In Mexico’s Fox, Observers Find a Political Paradox

It was one of the lowest points of Vicente Fox’s life.

He had just lost a fraud-riddled race for governor of his native state, Guanajuato. He was broke. And his wife had left him after two decades of marriage.

To anyone else, Fox looked like a political corpse in the early 1990s.

Not to Fox. In the depths of his crisis, he set a quixotic goal: to seek Mexico’s presidency, taking on an authoritarian system run by the world’s longest-ruling party.

The towering former rancher will cap his recent victory by meeting today with that other comeback kid, President Clinton, at the White House.

What kind of president will Fox be? Friends and colleagues call him a hard-charging visionary with the communication skills of Ronald Reagan. They say Fox, 58, a onetime Coca-Cola executive, won by combining political savvy with long-range business planning--skills that they say will enable him to transform Mexico.

And yet, the Mexican president-elect is still largely an unknown quantity, at home and abroad. Acquaintances say Fox has little ideology and a brief track record in office. He is a riddle wrapped in a mystery stuffed into size 12 cowboy boots--a man who has spent almost all of his short political career running for president.

“He hasn’t had time to govern,” said Ramon Martin Huerta, a Fox supporter who replaced him as governor of Guanajuato a year ago.

Fox is the antithesis of the traditional Mexican politician. The grandson of an Irish American immigrant from Ohio, Fox grew up celebrating Thanksgiving--something he downplays in nationalistic Mexico.

What he does emphasize are his country roots. Fox was raised on a remote ranch with no television or phone, far from the elite urban society that produced many Mexican officials. Although Fox’s family lived comfortably, his childhood playmates were local peasant children.

“They continue to be my friends, but they continue to be poor. This taught me something important: In life, what matters are opportunities,” Fox said in an interview on the presidential jet last week. “The heart of my government’s philosophy is to ensure that everybody has opportunities in Mexico.”

Fox’s big opportunity came as a teenager, when he studied business administration at Mexico City’s Iberoamericana University, a prestigious Jesuit institution. The strapping young man was such a country hick that classmates nicknamed him The Indian.

Climbing to the Top at Coca-Cola Mexico

But his folksy manner would serve him well in his first job, at Coca-Cola’s Mexico operation. Friends recall his remarkable ability to lead both college-bred whiz kids and less-educated company veterans. A tireless worker, Fox rose from local salesman to president of Coca-Cola Mexico at the age of 32.

“The competitiveness between the soft-drink companies feeds a spirit of great competition among employees,” Fox said in the interview. The same spirit carries over to politics, he said. “Either you compete and you move, or you’re dead.”

The company also transformed the way Fox saw the world, giving him a no-nonsense approach to solving problems, colleagues say. He became a master at using media and other business tools to promote a product. Eventually, that product would be himself.

Guillermo Cantu, one of Fox’s many Coke colleagues who became key to his campaigns, said Fox “is sensitive to the market. He perceives what people want, even when they don’t say it. He realized that people were fed up with what was happening in Mexico.”

In fact, by the late 1980s, Mexico’s essentially one-party system was showing signs of strain.

Middle-class city dwellers frustrated with repeated economic crises were joining the small center-right National Action Party, or PAN. One day, Manuel Clouthier, a party leader, called Fox, who had retired from Coca-Cola to work in his family’s agricultural and footwear businesses.

“He gave me a very simple message: ‘Listen, Fox, in this country, we all complain about corruption, poverty, bad government. Very few do anything to change the situation,’ ” Fox recalled.

“I decided at that moment to take part in politics,” Fox said.

Not a Typical Campaign

Fox became a federal congressman in 1988, and soon set his sights on the 1991 governor’s race in Guanajuato. But this wasn’t going to be a typical campaign. Traditionally, the PAN had shown all the professionalism of a quilting bee. Fox launched his campaign a year early, spent weekends building up PAN chapters around the state, and used a sophisticated media and marketing strategy, colleagues say.

He was clearly not just another politician. “He talked about changing the system [in Mexico]. That’s what convinced me,” said Juan Manuel Oliva, a PAN senator.

Despite delirious pro-Fox rallies, he lost to the candidate of the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, in an election marred by fraud. A furious Fox led mass protests, forcing then-President Carlos Salinas de Gortari to negotiate a solution. The governor-elect was replaced with a different PAN member, Carlos Medina.

Fox was devastated.

