Mexico’s Fox is on a losing streak

The very bad week of lame-duck Mexican President Vicente Fox began shortly after midnight Monday with a series of guerrilla bombings, and it’s been downhill from there.

On Tuesday, Fox was ordered by lawmakers not to leave Mexico on a trip, and has since been captured on television making indiscreet statements and been sued by his own lawyers.

Nobody was hurt in the bombings of a bank building, the country’s electoral tribunal and a national party headquarters. But the incidents caught the attention of international investors who until then had figured Mexico’s increasingly restless leftist movement was largely benign. The drug war raging along the border and erupting on the Pacific Coast already has money people nervous about doing business here. Add bomb-throwing radicals to the list.

Mexico’s lower house voted Tuesday to keep Fox from leaving next week for a trade mission to Vietnam and Australia. Lawmakers said that Fox, whose six-year term ends this month, ought to be home restoring order in the state of Oaxaca’s capital city, where thousands of federal police and protesters have been battling for control of the streets.

Lawmakers said maybe Vietnam, where the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum will hold a two-day summit. But they weren’t buying a four-day stopover in Australia, Mexico’s 32nd-largest trading partner and home to one of Fox’s daughters.

“It’s great that the daughter of President Fox went to study in another country,” said federal lawmaker Erick Lopez Barriga. “... But maybe it would be better for him to make a work visit to Oaxaca; better to go to the border; better that he stay and try to resolve the security problems in our own country.”

It was an old story for Fox, who lost his reform battles on taxes, energy and labor in Congress, and he reacted angrily to the humiliation. “We can’t allow, in this time of democracy, the president to be kidnapped because of a few people,” he said Tuesday night after the vote.

The next morning, Fox’s former attorneys filed a lawsuit alleging that he hadn’t paid the $3 million in legal bills he ran up while defending himself against charges of laundering money from U.S. donors in his 2000 presidential campaign. Fear of U.S. interests buying a Mexican election makes it illegal to receive foreign donations or campaign abroad.

The case had been seen as a slam-dunk against Fox, but lead attorney Arturo Quintero won it, with a fine being paid instead by Fox’s National Action Party.

“I worked a long time and got very good results,” Quintero said in a radio interview.

The president agreed to personally square the legal bill more than a year ago, said Quintero, who added that he still hadn’t seen a dime. “It’s a private matter between them,” said Fox spokesman Ruben Aguilar.

Fox again made headlines Thursday, when Mexican newspapers reported that he told a television interviewer at Los Pinos, Mexico’s presidential residence: “I can say whatever stupid thing I want. Really. I’m leaving.” The video was posted on YouTube.

It’s not that he doesn’t care. Fox has spent a fortune -- no one will say how much -- on government-paid commercials that have been clogging radio and television since September. The spots boast of gains for Mexico under his leadership: more housing, more help for the poor, better healthcare.

The first president elected from an opposition party after the seven-decade rule of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, Fox wants to be known as the only one in recent history to keep the peso stable and inflation low.

Tall and strapping, the 64-year-old Fox is popular and engaging in a crowd. But his image has taken hits.

The list of complaints against him, which begins with poor job growth, is long and includes his failure to settle with angry Oaxacan leftists, his enduring the sabotage of his last state-of-the-union address by losing presidential candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, and his inability to stem the corruption, kidnappings, beheadings, dismemberments, body burnings and other grim fallout of the country’s drug wars.

As if things couldn’t get any worse, there’s a cumbia-style pop song, “Fox, Hand It Over and Leave,” sharing the airwaves with his publicly funded touts.

The last verse of the Guillermo Zapata song, very roughly translated:

“You’re going back to your ranch to milk a vaca [cow],

because you couldn’t fix Oaxaca.”

sam.enriquez@latimes.com

Carlos Martinez and Cecilia Sanchez of The Times’ Mexico City Bureau contributed to this report.