Fox Poised to Pry Mexico’s PRI From Power

SAN CRISTOBAL, Mexico —  Vicente Fox might have been a Jesuit missionary in an earlier age. Instead, he is waging a relentless political crusade as he crisscrosses Mexico’s sprawling cities and Indian villages, spreading the word about his avowed goal: “to bring down a dictatorship.”

Mexicans used to scoff at Fox’s improbable opposition party pilgrimage, believing the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, to be unbeatable in a national election. After all, the PRI has won every presidential vote since the party was formed in 1929, and its structures permeate every community.

Yet with less than two months to go before the July 2 presidential election, the 6-foot-5 Fox arrives in Los Angeles today to bring Mexican migrants an unexpected message: He has surged to a near-deadlock in the polls with PRI candidate Francisco Labastida, and an opposition victory is no longer just a Quixotic dream.

Still, as Fox’s electoral prospects move from nil to good, Mexicans are increasingly wondering: Would he offer open and honest rule--what he calls a transitional democratic government--or would he be another dangerous Latin American autocrat, as the PRI contends? And would his open-arms embrace of anti-PRI Mexicans from right to left create a healthy rainbow coalition or an unworkable government?

Whoever wins, Fox’s innovative campaign as the candidate of the center-right National Action Party, or PAN, has changed Mexican politics forever.

“At first, we wanted to win recognition that we were serious--that this wasn’t a game, that the PRI could be defeated. This was a barrier we had to knock down,” Fox said in an interview. “Today, Mexicans believe and have confidence that we are going to win [and that] we can defeat the PRI. This is a historic change.

“We are 60 days from a change of power. We are 60 days from ending corruption, trickery and arrogance. We are 60 days from starting a new miracle of economic growth.”

PRI leaders are fuming at Fox’s suggestion that their party is undemocratic and unchanging, and they scoff at the suggestion that Fox is ahead. The PRI is fighting back, especially since Fox’s convincing showing against Labastida in the first campaign debate April 25.

New television and newspaper ads shout: “Fox lies!” The ads note, for example, that while Labastida leads Fox in 22 of 24 polls published so far this year, Fox claims at every campaign stop to have taken the lead.

The PRI wants to label Fox a loose cannon, a Mexican version of Peru’s populist Alberto Fujimori. Fox’s foes also criticize his record as governor of Guanajuato state from 1995 to 1999, saying he’s a marketing creation with no substance.

But Fox prefers other images: He has invoked the names of South Africa’s Nelson Mandela and Poland’s Lech Walesa, and he compares his campaign to end 71 years of unbroken PRI rule with the movement that brought down the Berlin Wall.

“Getting the PRI out of Los Pinos [the presidential residence] is a challenge bigger than putting a man on the moon,” Fox tells campaign rallies.

The Family Story Reads Like a Novel

Fox’s record suggests that he thrives on such challenges: The travails of the Fox family on its rural hacienda in San Cristobal in central Mexico through the 20th century would have made a fitting subject for James Michener’s sweeping novel “Mexico.”

Most of the Fox family’s original 12,500-acre hacienda was seized through a land reform program in the 1930s, and the family battled land invaders on the homestead’s remaining 2,250 acres in the years that followed. Young Vicente Fox left the ranch to study at Ibero-American University in Mexico City and then joined Coca-Cola Co., where he rose from route driver to chief executive for Mexico and Central America during a 15-year career.

Fox decided to leave Coke to help run the family’s growing agribusiness, only to see it ravaged by government-fueled economic errors. A phone call from the late PAN presidential candidate Manuel Clouthier, himself a businessman turned politician, persuaded Fox to run--successfully--for the Mexican Congress in 1988. After his first, failed bid for the Guanajuato governorship ended in conflict over alleged PRI fraud, he waged a second, victorious gubernatorial race in 1995.

Campaigning Off the Traditional Path

The next chapter of the Fox saga is now playing out, and it could be the most dramatic: Fox’s campaign could end in victory July 2--his 58th birthday.

Fox has relied on his brash, sometimes crude humor and the business skills learned at Coca-Cola to craft a campaign that has differed radically from traditional party politics in Mexico, usually a staid affair.

Along with other business leaders who were brought into the PAN, Fox was regarded with skepticism by some party traditionalists--especially the staunch purists from the north who worried that Fox would be unaccountable to the party. Denied fervent support from the PAN, Fox instead created a vast citizen movement, called Friends of Fox, which claims to have enrolled 4 million followers.

Last week, his supporters launched another Mexico City-based organization, the National Unity Movement, designed to mobilize 1 million more activists on his behalf in the next two months.

Fox also has used audacious marketing devices. One example: His Mexican Migrants for Change--a support group in Los Angeles, which he said is 400,000 strong--will receive three-minute phone cards in June so they can call home and urge family members to vote for Fox.

Former PAN leader Carlos Castillo Peraza, now a political analyst, says Labastida and the other main candidate, leftist Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, have run unimaginative campaigns that make them seem like local parish priests interested only in hanging on to their dwindling parishioners.

