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Mexico Voters Reject One-Party Tradition July 6, 2000 Against all odds and against the weight of Mexican history, Vicente Fox will become president on Dec. 1, faced with taming the world's most entrenched political machine and forcing it to help him create a new political order. In giving Fox and his right-of-center National Action Party a decisive victory July 2 after 71 years of unbroken rule by the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, voters longing for change turned their backs on generations of political tradition in favor of a bold leap into the unknown. Fox remains part of that unknown, despite a three-year presidential campaign that elevated him from relatively obscure state governor to president-in-waiting. He has made amateurish blunders, flip-flopped on numerous issues and invited renowned leftists into his conservative crusade, prompting critics to question where his ideology ends and opportunism begins, and what sort of leadership he will offer. Fox's election as the first president from the opposition since the Institutional Revolutionary Party was founded in 1929 signals the end of a peculiar style of democracy in which the ruling party and the government were synonymous. Fox has broken that system -- which presumably marks the beginning of a new era of alternative political power -- without ever clearly indicating before the election what he will replace it with. For Mexicans, "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," said Eric Olson, an election observer representing the independent Washington Office on Latin America. "After 71 years, they have to figure out how to recreate 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, during the campaign 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 government 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." Fox, 58, has promised to appoint a cabinet that will include the best and the brightest from all parties -- even the Institutional Revolutionary Party -- to calm concerns about the lack of leadership depth and experience in his own ranks and to ensure stability and continuity, especially in economic matters. Fox's party was a major supporter of the former government's push for the North American Free Trade Agreement and it is considered Mexico's most pro-business party, but it has never managed the economy at the national level. "Fox promised a lot of new spending, which is based on assumptions of very strong growth founded on financial reforms that are still undefined," said Jorge Mariscal, chief Latin American strategist for the New York-based investment banking firm Goldman Sachs. "For the first time in a long time, Mexico has the potential to address the key structural reforms President Ernesto Zedillo has left behind, such as an in-depth fiscal reform and the reform of the judicial system. It's overall very good news." In the six northern and central Mexican states that Fox's party has governed, it fostered generally good labor relations, although labor unions are closely aligned with the former government. Like the long-governing party, however, Fox's National Action Party had little success in combating Mexico's drug gangs, which are responsible for producing or shipping about two-thirds of illegal drugs used in the United States. Fox has vowed to let the legislature choose the country's attorney general to de-politicize the position. Analysts expect no major changes in relations with the United States. Fox has proposed a free-labor agreement that would allow Mexican workers easier travel to jobs in the United States, and he has promised to eradicate corruption and tackle the cross-border drug trade more forcefully. 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 Institutional Revolutionary Party to stoke what analysts called the "Fear of Fox" factor. During the campaign, every time Fox's ideas swerved near a controversial issue -- privatizing the oil industry, sending more legal Mexican workers to the United States, liberalizing church-state relations -- the former government 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 longtime ruling party and is an integral part of its political machine. Officials in the Fox campaign are preparing a team to work with officials of the outgoing administration to try to make the five-month transition as smooth as possible and to try to avert problems that have plagued transfers of power at lower levels of government. In states and localities where opposition parties have unseated the Institutional Revolutionary Party --- such as Mexico City, where city hall was captured by the leftist Democratic Revolutionary Party in 1997 -- the new political leaders often arrived in their offices to find outgoing bureaucrats had taken even the furniture with them. Officials also have been accused of stealing government funds before leaving their posts. In law enforcement agencies particularly, high-ranking officials have cleaned out their files and left nothing for the incoming administration. In a July 5 news conference with foreign reporters, Fox announced plans to completely dismantle and rebuild the country's federal law enforcement system as the only way to wipe out the corruption that has crippled the system for decades. He also made it clear that he would travel soon to the United States to meet with President Bill Clinton and both major presidential candidates to press his proposals to open the U.S.-Mexico border to the free flow immigrant workers on condition that the two countries meet certain standards for the protection of the environment, law enforcement and workers' rights. In a news conference with foreign reporters that lasted about two hours, Fox offered detailed plans for how his new government would deal with a range of Mexico's most persistent and complex troubles, including the fight against poverty, the effort to stem the flow of drugs through Mexico and the unresolved conflict in Chiapas. He also offered specific proposals for improving U.S.-Mexican relations, including extending the benefits of NAFTA more evenly to small businesses on both sides of the border; turning the drug certification program into a multilateral process involving all countries affected by narcotics trafficking; and creating a U.S.-Mexico fund to help make the border cleaner and safer. His most detailed proposals, however, came in response to questions about the fight against corruption. Among other proposals, he said he would create a "Commission of Transparency" made up of Mexican citizens charged with investigating high-profile scandals of past administrations and with serving as a watchdog over his own government. But he was careful to point out that his eyes were set forward and that he had no plans to conduct wholesale investigations of government conduct prior to his election.
© 2000 TruthNews. All Rights Reserved. And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.
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