For Mexico's Fox, a 'Revolution' Unfulfilled
By Kevin Sullivan and Mary Jordan
Washington Post Foreign Service | June 27, 2005
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06/26/AR2005062601235.html
MEXICO CITY -- Five years after his historic election on July 2, 2000,
as President Vicente Fox enters the twilight of his term and the
nation moves toward elections next year in which he is not eligible to
run, even his critics say he has made government more honest and
transparent, fortified the economy and championed democracy.
But the idea of Fox as a revolutionary, a powerful figure who would
energize and modernize a nation long strangled by corrupt and
authoritarian government, has died. And many of his closest advisers
say that despite his image, Fox succumbed far earlier than anyone
realized, and sooner than they wanted to admit at the time.
New Mexican Vicente Fox, center, accompanied by his daughter Paulina,
left, and his son, Rodrigo, right, waves to the crowd en route to the
National Palace following the inauguration ceremony at the National
Congress in Mexico City, Friday, Dec. 1, 2000. (Jose Luis Magana - AP)
The Fox Record
Several advisers said that within weeks of the election, major
problems emerged, including Fox's distaste for confrontation and his
rejection of get-tough politics with the Institutional Revolutionary
Party, or PRI, which ruled Mexico for seven decades until Fox became
president. In addition, he was nearly paralyzed by concern that
adversaries, if provoked, could destabilize the economy with strikes
or protests.
Within a year, the advisers said, the bold promise of his
administration had all but evaporated.
"The Fox revolution died in the transition," said Adolfo Aguilar
Zinser, a key aide to Fox and architect of his presidential campaign,
referring to the five months between his election and inauguration.
One exchange offered a glimpse of why Fox's promised revolution -- to
slash crime, create millions of jobs and supercharge the economy by
reforming antiquated tax, labor and energy laws -- never got off the
ground, key aides and outside observers said.
In June 2001, six months after Fox took office, a group of his closest
aides requested an emergency meeting at his ranch. They feared that
his promised "revolution of the 21st century," along with his
presidency, was sinking.
"You are not doing the job; you are deserting us," said Aguilar
Zinser, who later served as Mexico's ambassador to the United Nations
until Fox dismissed him for his criticism of U.S. policies.
The aides told Fox he was being too soft on the PRI, which was now
strangling his key reforms in Congress. They told him it was time to
play hardball, and they proposed a plan: scrutinize the finances of
100 PRI officials and threaten to expose their corruption.
"Let's give them options: leave the country or go to jail," Aguilar
Zinser recounted in an interview before his death in a traffic
accident earlier this month.
The president shook his head.
"I am not God," Fox said, according to Jorge G. Castañeda, a former
top aide and foreign minister. "Who am I to draw up that list?"
"This is not going to work," Castañeda remembered saying in
frustration. "We're losing too many battles."
Fox, in an interview aboard his presidential plane earlier this month,
insisted he had succeeded in bringing far-reaching change to Mexico.
"The revolution to me was breaking the 70 years of authoritarian
dictatorship," he said, recalling his election night, when Mexicans danced
in the streets.
Fox likened himself to Lech Walesa, whose election as president of
Poland was a historic blow against Soviet communism, but whose transition
from crusading candidate to head of state was "not very smooth." Fox
said his own shift from fiery campaign rhetoric to a more cautious
approach as president was simply the pragmatism of an executive whose party
held a minority in Congress.
When Fox took office, full of swagger and standing 6-foot-6 in his
trademark cowboy boots, perhaps no Mexican political figure had ever so
captivated both Mexicans and millions of people in the United States,
many of whom for the first time knew the name of a Mexican president.
Now, as Fox nears his 63rd birthday, his black hair and mustache are
tinged with gray, his wrinkles are deeper and his big grin is slower to
appear. Back surgery a couple of years ago forced him to trade his big
boots for sensible, flat shoes.
"My government is not a failure," he said, his voice rising over the
roaring jet engine just outside the window. "You don't build up a
country in six years. Mexico was so far behind that we will need a generation
to solve all the problems completely."
Asked whether he felt overwhelmed by the office, he responded
vehemently.
"Never, never, never. That's not what made me change," Fox said. "Many
people still ask me: 'Where are the boots? Where is your language and
your messages of before?' . . . But being president is different from
being candidate. It's more prudence, more tolerance. Being a president, a
minority president, I am more obliged to . . . reach consensus and
agreements. So, that's what I have to work at. Everything would have been
different with this story if I had had a majority in Congress."
