature. But to know the PRI isn't necessarily to love it. The party has always been treacherous, inside and out, as Fox knows. "The struggle inside of the PRI is not between good guys and bad guys but between bad guys and bad guys, and we cannot trust any of them," he said before the presidential vote.
Nobody is openly saying so, but everybody in Mexico knows what the PRI is getting in exchange for its apparent hospitality: amnesties, indulgences, and pardons. If Fox were to systematically prosecute predecessor administrations for malfeasance, Mexico's governments would grind to a halt. But the president-elect has already promised that he "will not dedicate time to pursuing the past with nostalgia."
This pledge, however, is not binding on PRD firebrands in Congress, who will doubtless demand a pound of flesh from PRIista embezzlers and cops who engaged in torture. Fox may sidestep their zeal by creating a Transparency Commission, modeled on the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Its goal would be to expose wrongdoers, not prosecute them, and like most things in Mexico, the panel will probably operate on a mañana timetable. Fox has pledged to reform and "reinvent" government, the employer of 3.5 million Mexicans, including a lot of PRIista deadwood. But he has also promised bureaucrats that "nobody is going to be left without a job."
Because a comprehensive break with Mexico's PRIista past would be costly in a dozen ways, Mexico is not going to change as quickly as its radicals would like—or as quickly as Americans hope. Nor has Mexico been greatly transformed in the places where PANista rule has been established for years. Monterrey, for example, elected its third PANista mayor this summer, but cops and municipal officials are still on the take. Their mien may be more humble, but they have not discounted bribes: $2 to $5 is still the going rate for a traffic ticket, $500 to $2,000 for the disposition of an ordinary court case. What is gone is the arrogance with which bribes are demanded and the fear with which they are paid.
Two big issues that Fox will face after taking office are the strength of the peso and immigration to the United States. There is talk that the peso is overvalued again, and speculation centers on a shift from today's rates of about 9.5 pesos to the dollar to a rate more like 10.5 or 11, if it can be stopped there. PRIista officials have been unwilling to shoulder the responsibility because, as former president José López Portillo once said, "The president who devalues [the peso] is himself devalued." If Zedillo can't be persuaded to act before leaving office, Fox could find himself wearing the shoes that pinched Zedillo in 1995. Regarding immigration, Fox hopes to persuade the U.S. Congress to rework immigration laws to create, in effect, an industrial bracero program by granting six-month contract visas to Mexican workers and returning them home when their contracts expire. Under current practice, Mexico pays for the birth, rearing, and training of workers, but if they move north of the Rio Grande and wire money home, a portion of each paycheck is lost to Western Union. Fox's objective is to make sure their earnings are channeled to Mexico.
The immediate question for Vicente Fox and the PAN is what will happen on December 1. Some members of Fox's team fear that they will find their offices and agencies without archives, assets, or funds. As fragile as the alliance between the PAN and the PRI is, however, the only thing worse is no alliance. The danger is that the PRI could split into warring nationalist and neoliber factions. Anti-neoliberal stirrings in the PRI became apparent on September 1, when Zedillo delivered his final Informe, or State of the Union speech. Only congressmen from the PAN applauded the president. His PRIista allies sat with arms folded and mouths shut.
Fox and other PANistas have no choice but to wish their old rival a long life, because if the coalition fails, Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas and the PRD will become the most likely beneficiaries of Vicente Fox's triumph. If the PRI cannot hold fast to policies and outlooks that are compatible with Fox's—if it steps backward in time and advocacy to re-embrace revolutionary nationalism, or if it splinters into warring factions whose only unifying strategy is to stand in the president's way—the election of Fox could become a meaningless event. Even under the leadership of a politician almost all Mexicans adore, Mexico is still far from redemption.
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