“Fox, in contrast, is speaking the discourse of a missionary in the land of the faithless,” Castillo Peraza said. “He is trying to convert everyone--evangelicals, Buddhists, atheists--to his cause. That is what makes Fox such an enthusiastic candidate.”

Anti-PRI Message Gains Support

Well-credentialed leftists such as independent Sen. Adolfo Aguilar Zinser and political scientist Jorge Castaneda have joined Fox’s beat-the-PRI crusade. Some PANistas ask whether the resulting smorgasbord of interests can be reconciled into a workable government.

But Zinser said at a recent rally: “This is the new Mexico in which all of us do fit. Our ideological differences are not greater than the shared goal of giving Mexico a legitimate democracy.”

PRI leaders note that theirs was the only party to hold an open primary to nominate its presidential candidate, while Fox was unopposed for the PAN nomination. And Mexico is hardly a one-party state. Opposition parties govern 11 of the 32 states and 43% of municipalities--evidence, the PRI says, of deep-rooted pluralism.

Fox’s brother Cristobal, who still runs the family’s turbulent businesses from the hacienda where the nine Fox brothers and sisters were raised, says his brother “was always a person who helped others. He lent money to family members. He might have been a Jesuit in another era.”

Fox himself cited his Jesuit schooling as one of many factors that have driven him to seek the presidency.

“I learned the philosophy of St. Ignatius of Loyola, that a person only finds personal fulfillment existing for others, serving others,” Fox said. “I have a real vocation for service. I find my happiness, my personal realization, serving my community and serving my country.”

In an interview in his sport-utility vehicle, Fox said another motivating factor was his 15 years at Coca-Cola, “where I learned to be competitive. I learned the discipline of work. I learned about quality, about the many ways you can change things using talent and intelligence.”

Fox constantly uses business language in describing how he would run the country: “We are going to achieve a total-quality government, an efficient government, a government that costs less and does much more.”

Fox’s critics in Guanajuato contend that he was far from businesslike during his tenure as governor.

Martha Lucia Micher, who is running for mayor of the industrial city of Leon for Cardenas’ center-left Democratic Revolution Party, or PRD, fought with Fox often while she served in the state legislature.

“One of his traits was political arrogance. His view was, ‘If I travel too much, it doesn’t matter,’ ” she said. “And his group of advisors was very inept, with scarce experience in public politics.”

Miguel Alonso Raya, the PRD’s candidate to succeed Fox as governor of Guanajuato, said that he “governed by decree” and set up parallel institutions to existing government departments. “[Fox] thinks change is symbolized and represented in himself, at the expense of institutions,” Raya said. “He is so prone to govern by occurrences that he could become a kind of Fujimori.”

Fox responded in the interview that he did create new structures in Guanajuato--”and with much success. Why? Because the bureaucratic structures of government are heavy, rigid and costly.”

Fox said he first started thinking of seeking the presidency when a constitutional amendment was adopted in July 1994 removing a restriction that both parents of a president must be born in Mexico. Fox’s mother was born in Spain. His paternal grandfather was American, but his father was born in Mexico.

Juan Ignacio Torres Landa, the PRI’s candidate for governor of Guanajuato and son of a former governor, said Fox won’t win for one simple reason: “I believe Mexico will never have a president with an Anglo-Saxon name, just as I believe the United States will never have a president with a Hispanic name. At the end of the day, people vote for their culture.”

Fox’s Mexican-ness, however, has not surfaced as a campaign issue.

Fox is devoted to children, his family and friends say. He and his wife adopted four children. Now divorced, the couple share parenting responsibilities. Fox’s daughter Paulina often campaigns with him.

Juan Carlos Romero Hicks, former rector of the University of Guanajuato and Fox’s handpicked PAN candidate for governor, said Fox rarely makes appointments at night so as to spend time with his children.

Fox has sold his shares of the family business to his brothers in recent years. He still maintains a small ranch, complete with horses, cows and ostriches, near the family homestead in San Cristobal, just south of the shoe manufacturing city of Leon.

The family business--now employing about 1,300 people in a broccoli farming operation, a food processing plant and a factory making shoe uppers--remains a political football. When the latest financial crisis struck Mexico in December 1994, Grupo Fox and many other firms saw business plummet and interest rates soar.

A Call for ‘Social Fighters’

Cristobal Fox said that, after struggling to make interest payments for two years, he finally couldn’t keep up. The family’s bad debt became part of a controversial bank bailout program, a fact frequently cited by opposition parties.

Cristobal said he is within months of renegotiating the debt with the banks, and meanwhile “we have lost almost everything. After 30 years, we are just about back where we started, with the ranch itself. But we have nothing to hide. We bet on Mexico, and like 80% of all Mexicans, we lost.”

Vicente Fox began the campaign boasting of his country roots, wearing jeans and cowboy boots and brashly confronting the PRI. The goal, he says, was to embolden people.

“In Mexico, there is no democracy,” Fox said. “What are needed are social fighters for democracy. The people want to see people with character, firmness, who are capable of knocking down a party dictatorship.”

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MEXICAN CAMPAIGN STOP

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