Mexico’s Vicente Fox -- talking ‘bout a revolution

HERE’S some unsolicited advice for Mexico’s former president Vicente Fox: When you write an autobiography in which you lambaste your political predecessors as “kleptopresidents” -- i.e., thieving fat cats who gorged themselves silly at the public trough -- it’s best not to publish it shortly after appearing with your wife in a magazine photo spread featuring your lavish, multimillion-dollar ranch estate.

That’s what Fox did last month, in an ill-timed publicity gesture possibly meant to boost sales of his new memoir, “Revolution of Hope: The Life, Faith, and Dreams of a Mexican President.” Instead, the former first couple’s rash display of conspicuous consumption gave Fox’s old political enemies an opportunity to fire back -- accusing him of having pilfered public funds in office and demanding a full-blown investigation into his financial affairs.

One critic ripped Fox for padding his pockets “in a very shameless and cynical way.” And that was Lino Korrodi, the finance chairman for Fox’s historic 2000 presidential campaign, which ended 71 years of monopoly rule by PRI, the Institutional Revolutionary Party, and ushered in a new era of Mexican democracy. In a recent open letter, Fox denied any impropriety “[b]efore Mexico, and the Mexicans, and my mother in heaven.”

Even before he left office last December and retired to his now-embattled Rancho San Cristóbal, Fox seemed destined to be remembered as a kind of Mesoamerican Mikhail Gorbachev. He and his centrist, pro-business PAN, or National Action Party, unquestionably helped dismantle the paternalistic PRI monolith, whose skill in manipulating the trappings of democracy to mask its autocratic control prompted Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa to brand Mexico as “the perfect dictatorship.” It’s a phrase Fox invokes more than once in “Revolution of Hope.”

But like Gorbachev in post-Soviet Russia, Fox has been faulted for not pushing his revolution far enough -- for failing to fully capitalize on the powerful mandate handed him in 2000 by his long-suffering nation of more than 100 million. Specifically, some argue, he did not do enough to win an immigration accord with the United States, foster competition in key Mexican industries such as telecommunications, curb Mexico’s rampant, violent narco-trafficking gangs or push investigations into the human-rights atrocities committed against political dissidents during the country’s “dirty war” of the 1960s and ‘70s.

As Fox rightly maintains in his book, some of this was not his fault but Osama bin Laden’s.

When George W. Bush became president, a few weeks after Fox, he honored Mexico by making it his first foreign stop as head of state. Bush and Fox had known each other as state governors in the late 1990s and had struck up a rapport based on their shared self-image as good-ol’-farm-boys-turned-politicians and their regard for each other’s culture. (Fox’s German American grandfather immigrated to Mexico from Ohio in the late 1890s, and Fox attended a Jesuit prep school in Wisconsin.) In his book, Fox describes 43, approvingly, as “quite simply the cockiest guy I have ever met in my life,” a man who “exuded that enormous self-assurance that some find arrogant but I have always rather liked in Americans.”

Alas, this warm personal relationship turned chilly after Sept. 11, as the United States shifted its attention to the Middle East, postponing any discussion of an immigration treaty or a guest-worker program. The friendship got frostier when Mexico refused to support the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Fox suggests that the administration might have anticipated this reluctance had it recognized that Mexico’s long history of occupation by foreign armies (including that of the United States) made it wary of supporting others’ wars of conquest. “On Iraq, I think that George W. Bush did what he deeply believed was right,” Fox writes. “The sad thing is that he was so deeply, deeply wrong.”

The most entertaining parts of “Revolution of Hope” are those detailing how Fox led the charge against the PRI, first as governor of the central Mexican state of Guanajuato, then in his come-from-behind presidential candidacy. Although he grew up privileged by Mexican standards, Fox acknowledges that as the offspring of provincial “entrepreneurial rancheros,” he resented “the indulged sons of the wealthy establishment.” Eventually, that resentment became the weapon he wielded against the entrenched PRI.

Fox comes off as sincere in his conviction that the PRI stranglehold was choking Mexico’s potential and had to be ended. Yet the book, co-written with his longtime political consultant Rob Allyn, sometimes strains in attempting to make Fox’s life experiences dovetail with his political philosophy. (“Even from our cot above the boot warehouse in Paris, I could see the results of the great European economic integration of the 1980s.”) More significant, the book’s insistence on imparting a patina of ideological consistency to his opinions occasionally makes them seem overly inflexible, most notably in his relentless advocacy of free markets as the key to 21st century international relations. Despite the former Coca-Cola executive’s claim that international trade “has become a win-win deal for workers on both sides of the global divide,” the current record is decidedly mixed -- not only in Mexico, whose laborers continue risking their lives crossing the Rio Grande despite NAFTA, but also in places such as India and China, where hundreds of millions remain in poverty and mounting environmental damage must be weighed against the benefits of open trade.

Some of Fox’s other editorial choices are puzzling. For example, he allots a single paragraph to the massacre at Mexico City’s Plaza of the Three Cultures, a watershed of Mexican politics in which an estimated 200 to 300 protesters were killed as the country, about to host the 1968 Olympics, clamped down on dissent. He also indulges in some gratuitous bashing of Venezuela’s leftist president, Hugo Chávez, and former Mexico City Mayor Andrés Manuel López Obrador, whom Fox labels a “leftist demagogue.” Yet while condemning Fidel Castro’s human-rights record, he praises the much more hard-line Cuban leader’s “inexhaustible energy and brilliant, diverse intelligence.” More statesmanlike is his thoughtful, nuanced argument that the United States shouldn’t wall itself off from Mexico’s vast reserve of relatively cheap labor just as it faces a huge economic challenge from China.

Despite that sprawling ranch, Fox is still highly popular at home, probably because of the affection he holds (and expresses well here) for Mexico’s history, landscape, culture and people. If Mexicans are more hopeful about the future than they were seven years ago, and surveys indicate they are, he deserves at least some of the credit.

reed.johnson@latimes.com