Fox’s Rise Has U.S. Scrambling to Get Clearer View of What’s Over Fence

There is one fact about Mexico that official Washington has long held as certain: When Mexicans elect their president, the same party always wins.

With the relationship between the United States and Mexico as volatile as it is, that certainty has had its pluses.

Washington might yearn publicly for democracy in Mexico. But when it comes down to the hard business of working together across a 2,000-mile-long border, it has helped enormously to have a clear picture of who was standing on the other side.

Suddenly, the view across the frontier is blurred.

Vicente Fox, a charismatic opposition candidate for president, is in a statistical dead heat with Francisco Labastida, the nominee of the party that has held power in Mexico since 1929. With the July 2 election only weeks away, Washington is struggling to figure out what a Fox victory could mean for the fragile cross-border partnership that the U.S. and Mexico have forged.

“There is a big element of surprise both in the U.S. and in Mexico,” said Denise Dresser, a visiting fellow at the Pacific Council on International Policy at USC. “Six months ago, everyone had predicted the results of the election: It was going to be a hands-down victory for Labastida.

“This Fox surge has been a big surprise in both countries, and even though Fox has traveled to Washington and New York, he’s still an unknown quantity,” Dresser said. “I think official Washington will have to go through a very steep learning curve in the next several months to find out what a Fox win entails, what his policies would be and what sort of people he will surround himself with.”

After decades of presidential elections in Mexico that were little more than victory tours for a parade of preselected candidates from the autocratic Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, the possibility of change is very real. For the past decade or so, the PRI has been steadily losing its ironfisted power. Mexican society has become a protean caldron of political parties, opposition voices and nongovernmental organizations, all insisting on change.

Fox, a former Coca-Cola executive from the center-right National Action Party, or PAN, has emerged in recent weeks as the opposition candidate with the best chance of unseating the PRI. One recent poll commissioned by Reuters news service even showed him with a slight lead over Labastida. Another by the major Mexico City newspaper Reforma showed him behind by just 2 percentage points.

Policymakers at the State Department and the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City say little has been prepared on the likely makeup or policies of a Fox administration.

There are no lists of possible Fox Cabinet members or biographies on hand of his inner circle. And although Fox has said he welcomes foreign trade with and investment in Mexico, there has been little investigation of what specific policies he espouses.

And Fox has said some very controversial things on the campaign trail. He says he supports the creation of a “totally open” border between Mexico and the U.S. in the next decade but hasn’t elaborated on what he means. And he has said Mexico should adopt a stronger stance in its relations with the U.S.

Fox built his political base as a conservative. But his inner circle now includes several prominent left-wing intellectuals who in the last two Mexican presidential campaigns were advisors to Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, the standard-bearer of the Mexican left and a vigorous opponent of the North American Free Trade Agreement.

And while Fox has been traveling to Washington and New York for years to meet with top officials in the political and financial worlds, he is still known largely by his image as a towering, swaggering populist.

“The image that we have of Vicente Fox in the U.S. is an image that is familiar to Americans. It’s the Marlboro Man. It’s the head of Coca-Cola,” said Delal Baer, a Mexico analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

“These are not frightening images to an American. These are reassuring images. Now, whether he really is the Marlboro Man is another matter.”

Baer added: “Until recently, all polls showed Labastida with a comfortable lead. There was a certain complacency in the U.S. government. Now that there’s been a tightening up, I think there’s a scurrying about as they try to come up with contingencies for what to expect.”

Much of what Fox has said he stands for appears designed to make Washington comfortable. He is emphatically in favor of free trade. He seems to enjoy broad support among Mexico’s business elite and is the first opposition candidate to do so. He says that he would form a coalition Cabinet and that he wouldn’t clean house in the government’s lower and middle ranks, even though virtually all government workers are PRI members.

“He has a lot of good ideas, but his policies are not really that different from those of the PRI,” one senior Clinton administration official said. “There’s been enough stability in Mexico and enough institutionalization of the electoral process that you have more of a possibility of Mexico voting for change without causing instability.”

The administration says it is playing no favorites in the race. Administration officials met with Fox when he visited Washington in March and with aides to Labastida when they were in town.

But in a possible nod to the seriousness of his candidacy, top administration officials have offered considerably more access to Fox during the campaign than they have to any Mexican opposition candidate in the past. White House anti-drug policy director Gen. Barry R. McCaffrey and Undersecretary of State Thomas R. Pickering met with Fox on his last visit.

At every meeting, U.S. officials have been careful to project official neutrality.

“There’s no indication that Fox is going to be deviating from a commitment to a market economy,” said White House Deputy Chief of Staff Maria Echaveste. “We’re prepared to work with whomever wins. And the most important issue is having a vibrant, strong democracy and honest and fair elections.”

Immigration and Naturalization Service Commissioner Doris Meissner told reporters last week that “what we’ve done, what we’ve built, transcends any particular administration.”

“We share a common border,” Meissner said. “That is not going to change. Any government in Mexico or the United States is faced with the border as a fact of national life. The progress that we have made that is direct and oriented toward problem-solving is something that any new government will build on.”

Still, the scene at a meeting held in Washington last week between Mexican and U.S. Cabinet members and other top-level officials was indicative of the comfortable familiarity that U.S. officials feel toward those with whom they have been dealing.

In a giant auditorium at the State Department, U.S. officials mingled with their Mexican counterparts, with midlevel officials greeting each other as old friends.

Officials from the two countries have formed strong relationships in recent years as a generation of PRI leaders educated at U.S. universities has come to power.

These policymakers have moved away from the anti-Americanism of Mexico’s political past. Today, Mexican and U.S. officials at all levels meet frequently to cooperate on issues and work out problems.

“American officials have been comfortable in the knowledge that technocrats were firmly in power and that there was someone guarding the fort, in economic policy in particular,” Dresser said.

“It’s not clear who Fox would put in charge of the shop,” Dresser said. “He says he supports neoliberalism with a more human face, but it’s not known if the technocrats who have walked through the corridors of power in Washington so comfortably would remain in charge.”