Vicente Fox

Vicente Fox is not your typical Mexican presidential candidate. For starters, he’s 6 foot 6 inches tall. He usually wears cowboy boots, even when dressed in a dark suit. He is relentlessly personal in his attacks on his main opponents, calling Francisco Labastida, the choice of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), “the more-of-the-same candidate” and Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, the candidate of the Democratic Revolution Party (PRD), a “has-been.”

But what is most unusual about Fox is that, for the first time this century, a candidate from an opposition party, the National Action Party (PAN), may win a Mexican presidential election. Most polls in Mexico indicate that Fox’s popularity is surging, helping him to cut into the lead of his closest rival, Labastida.

Singled out by his college peers as a “most likely to succeed” kind of guy, Fox made a career at the Mexican subsidiary of Coca-Cola, rising from route supervisor to chief executive officer. After a 15-year stint in the soda business, he joined the family businesses, alternately running a farm and a footwear company.

One day in the mid-1980s, he met Manuel J. Clouthier, the late presidential candidate and the man who would become his political mentor. Under Clouthier’s guidance, Fox began his political career, winning election to Congress in 1988. Three years later, he apparently was cheated out of the governorship of his native state of Guanajuato. In 1995, he ran again and won. While governor, Fox began to think the impossible: He could take on the PRI political establishment in a presidential race and win.

His race for the presidency opened, as one might expect from a political maverick, unconventionally. In 1997, he began touring the country to inform anyone who would listen, including his party’s leadership, that he was seeking the presidency.

Fox’s popularity and personality are not the only explanation for his competitiveness. In the past, some opposition candidates may have actually won the presidency but were unable to prove it because the government controlled the vote counting. This situation, however, changed for the 1994 presidential election, when an autonomous and independent Federal Electoral Institute was established. It is this electoral body that makes it possible to have a clean election.

Fox, who was interviewed in Los Angeles and Mexico, is divorced. He has four adopted children, two of whom attend college. They all regularly rendezvous at the family ranch in the state of Guanajuato.

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Question: Watching you on the campaign trail, I get the impression that you are two different people: the business-executive-turned-politician solicitous of his country’s future and a foul-talking populist dressed as a cowboy. Which is the true Vicente Fox?

Answer: There are two Foxes, indeed: One who has to fight to end the PRI dictatorship that Mexico endures, and one who can successfully and efficiently govern Mexico.

Q: Wasn’t the PRI’s primary election to select a presidential candidate a big step forward in party democracy?

A: No. Like most Mexicans, I believe it was a farce. . . . We all knew there was an official candidate appointed by the president [Ernesto Zedillo] who would be imposed upon party members.

Q: Do you trust the Federal Electoral Institute to hold a clean and transparent election?

A: I do, because its members are a group of honest citizens. But I don’t trust the state’s political machine, because during the PRI primary, it . . . channeled illegal campaign contributions to its candidate. . . . Just remember how, during the PRI primary, the losing PRI candidates complained about the abusive practices of the party hierarchy. We know that the office of the president will try to do the same thing during the presidential election, and we, the citizenry, the PAN and Vicente Fox must be prepared to confront it.

Q: If elected president, who will you appoint to your cabinet?

A: I’ll do what I did during my tenure as governor of the state of Guanajuato. I’ll seek the best people in the country to be in my cabinet, people from the three main parties in Mexico. Talented, honest and capable citizens with a proven record serving the people. People who know how to make Mexico grow economically, people with moral stature and enough courage to send corrupt politicians to jail. We’ll find people who can successfully lead an education revolution.

Q: Does this mean you believe there are some honest Priistas?

A: Yes, many. I know many undersecretaries, area directors and many more.

Q: Will you be able to govern if Congress remains as divided as it is now?

A: I will govern Mexico just as I governed Guanajuato, where Congress was controlled by the opposition. A good politician creates consensus. In a country where there is political plurality, we have to find ways to integrate different ideas.

Q: What is Mexico’s biggest problem?

A: The wave of violent crime, which is tolerated and encouraged by corrupt and dishonest authorities. Next is the economic problem of low wages, unemployment and extended poverty. These two problems go hand in hand, and solving them should be our first priority.

Q: You’ve said you want to nearly double the country’s annual economic growth, to 7%. How are you going to do it?

A: I believe that is the minimum rate of growth needed to catch up with the times. We need to create over 1 million jobs annually; we have to keep up with growing demands in education, health and infrastructure.