Still, Fox acknowledged that his early coalition-building efforts with
the PRI had yielded few results. Was it the right call?
"That's a decision that history will have to judge," Fox said. "Up to
now, it seems that it was not the right decision. But if I were to go
back, I would still keep on trying the option of plurality and
alliances. I'm absolutely at peace in my conscience that I did well for the
country."
Shortly after the election, Fox's transition team began meeting at a
private house at 607 Reforma, a tree-lined boulevard where Fox's
second-floor office overlooked a lush garden.
In one of the first meetings, Castañeda recalled, the campaign
received a gift. He said outgoing President Ernesto Zedillo had privately
signaled that he was willing to seek increases in electricity rates and
gasoline prices before he left office, creating a potentially huge revenue
infusion for Fox's first budget.
Castañeda was delighted that Zedillo, a Yale-educated economist who
had fallen out with his own party, was offering to take the political hit
for an unpopular move.
But Fox would have none of it.
"No, no," Castañeda recalled Fox saying. "We don't want to start off
with unpopular measures."
"It was the first warning sign," Castañeda said, recalling his concern
that a newly elected leader was unwilling to take risky but needed
moves. "I said: 'Gee, wait a minute. We've got a problem here.' "
Fox, in the recent interview, said Zedillo had made no such offer. A
source close to Zedillo, however, said the former president had done so.
There were many instances in those early months, Castañeda said, when
Fox recoiled at the notion of doing anything that might damage his
popularity ratings.
During the campaign, Fox had made bold promises. He would create
millions of jobs and lift up the poor. He would win a new immigration deal
with the United States. He would change outdated labor and tax laws to
attract investment. He would overhaul education. He would expose and
punish the corruption that undermined Mexico's government and judicial
system.
Lino Korrodi, Fox's former campaign finance chief, has known Fox since
1967, when they were both starting out at the Coca-Cola Co., where Fox
rose to become the company's top executive for Mexico. Korrodi said he
had always thought of Fox as almost superhuman and fearless. But after
becoming president, Korrodi said, Fox suddenly seemed to show "a lack
of determination."
Korrodi, who left the administration after allegations that he had
helped channel illegal contributions to Fox's campaign from abroad, said
Fox "changed completely" and seemed "smaller" after he arrived at Los
Pinos, the presidential residence.
"There are two Foxes I'm talking about," Korrodi said. "The Fox who
made it to 2000, and the Fox who, on getting to the door of Los Pinos,
took off his boots."
Aguilar Zinser said he observed the same contrast in September 2000,
when the transition team went to a beautiful old hacienda in Cocoyoc, a
weekend resort town south of Mexico City.
One morning, Aguilar Zinser said, the team entered a meeting room
where a vast organizational chart of the sprawling federal bureaucracy had
been posted on a wall. He recalled that Fox looked increasingly alarmed
as he studied the web of ministries and agencies dealing with matters
from spying to fisheries.
"Is this what I have to manage?" Fox said, according to Aguilar
Zinser.
Mexico's lumbering, often corrupt bureaucracy might have buried any
new leader's ambitions, and Fox seemed particularly daunted. Castañeda
said part of the problem was that Fox had not really expected to win, so
he was not prepared to rule. A revealing moment, he recalled, was when
he heard Fox telling Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain in 2001 that
he enjoyed being a candidate much more than governing.
Aguilar Zinser said Fox was effectively marketed to the nation as a
new product.
"The product was a mustache, a hat, a belt, the boots and a brand
name," he said. "It was all identified with a bottle, a Coca-Cola bottle.
And Fox was very comfortable being a bottle."
But faced with the challenge of governing, Aguilar Zinser said, Fox
suddenly seemed uncertain of his role and unable to grasp the power of
the presidency.
"We did not want to acknowledge it in the beginning, but when we
looked into the bottle, we said, 'My God, it's empty.' "
A few days after Fox took office, he approached Carlos Rojas Magnon, a
lifelong friend who was handling administrative issues in the
presidential office. He held out a list of journalists and media companies that
were receiving monthly payments from the presidency, a long tradition
that helped shield PRI politicians from criticism.
"Get rid of it," Fox ordered.
Rojas said he explained that cutting off the journalists' payments
would anger them, and that this would surely color their coverage of the
new president.
"Well," Fox said, "one day it has to be done, and today's as good a
day as any."
