For a man who set out just two months ago to tackle Mexico’s most intractable problems–poverty, corruption, an unreliable economy and massive illegal migration–President Vicente Fox is making progress.
He pushed his first budget through an opposition-dominated Congress and has proposed a tax increase that astonishingly has substantial public support. He has lured the long-recalcitrant Zapatista rebels of the Chiapas jungle toward the bargaining table, and has appointed to high government posts people known for their honesty, including many opposition figures.
“Fox is my president, and his tendency is to do what he promises. We only have to give him time,” said Patricia Peral, 56, a Mexico City homemaker. She, like many Mexicans, is proud of Fox’s landslide victory over the powerful Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, which ruled Mexico for 71 years.
But not everything has gone well for Mexico’s ambitious new president. The rancher and former Coca-Cola executive has seen his country’s fast-growing economy weaken in the wake of a U.S. slowdown, just as he has promised more growth and more jobs. The rebellious southern state of Yucatan, a PRI stronghold, is hinting at seceding, a notorious drug lord has escaped from prison, and Mexico City is suffering an ugly string of high-profile murders.
“I’m not sure that Fox has made any big mistakes, but I’m not sure he’s doing that well either,” said Jose Antonio Crespo, a political analyst. “We’re still waiting to see what he’s really going to do.”
Nevertheless, 7 in 10 Mexicans think Fox is doing a good job, according to recent polls.
On Friday, President Bush makes his first presidential foray to Mexico. The two men, who share conservative backgrounds and a penchant for cowboy boots, plan to sit down at Fox’s Guanajuato state ranch for lunch and brief talks on migration issues, drugs, trade, energy and economic integration before Bush returns to the United States on Friday night.
Mexicans are pleased with Bush’s decision to visit Mexico first, rather than Canada.
“We’re nicer than Canadians, we have better food, and we’re closer to Texas,” joked Federico Estevez, a political scientist at the Autonomous Technological Institute of Mexico. “This is his back yard.”
Despite the host of problems Mexico faces, Fox has come to office with perhaps the best conditions in decades for dealing with them.
Mexicans, relieved to be rid of the PRI, are expected to give Fox latitude and time to begin to solve the country’s deep-seated problems. Most have expressed approval of Fox’s early steps, particularly his appointments of Cabinet ministers and other high officials known more for their honesty than for their party ties to the new president.
Some analysts, however, say that while Fox has talked a good line on combating corruption and improving Mexico’s economy, they have not seen much beyond words. They accuse Fox of coasting through a post-inaugural honeymoon mostly on charm and big hopes.
“Fox is doing well and people like him, like his style and like being talked to by him,” Estevez said. “They don’t care about him being short on substance. But real politics may intrude on this love fest.”
Fox has already tested the depths of his support by proposing a plan to extend Mexico’s 15 percent VAT tax to food and medicine, items traditionally excluded in order to hold down taxes on the poor, who account for 40 percent of Mexico’s population.
Remarkably, many Mexicans have gone along with the new president. While in the past at least 75 percent of Mexicans have opposed such new taxes, about 50 percent oppose this measure, Estevez said.
“Just by bringing it up publicly a few times, Fox has managed to shift public opinion,” he said. “His political capital clearly can move public opinion in his favor.”
That has bought Fox bargaining room in Congress, where his party holds a minority of seats.
“If there’s a proposition of Fox’s that’s clearly popular, Congress won’t take the risk of opposing it,” said Jorge Chabat, an international political analyst at the Center for Economic Investigation and Study in Mexico City. “They don’t want public opinion against them.”
Fox also has won kudos from most Mexicans for his quick efforts to bring the Zapatista rebels in Chiapas back to the peace table. The president has closed down army bases in Chiapas, freed jailed Zapatista rebels and, most importantly, sent to Congress an Indian rights bill, a central demand of the rebels. Passage of the bill is expected to be difficult, requiring a two-thirds majority of Congress.
Critics have charged Fox with meeting Zapatista demands too quickly, without adequate assurances that the rebels will lay down their arms if their demands are met. The president insists a peace deal is a few weeks away.
Many average Mexicans and most international analysts, however, give Fox credit for so quickly moving to end the long standoff.
“I think the solution for Chiapas is at the door,” said Carolina Romero, 23, an art student in Mexico City. “Fox is the kind of president Mexico needs to change–a man who keeps his promises, who’s audacious and without fear of our problems.”
More troubling for Fox is the uprising in Yucatan state, where old-line PRI officials have refused to follow a federal court ruling dismissing the old PRI-dominated electoral commission before elections in May.
Gov. Victor Cervera has insisted that Fox’s call for greater states’ rights means that Yucatan should be able to make its own decision on electoral officials. His backers have formed a human chain around the electoral commission offices and hinted that the state might try to secede from the union if Fox sends in the military to enforce the federal order.
Fox, in typically unflappable style, has so far said only that he will push on toward a negotiated solution with the state, which did briefly secede 160 years ago.
Some Mexicans praise that attitude as a more civil and progressive one than Mexico has seen in the past. Others charge that Fox lacks the fighting heart he will need to take on deep-seated corruption and old-style politics in Mexico.
“Fox has to make a firm decision or the people against him will see the road open before them,” said Rafael Loret de Mola, an independent political analyst in Mexico City. “There’s no doubt Fox is the president with the biggest margin of popularity in years. What’s worrying is that not everything can be solved with popularity.”
Perhaps the biggest potential obstacle facing Fox is a downturn in Mexico’s economy. Trade with the United States has grown from $26 billion a year in 1988 to about $400 billion since the two countries signed the North American Free Trade Agreement, and today 90 percent of Mexico’s exports go to the United States.
With the two economies so closely linked, Mexico’s growth rate of better than 7 percent GDP for much of last year was expected to drop to 5.9 percent in the last quarter of 2000. Financial analysts expect that fall to continue, with growth of only about 4 percent in 2001.
That’s below the 7 percent level international economic analysts say is critical to making progress against poverty, and it could lead to layoffs rather than the job expansion Fox has promised to help businesses achieve. Most Mexicans put economic growth at the top of the list of what they’d like to see from their new president, closely followed by improvements in public security.
Still, analysts say that Fox’s election and the fact that Mexico avoided economic chaos and a peso devaluation at the start of his term should draw new foreign investment that could soften the economic blow of a potential recession in the United States.
“If Fox can project an image of stability in the country and if he can improve a little bit the standards of public security, my impression is we will have a lot of foreign investment, more than in the previous 10 years,” Chabat said.
An economic downturn in Mexico, however, likely would boost the flow of undocumented immigrants to the United States. That could complicate U.S.-Mexican relations.
Similarly, analysts say it is important that Fox and Bush find ways to cooperate more effectively in stemming the flow of illegal drugs over the U.S. border. The United States “has shown a big inability to reduce drug consumption. It has shown a big inability to prevent drugs from entering,” Fox said recently.
Most Mexicans and many political observers say they have faith Fox will make a strong effort to right Mexico’s wrongs and that Mexicans will be with him for the ride.
“I think overall his administration is off to a very strong start. In two and a half months you can’t expect more,” said Kevin Middlebrook, director of the Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies at the University of California-San Diego.
