Book paints picture of tough Mexican first lady

The plot could be taken from one of Mexico's TV soap operas. A young girl of immigrant stock, who dreams of ruling her nation, meets and marries the president.

Before long, the ruthless and determined first lady is recognized as the real power behind the throne.

Yet this is no work of fiction. If a new biography of the wife of Mexican President Vicente Fox is to be believed, Marta Sahagun de Fox is a power-hungry woman intent on taking over from her husband.

La Jefa (the Boss Woman) is due to hit bookstores in Mexico this weekend. But it was causing a sensation well before copies went on sale.

In it, Fox's wife is accused of influence peddling and misuse of official money, including allowing her children from a previous marriage to use the presidential jet to fly on a shopping trip to Houston.

Since the couple's marriage in July 2001, Sahagun has become by the far the most powerful and polemical first lady in Mexican history. She is being compared to another ambitious woman in Latin America who succeeded her husband in office, Argentina's Eva Peron.

The book could not come at a worse time for Fox, whose popularity has plummeted over his lack of success in bringing about promised reforms to change the country's political system, which was dominated for 70 years until 2000 by the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI).

Sahagun has never been popular with Mexico's intellectual elite. The couple's marriage, less than six months into his presidency, raised eyebrows among Mexico's Roman Catholic faithful. The couple were previously married with children and profess to be strict Catholics.

Fox's conservative National Action Party (PAN) is close to the Catholic church hierarchy, and Fox was accused of trying to use his political influence to seek a papal annulment of his previous marriage.

The president's former press secretary, Sahagun has never made a secret of her political ambitions. She ran for mayor of a town in central Mexico in 1994, but lost.

While Sahagun has been savaged in the media, polls show she enjoys a 70 percent popularity rating among Mexicans.

Sahagun rose to prominence during Fox's campaign. They made an odd couple. A tiny, elegantly dressed figure with a shy smile, Sahagun is dwarfed by her husband's 6-foot-4-inch, somewhat clumsy-looking figure.

The first lady has sought to use her position to promote good causes and make herself a leader in the cause of women's rights. At a speech last week at the Mexican University Federation, she addressed the need to protect women from domestic violence and spoke about the unsolved murders of more than 300 women over the past decade in the Mexican border city of Juarez.

But critics have questioned the role of her private charity foundation, Vamos Mexico (Let's Go Mexico), which has offices in the presidential palace, Los Pinos.

While allies of the president have dismissed the book as an unjust invasion of the couple's privacy, critics point out the first lady granted the author six long interviews and access to her inner circle of friends. The author, Olga Wornat, is a well-known Argentine writer who has written bestselling books about that country's controversial former president, Carlos Menem. Wornat says she was very clear about her plans for the book in her interviews with Sahagun.

Interviewed on Mexican radio this week, Wornat described the first lady as an ambitious woman "who loves the limelight and power." She added that Sahagun confided her plan to run for president in 2006.

Sahagun hit back, saying she felt betrayed by the book. But she refused to deny her political ambitions. "The project must continue, let's just leave it at that," she said in a TV interview.

Wornat says she's amused the first lady feels let down. "She's confused. She thinks I was her friend, and I'm not. I'm a journalist."

She also had words of warning for the first lady's enemies. Anyone close to the president should be "very wary of having her (Sahagun) as an enemy, because as an enemy she is terrible, very terrible," Wornat said.

The first lady is a person who "knows what she wants" and "will attain it, by hook or by crook," she added.

Mexico has never had a female president. Experts say it's too early to predict if Sahagun will run in 2006.

- David Adams' e-mail address is dadams@sptimes.com

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