His supporters abandoned him for Medina. His family business was suffering. Fox was so broke that friends tried to collect enough money to buy him a used van--and failed, recalls Fermin Salcedo, a businessman who worked on the Fox campaign.

On top of everything else, Fox’s wife had left him for another man, friends say. Fox was left to raise the couple’s four adopted children.

But over the next few months, something changed in Fox. The president-elect dodges questions about the period, but Salcedo says the proud, competitive Fox was ruminating a new plan. In the 1991 race, his campaign slogan had been “Let’s go for Guanajuato.” At the end of that year, Salcedo asked him to autograph a document. Fox signed, “Now, let’s go for Mexico.”

“He had gotten it into his head he could be president,” Salcedo said.

The idea seemed laughable. Fox had no money, no national stature and was facing a ruling party that controlled nearly all of Mexico’s governorships and Congress--not to mention the presidency. But there was a further hurdle: Children of immigrants were barred from becoming president in Mexico, and Fox’s mother was born in Spain.

In early 1993, Santiago Creel, a prominent corporate lawyer and civic activist, had an unusual visitor in his swank Mexico City office tower. The giant rancher had met Creel on a few occasions. Now he needed a favor.

“I want to be president,” Fox said, according to Creel. “But I have a small problem.”

Creel recalls his astonishment. “This is not a small problem,” he exclaimed. “You have to change the constitution!”

And that’s what happened. Fox spearheaded a campaign by intellectuals, lawyers and politicians to allow first-generation Mexicans to be president. Finally, Salinas agreed to the change--but decided that it would take effect in 2000, eliminating Fox from the 1994 race.

Once again, Fox was crushed. He returned to his ranch, declaring himself on a “political strike” until Salinas left office. Fox only resumed all-out political activity in 1995, when he handily won the Guanajuato governorship.

The state became a laboratory for Fox’s presidential bid.

Generally, Fox was successful. The charismatic governor won high approval ratings, especially for his expansion of scholarships and the highway system. Even his opponents say corruption declined. And Fox reveled in introducing ideas, from a micro-credit program borrowed from Bangladesh to governing structures inspired by management gurus such as Tom Peters.

But some say Fox’s big ideas--which he typically labels “mega-projects”--didn’t always produce mega-results.

And others say that Fox’s spectacular projects were done to boost the governor’s image.

“Guanajuato was governed as a platform for the presidency,” said Luis Fernando Macias, a federal electoral official based in the state.

Fox wasted no time launching his presidential bid. He formally threw his hat into the ring in July 1997, three years early. It was an unprecedented move in a country where the president set the political timetable and campaigns generally lasted only a few months.

Fox went on to revolutionize Mexican elections. In a political system dominated by cronyism, Fox formed an eclectic campaign team focused on efficiency. He used a headhunter to choose his campaign manager, a former airline executive. For a marketing director, he insisted on a Procter & Gamble veteran because of that firm’s skill at selling products, aides say.

Fox built a support group of 30,000 PAN members to win his party’s nomination and went on to form a parallel organization, Friends of Fox, with more than 4 million supporters, aides say.

“Fox always said you need a structure at least equal to your adversary’s,” said Sen. Oliva, who led the Fox campaign within the PAN.

Deeply pragmatic, Fox reached beyond the pro-business, pro-Catholic PAN to incorporate prominent left-wing intellectuals and former Communists into his campaign.

It was a sign of Fox’s disregard for ideology. In fact, Macias, the electoral official, says Fox has told him of heroes as diverse as St. Teresa of Avila and Richard Nixon--a 16th century mystic and a scheming, tough-nosed politician.

That is just one example of Fox’s paradoxical personality, friends say. While committed to democracy, Fox can sometimes act like a South American strongman, they say. He is a sophisticated political strategist who still returns to his family’s ranch on weekends, to ride horses and tuck into home cooking with a wad of tortilla instead of a fork.

And, although gregarious, Fox appears to be a solitary man, with few close friends.

Fox, who is divorced, evades questions about his love life, insisting that he has “52 million girlfriends”--the female population of Mexico. In fact, it is an open secret that he is romantically involved with his spokeswoman, Martha Sahagun, a petite Carol Burnett look-alike. Fox’s children, however, have made it clear that they oppose the idea of their father remarrying.

Fox’s inauguration isn’t until Dec. 1. But aides say he began planning his Cabinet almost a year ago, when he was still well behind in the polls. As usual, he is thinking way beyond the moment.

“He’s not going to stop,” Sahagun said. “He’s going to be a world leader.”