Mexico takes leap into unknown

Vicente Fox campaigned on change, but exactly how the next president will shake up Mexico has yet to be revealed.

Compiled from Times wires

© St. Petersburg Times, published July 4, 2000

MEXICO CITY -- Mexican President-elect Vicente Fox began building his historic new government Monday, but he faces some daunting challenges in making policy, working with the Congress and meeting voters' high expectations when he takes office in December.

Fox met Monday with outgoing President Ernesto Zedillo and got to work on the transition. He also spoke with President Clinton, who said he offered "my congratulations and those of the American people on his historic victory." Clinton said the United States was "ready to work to enhance the close cooperation that characterizes our bilateral relationship."

Fox has been accepted as the winner of Sunday's presidential election, though the results aren't official. Not only will he be the first president from outside the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, since 1929, he also will be the first to win with less than a majority of the vote.

"It's like the fall of the Berlin Wall, the end of apartheid and the end of the Pinochet regime all rolled into one -- and it was done peacefully," marveled Eric Olson, an election observer representing the independent Washington Office on Latin America. "After 71 years, they have to figure out how to re-create a government without a state party and tackle a lot of political reforms to make the government more accountable and transparent. For a lot of people, it's scary."

While Fox promised sweeping change, he never offered a comprehensive plan specifying what he would change, or how. In fact, many of his policy proposals were hardly different from those of Francisco Labastida, the PRI candidate, except on the biggest issue of all -- toppling the ruling party regime.

"People wanted change; it's that simple," said Nicolas Checa, a senior Fox campaign strategist and pollster. "The PRI tried to define change negatively as a jump into the abyss, but we said change was an acceleration of the country's natural progression forward."

As the outcome became clear, Mexico City erupted in a spontaneous citywide celebration that lasted until the early morning hours, with citizens -- many in their bathrobes -- pouring out of their homes and apartment buildings, hugging and kissing neighbors as well as strangers, giddy with excitement over a peaceful government overthrow that many never expected to witness in their lifetimes.

"We are the first democratic government in Mexico," Fox said in an interview late Sunday. "This gives us the moral authority, the democratic legitimacy."

In a national radio broadcast later, Fox added: "We cannot fail because we have awakened too many expectations, too many dreams and desires."

The financial markets, a critical barometer for Mexico's economic well-being, responded to his victory with strong spurts on the Mexican stock exchange and in the value of the peso against the dollar. "This has really surprised the markets," said Carlos Janada, a vice president at the New York investment firm of Morgan Stanley. "Fox won by a landslide, which gives him a clear mandate. This puts him in a very good position, and the markets will like that. We'll see an increase in the equity market, the currency should appreciate, and we should see lower interest rates."

That preliminary praise was a far cry from market responses to previous elections won by PRI, which generally have been followed by devaluations of the peso, high inflation and economic turmoil. A peso devaluation after Mexico's last presidential election in 1994 sent Mexico into its deepest recession in 60 years.

Fox's winning coalition is expected to hold the largest number of seats in the Congress when that complicated vote count is completed later this week. But governing will require tricky negotiations with the other two leading parties, the leftist Party for the Democratic Revolution, or PRD, and the ideologically diverse PRI.

At a news conference Monday night at Los Pinos (the Pines), Mexico's White House, Fox, who will be sworn in Dec. 1, said he and Zedillo were striving for a successful transition "not just in terms of tranquility and stability," but in job creation, economic initiatives and "all that the (Zedillo) government has under way."

Fox said all federal employees other than Cabinet secretaries and their immediate staffs, and in some cases deputy secretaries, will be asked to stay on. Over the next two months, he said, a team will assemble lists of the "best men or best women" for Cabinet posts. He promised to pick cabinet secretaries with an eye to political, geographic and gender diversity.

The new nominees, he said, would spend weeks or even months working with their predecessors, and the incumbents would be asked to report to Fox on all their work to assure its continuity.

