Plain Talk, Reception Raise Hopes in Mexico

President Vicente Fox’s plain talk and warm reception during his U.S. visit have underscored for Mexicans that relations between the two neighbors have never been on a better footing, raising hopes that progress on thorny immigration and trade issues might be at hand.

Analysts generally gave the Mexican president high marks for presenting his nation’s case in a forceful manner and for his apparently genuine friendship with President Bush, who spoke effusively about his guest during the three-day state visit that ended Friday. Mexicans see the cordial relations between the two leaders as an asset.

“Fox did well. He addressed the American audience, presenting himself as the constructor of Mexican democracy,” said Jesus Velasco, a U.S. specialist at the Center for Economic Research and Teaching here. “He did his job pushing his agenda forward as far as he could take it.”

But Fox’s visit also highlighted the reality that his major policy initiatives are out of his hands and in those of the U.S. and Mexican congresses. It’s a situation Bush also faces: Neither president can arbitrarily impose decisions on the immigration question or on trade disputes involving sugar, trucking and tuna that divide the two nations.

“In the final hour, Bush’s support may be interesting, but Bush has his own [political] dynamic” and constituencies, Velasco said, in issues ranging from migration to disputes that have cropped up in relation to both countries’ membership with Canada in the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA.

The pomp and fanfare of this week’s visit did little to obscure the deep differences here in Mexico, even within Fox’s own National Action Party, or PAN. Going against Fox’s position, the Mexican Senate voted Thursday to repeal part of NAFTA dealing with sugar. Many lawmakers here feel that Mexico is getting a bad deal in free trade when it comes to agriculture.

An example of the fractiousness was illustrated by opposing parties’ response to Fox’s speech Thursday before a joint session of U.S. Congress. Although hailed by U.S. lawmakers, the address cost him points with the leaders of Mexico’s opposition parties as he is trying to forge a legislative alliance to push forward his ambitious slate of reforms.

In the speech, Fox implied that Mexico’s democratic impulse dates from his July 2000 electoral victory, when he and the PAN ended the 71 years of single party dominance by the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI. Fox told U.S. lawmakers that the PRI regime “for the most part was considered antidemocratic and untrustworthy.”

Sitting sullenly in the Capitol audience was Dulce Maria Sauri, head of the PRI. Fox had invited her along to Washington to try to improve relations. But on Thursday she characterized as a “barbarity” his implication that democracy in Mexico was born last year.

Fox had been more magnanimous to the PRI in his Wednesday acceptance speech of the National Endowment for Democracy award in Washington, crediting the “democratic behavior of the PRI and its president, Ernesto Zedillo, on July 2” when they quickly recognized the electoral victory of Fox and the PAN.

The episode exemplifies Fox’s willingness to attack the PRI when the purpose suits him and yet to be conciliatory when trying to gather support for his reforms, said Jose Antonio Crespo, a political scientist with the economic research center.

In an interview Monday before departing for Washington, Fox predicted the beginning of a “highly productive 12 to 18 months in the relations between the executive branch and Congress.” That sort of harmony is essential to the success of Fox’s proposals to reform tax, labor and energy policy, because his party does not have a majority in either house of Congress.