Q: But how are you going to do it?

A: By developing trust, something that is lacking in the country. By building trust, we’ll have the internal and external investment we need to grow. We’ll follow a disciplined economic model that will give us, by my fourth year in office, a fiscal surplus that will ensure the independence and autonomy of the Bank of Mexico, our central bank. By law, we’ll make the central bank responsible for the country’s monetary policy. It will be responsible for keeping inflation down and will have the authority to decide the exchange rate of the peso. We’ll also finish all the necessary economic reforms left behind by past administrations, to ensure that every single state agency is run efficiently, and those that need to be converted into private enterprises are transferred. . . .

Q: Are you talking about privatization?

A: I call them transfers. All transfers must meet these four conditions: The state must make money with the sale; consumers should benefit from the price of the product or service sold; workers should not be affected; and there should be a social reason for the sale.

Q: Pemex, Mexico’s government-owned oil company, desperately needs capital to be more productive. If parts of it are not privatized, how are you going to make it work efficiently?

A: I have studied how Pemex works, and I don’t believe it needs to be privatized. . . . The economy can be run efficiently and grow at a 7% annual rate without privatizing Pemex. Once I become president, however, I will look at all the alternatives in this case. If the transfer of some of the companies contained within Pemex meets my four conditions, and if it is the will of Mexican citizens to contemplate these options, then we’ll see if selling them benefits Mexico.

Q: Has the North American Free Trade Agreement been good for Mexico?

A: It has brought foreign investment [to Mexico], about $10 billion a year, and it has created a lot of jobs. But I feel we must go ahead with a new phase. We must begin to talk to Canada and the United States to include the free flow of people under NAFTA. What is needed--and I know it sounds a bit too strong now--is to have the three countries evolving into a common market, an association that, in the long term, will reduce the brutal wage differential among the three countries. Today, a Mexican worker makes $5 a day, while an American worker makes $60 a day. This difference in wages will always make the border an unstable zone. We have to do what Europe did with Spain, Portugal and Greece. We need to improve our sense of solidarity and friendship to turn the three partners into winners.

Q: How are you going to solve the crime problem in Mexico?

A: To solve the crime plague, we need to live in a full-fledged democracy, that is, in a system of government with checks and balances. Today’s violence and corruption are a byproduct of the political monopoly we have in place. Drug trafficking is closely linked to some circles of power. We have to clean up the place and straighten up government. We must instill ethics and morality into the office of the president, something we have never had up until this day. Our past presidents run away from the country with enormous fortunes or hide in their mansions because they cannot face the Mexican people.

Q: Are you including the current president in this list?

A: Well, we’ll see how he ends when he finishes his term. We never know before they finish their terms. So, in his case, I don’t know if it is going to be the same story. To strengthen the rule of law, you have to send the right signals from the office of the president. We should make every single government official accountable for his or her deeds. I will introduce an initiative to end immunity for public servants and another to have the attorney general appointed by Congress, not by the president. We are studying the possibility of having a part of the judiciary voted in, not appointed. Last, but not least, we must clean up the police force. There is an intolerable impunity in the country. Currently, only four of every 100 crimes are punished. The justice system needs more funding, more intelligence, more technology and more training.

Q: It’s quite fashionable in Mexico to blame everything on “neoliberalism.” But isn’t that what the rest of the world calls a free-market economy?

A: Yes. We must make a clear distinction between [neoliberalism] and PRI liberalism, which is a corrupted form of liberalism that has been a total failure in this country. We have 40 million people who live in poverty, 26 million people in extreme poverty; 18 million people have left the country and now work in the United States. I am not against a neoliberal economic policy in the U.S., because [U.S.] citizens have 14 years of schooling, on average, monopolies do not exist and economic development demands a free market. That is not the case in Mexico. We just cannot allow the market to assign blindly its resources or to distribute wealth. The state must conduct the country’s economic development in harmony with the market. . . . I believe the free market generates wealth, but the state should intervene, selectively and temporarily, to ensure sustainable development.

Q: How would you assess the U.S.-Mexico relationship, and what would you like to change?

A: The relationship [is] very distant, cold, unprofessional and insincere. We have to start speaking to each other truthfully. . . . We both must understand that our partnership is mandatory, because we [not only] share a common border but we can also succeed as partners. . . . Instead of exchanging accusations, we could have a shared long-term vision and behave like friendly neighbors and partners.