His promise of a gentle transition has credibility: As governor of the central state of Guanajuato, a job Fox won after long years of PRI domination of the state, Fox replaced relatively few high-level bureaucrats.

Fox said his main objectives for Mexico would be achieving a 7 percent growth rate, profound educational reforms and "substantive changes" in the organization of the country's crime-fighting systems, as he promised in the campaign.

Political coordination won't be easy for Fox, however. Even his own coalition members -- free-market conservatives of his National Action Party, or PAN, and the leftists who backed him to get rid of the PRI -- disagree about how to achieve his economic and other goals.

"Whatever he decides, about half of the coalition that elected him could become increasingly skeptical about his ability to fulfill his promises," said economist Rogelio Rameriz de la O. Fox also is offering assurances that Mexico will comply with its existing commitments in the world, although a key adviser hinted that any confidential understandings with the United States on issues such as drug enforcement policy and immigration will have to be aired and reviewed.

"A democratic Mexico will be better able to comply with its commitments, and those commitments would have to be more transparent," said Jorge Castaneda, who is widely expected to be Fox's foreign minister.

Fox, Castaneda said, "wants to deepen NAFTA (the North American Free Trade Agreement among Mexico, the United States and Canada) to achieve greater freedom in movement of people, improve Mexico's infrastructure and protect (Mexican) emigrants in the United States. The cooperation on drugs would continue, but we must make the issues transparent."

On the larger issue of overall policy, Fox's refusal to present a precise blueprint of how he would change Mexico's political system enabled the PRI to stoke what analysts called the "Fear of Fox" factor. Every time Fox's ideas swerved near a controversial issue -- privatizing the oil industry, sending more legal Mexican workers to the United States, liberalizing still strained church-state relations -- the PRI stirred nationalist anxieties, charging that Fox would sell out Mexican interests and destabilize the country.

This much is clear: Fox, a plain-speaking rancher and former head of the Coca-Cola Co. in Mexico, is the ultimate outsider, with a Ronald Reagan-like contempt for large bureaucracies, government intervention and costly subsidies. His main initial battles will be against Mexico's estimated 3.5-million-strong federal bureaucracy, which owes its existence and livelihood to the PRI and is an integral part of the party's political machine.

Before his inauguration Dec. 1, Fox said, he plans to travel the country talking with citizens and local leaders. He also is reaching out to political opponents, inviting them to join him in efforts to attack problems such as poverty, crime, corruption, joblessness and loss of buying power.

Fox's PAN also captured the biggest share of votes in elections for the Senate and Chamber of Deputies.

The PRI has ruled with a majority in both houses of Congress for decades. Since its founding in 1939, the PAN has never controlled more than 25 percent of the Chamber of Deputies. It gained strength Sunday in states that are usually bastions of PRI support, including Chiapas, Oaxaca, Yucatan and Veracruz. But it's not a foregone conclusion that the leftist PRD, which like Fox's party has been dedicated to turning the PRI out of power, will cooperate with his policy proposals -- or even in organizing Congress. The PRD is ideologically closer to the PRI.

The independent Federal Electoral Institute said Monday that the total numbers of senators and deputies for each party won't be known until today. Although international election observers and Fox's party said they found many cases of voter intimidation, ballot shortages and other problems, they said that overall the election -- which was conducted for the first time by an independent electoral commission -- was not marred by the widespread vote-buying, ballot-box stuffing and other sorts of fraud that helped keep the PRI in power in past elections.

Former U.S. Secretary of State James Baker, an election observer, called it "a truly historic sea change in the politics of Mexico."

"It can't mean anything but good in terms of U.S. interests," Baker said. "The United States is interested in promoting democracy around the world and this is the first peaceful transfer of power at the ballot box, in a closely contested election, in 71 years."

-- Information from the Associated Press, Washington Post and Knight-Ridder Newspapers was used in this report.

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