To Rojas, the moment was an example of Fox's accomplishments. He said
the president's efforts to end corrupt ties and make public spending
transparent -- in a nation where predecessors could legally spend
millions in secret -- were indeed "revolutionary."
Ironically, it was the new transparency that forced Rojas out of
government. When a Web site on government expenses showed the presidential
residence had been outfitted with $400 towels, Rojas took the fall. But
he and Fox remain close, and he began an interview by saying, "I love
this man."
During the PRI era, both Fox and his aides had endured humiliation and
worse. Rojas was jailed for painting anti-PRI slogans on a wall. Fox
lost a 1991 gubernatorial election in which fraud by the PRI was alleged.
Aguilar Zinser said he was kidnapped from his office by PRI thugs in
the early 1980s and taken to a military base where he was blindfolded,
beaten and had his head repeatedly submerged in a toilet.
While some PRI officials were honest, others rigged elections and
looted the treasury to subsidize lavish lifestyles. Party officials also
were implicated in the killings of rivals.
Once Fox was elected, however, he gave important jobs to PRI members.
Rojas said he could not believe it. At one transition team meeting, he
said, he protested to Fox: "What the hell are we doing with all these
guys from the PRI in the government?" But Fox, he said, went on about
the need for consensus.
"It was not easy to take," Rojas recalled.
Rojas said he believed that Fox at times "did not exercise the kind of
leadership that was necessary." Fox failed to control his cabinet
members, he said, and disagreements descended into public bickering. But
Rojas said the problem was most obvious with Fox's handling of the PRI.
Fox's election had devastated the PRI. Its leaders were quarrelling
openly and its financial picture was so grim that party leaders even
discussed selling some landmark buildings. The party appeared in danger of
splintering. Rojas argued that this was not the time to ease up, saying
old-guard PRI loyalists would respect only force.
"When you have your opponent hanging in the ring, you finish him,"
Rojas said. "You don't hold time for 10 minutes so that he can
recuperate." Fox "should have finished them in the first months. But it's not
in
his nature."
Fox, however, said he was just doing what was "prudent." In a country
that in 1994 had suffered a major economic crisis that crushed millions
of Mexicans, he said the "drums of war" approach advocated by some of
his advisers made no sense. "Stability," he said, was his "number one
ingredient" during the transition.
Fox also knew that the PRI still controlled many labor unions and was
capable of creating destabilizing strikes or even violence. Some aides
said they also suspected that Fox had struck a deal with wealthy
business leaders who bankrolled his campaign, promising not to provoke the
PRI. Mexico's elite worried that a war between Fox and the PRI could
scare off foreign investment and sink the stock market.
"I think Fox didn't know what to do with the PRI," said Dulce Maria
Sauri, a senator who was PRI president in 2000. "During the campaign, it
was very useful to paint the PRI as the devil. But to govern, that was
not enough. Fox's plan was to get the PRI out of Los Pinos, but then he
didn't know what to do. He opened the door to the transition, but then
he stood there paralyzed in the doorway. He wasted his political
power."
Fox's plane touched down in Veracruz state on the Gulf of Mexico. It
was a brutally muggy day earlier this month and Fox took the podium in a
sweltering concrete warehouse in the port city of Coatzacoalcos to
address a crowd gathered for Mexico's annual Navy day.
Four and a half years earlier, wearing a crisp business suit and the
green, red and white presidential sash across his chest, Fox had
delivered an inaugural address filled with soaring oratory, promising to make
dramatic changes and to "keep alive the call of hope."
Now, his graying hair and white guayabera shirt were soaked with
sweat. The sunburned president began a long defense of his administration's
performance as a few hundred sailors and civilians fanned themselves in
the heat. He railed against "radical opponents" in the PRI who had
blocked his plans to reform the justice system, taxation, fiscal policy,
labor laws and energy laws.
He spoke of new highways and housing complexes, of new pension and
health plans for workers, of how Mexico was now making its debt payments
on time.
"This is a responsible government," Fox said.
He mentioned Mexico's devastating economic crash of 1994, clearly
proud that his government had not suffered a similar disaster. He appeared
to be measuring his legacy more by what he had avoided than by what he
had achieved.
"One of the great changes and transformations in our country is this:
economic stability, political stability and social stability," Fox
said. "We are not going to put that at risk."
It was a businesslike, pragmatic speech. Gone was the
reach-for-the-stars rhetoric that once inspired his followers. Instead, his
flat list
of accomplishments could barely compete with the humidity for the
audience's attention.
--
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