Vowing Reform, Zedillo Assumes Top Mexico Post

To the applause of world leaders ranging from Vice President Al Gore to Cuban President Fidel Castro, Ernesto Zedillo assumed the green, white and red sash of the Mexican presidency at precisely 11 a.m. Thursday and, in his first presidential address, declared a crusade against the violence, poverty, corruption and injustice that litter Mexico’s path to the next century.

Facing deep political uncertainty, public insecurity and pockets of crushing poverty, Zedillo told Mexico’s newly elected legislature in a nationally aired speech that he will continue the free-market reforms that opened and saved Mexico’s economy, although they widened the gap between its rich and poor. But he promised an aggressive jobs-creation program, plans to help small and medium-size businesses “as never before,” and an unprecedented effort to educate all Mexicans through high school.

There was lingering skepticism from opposition leaders and an angry protest at Mexico City’s Monument to the Revolution. The demonstration erupted in violence that left at least 40 injured, five seriously, when a small group that the government identified as provocateurs broke from an estimated 10,000 peasants who were calling for civil insurrection and attacked police with stones.

Riot squads withstood nearly an hour of the stone-throwing before responding with tear gas and clubs. The protesters set fire to a truck bearing Zedillo’s ruling party symbol in an incident the government classified as “minor.”

Against the backdrop of that violence, Zedillo, a Mexicali shoeshine boy who rose to the highest post in the land, promised to reduce the power of the presidency and separate it for the first time from his Institutional Revolutionary Party, which has governed Mexico for 65 years. And he vowed to radically restructure a judicial system that has made corruption synonymous with the police and the courts in a nation he cast as being on the brink of historic change.

As he outlined Mexico’s new course after taking the presidential sash from outgoing President Carlos Salinas de Gortari in an emotional 15-second handshake, Zedillo also ordered immediate acceleration of official investigations into two major political assassinations that altered the course of Mexican history this year.

Fueling the widespread sense of national insecurity, Zedillo said, are the yet-unsolved Sept. 28 killing in Mexico City of the ruling party’s secretary general, Francisco Ruiz Massieu, and the murder in Tijuana in March of Luis Donaldo Colosio, Zedillo’s predecessor as the party’s handpicked presidential candidate.

“We will not rest until justice has been served,” he declared, announcing that “at this moment” he was directing newly appointed Atty. Gen. Antonio Lozano--for the first time, a Cabinet member from the opposition--”to significantly intensify the investigations and inform the public of their progress until the investigations come to an end.”

About Chiapas, the southernmost Mexican state where an armed peasant guerrilla movement has threatened to rebel anew when the ruling party’s elected governor attempts to take office next Thursday, Zedillo said only that he is “convinced it is possible to achieve new negotiations that will lead us to a just, honorable and definitive peace.”

The Mexican army, which crushed the rebellion in January, will maintain its unilateral cease-fire, Zedillo said, acknowledging that “the conditions of extreme poverty and neglect” in the state “fueled that violence.”

Zedillo saved his most urgent comments for the escalating street crime, kidnapings, robberies and general insecurity he is inheriting from Salinas--whom he otherwise praised and thanked as a president “who governed with vision.”

“In the last few years, particularly in recent months, we have lived in a climate of growing anxiety and insecurity,” Zedillo told his audience in the cavernous legislative hall. “We have suffered major public crimes that have not been altogether clarified; we have suffered from violence on a daily basis and from a deficient performance by the institutions in charge of public safety and law enforcement.

“Today, more than ever, Mexico must be a country of laws. That is what everyone, everywhere, is calling for. . . . In order to tackle the rampant crime, the frequent violations of civil and human rights and the grave public insecurity, we will launch an in-depth and genuine reform of the institutions in charge of the procurement of justice.”

Concluding that his would be a compassionate, open and progressive presidency “to serve all Mexicans with dedication . . . with pride . . . with an unbreakable spirit and nationalist conviction,” Zedillo then sped away from the downtown Chamber of Deputies in a motorcade to Mexico City’s National Palace.

His parade route did not pass near the downtown monument commemorating Mexico’s bloody 1910 revolution, where the anti-government protesters shouted “Zedillo Out!” and praised the Zapatista National Liberation Army for its rebellion in Chiapas.

Zedillo drove directly to the palace, where he continued to follow to the letter Mexico’s longstanding traditions of power transition.

In a blizzard of green, white and red confetti that filled the air with the colors of Mexico’s flag--which is also the tricolor of the ruling party--Zedillo stepped onto the presidential balcony of the National Palace overlooking an expansive historic square. He led thousands of soldiers, sailors and police in the national anthem, for the first time as their commander in chief.

Inside the palace, Zedillo spent the next hour greeting Mexico’s most powerful and wealthy elite--bankers, business leaders, politicians and priests--with handshakes and hugs, before adjourning to a lunch at the National Anthropology Museum with present and former heads of state, among them former President George Bush.

Within minutes of his speech at the national legislature, opposition leaders gave Zedillo mixed reviews of his earliest performance in what all acknowledged is one of Mexico’s most trying hours. But they made it equally clear that the 12th consecutive PRI president will enjoy a honeymoon, however brief, with a loyal opposition--something accorded few of his predecessors.

Alejandro Gonzalez Alcocer, a National Action Party deputy, expressed confidence in Zedillo’s political will to fulfill his cornucopia of promises. “I think now, because of the special circumstances in Mexico and the situation we find ourselves in, he is obligated to keep his promises. Because if he doesn’t, who knows what will become of us.”

Still, national legislators from the populist, opposition Democratic Revolutionary Party were less generous. The party’s parliamentary leader, Senator Hector Sanchez Lopez, delivered the opening speech of Thursday’s special inaugural session, and he used it to sharply condemn Salinas’ legacy and cast doubt on Zedillo’s ability to alter it.

Sanchez attacked Zedillo for appointing to his Cabinet Ignacio Pichardo, the ruling party chairman accused last week of obstructing justice by the chief investigator in the Ruiz Massieu murder.