Challenges Mean No Honeymoon for Zedillo : Mexico: On first day in office, the new president faces newspaper protest, Chiapas tensions, crime.

As President Ernesto Zedillo settled into Day One of his six-year term Friday, an open letter appeared in an influential newspaper demanding the immediate dismissal of the man Zedillo had just appointed mayor of this capital city.

Three of the newspaper’s journalists had been injured, along with dozens of anti-government protesters, when riot police attacked a stone-throwing mob hours after Zedillo’s inauguration Thursday. The workers union of the daily Jornada said in the letter that it deplores the “contradictory images” of “provocation and repression” at a time when Zedillo is promising a presidency of “tolerance, unity and transparency.”

“Less than 24 hours after having taken power, (Mexico City) Mayor Oscar Espinoza Villareal broke the presidential promise of negotiation and tolerance,” the union declared. “Therefore, we demand his immediate dismissal.”

The swift condemnation of a police action that the government justified as self-defense by a riot squad that had endured nearly an hour of stoning illustrated the immediacy, and depth, of the challenges facing Mexico’s 63rd president.

At a time of great expectations and high popularity ratings for Zedillo, there were other examples in the Mexican capital and countryside.

The young criminal lawyer whom Zedillo appointed from the opposition to serve as his attorney general--and point man for the creation of an independent and honest judiciary--defined one of the new administration’s biggest challenges. Antonio Lozano declared at his own swearing-in ceremony that the powerful law enforcement institution he is inheriting “is in a serious credibility crisis, which no one can hide.”

In the embattled southern state of Chiapas, tensions continued to mount as a statewide network of indigenous organizations threatened massive civil disobedience next week if the governor-elect from Zedillo’s ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party tries to take office.

And in isolated incidents nationwide Friday, it was clear that the violent street crime and narcotics trafficking that Zedillo had denounced as among the greatest threats to Mexico’s national security appeared to continue unabated.

Police in the southern state of Oaxaca reported that unidentified gunmen attacked a religious procession on a pilgrimage, killing three. The motive was unknown. In the western state of Michoacan, 15 family members opened fire on another family, killing five, in what police said was a feud. And in Chiapas, security guards for a private rancher battled militant farm workers who returned with arms after the guards expelled them from the land as squatters.

But as new, independent polls showed the new president starting off with the support of nearly 60% of the Mexican people, he and his Cabinet ministers also began the hard task of forging solutions that Zedillo, in his inaugural speech, had cautioned will take time.

After diplomatic sessions at Los Pinos presidential estate Friday with Latin American presidents and prime ministers, Zedillo met with Mexico’s top bankers and business leaders.

As a study disclosed that just 61% of all students complete elementary school, new Education Ministry staff members began laying the groundwork for plans to fulfill Zedillo’s promise of full secondary education for all Mexicans.

And Zedillo’s new secretaries of agriculture, land reform and finance also started looking for ways to, as Zedillo phrased it, “break the vicious circle of ignorance, unemployment and poverty in which many Mexicans are trapped.”