SAN FRANCISCO DEL RINCÓN, Mexico — A sign of Mexico’s political
evolution is the creation of its first presidential library and
museum, in the fashion of the libraries archiving and
commemorating the administrations of Harry Truman, Ronald Reagan,
Bill Clinton and other United States presidents.
Mexico was a one-party dictatorship of the statist bureaucrats of
the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) for 70 years
before the upset victory of Catholic, conservative Partido Acción
Nacional candidate Vicente Fox in 2000. In a disheartening
pattern, many if not most of Fox’s PRI predecessors became
personae non gratae in their countries — nomads with
bulging Swiss bank accounts — following their tenure in the
presidency. Presidential records, instead of being objects of
reverent examination by historians, instead were kept — or often
destroyed — as state’s evidence.
Like United States presidential libraries, Vicente Fox’s is in
his native state — in this case, adjacent to his home and ranch
near the postcard-perfect colonial university and vacation towns
of Guanajuato and San Miguel de Allende. Centro Fox’s warm, dry,
ranch-country setting and the high quality of its architecture
and museum and research facilities are reminiscent of the Reagan
Library in Simi Valley. Fox and President George W. Bush made
Fox’s Rancho San Cristóbal the site of their February 2001 summit
meeting at a moment of optimism during their new presidencies.
Fox is a man of action and is not bookish, but this rancher and
corporate executive-turned-politician has a keen, Jesuit-trained
mind that helped him overthrow the dictatorship of the PRI. He
also had good judgment in finding talented writers and editors to
help him produce a highly readable and thought-provoking
English-language memoir, Revolution of Hope. The volume
is informative and insightful about the achievements and
disappointments of his administration and its relations with the
United States. More than a memoir, Fox’s book puts forward a bold
proposal for deepening the North American Free Trade Agreement
into a more cohesive economic community along the lines of the
European Union. In this regard, it is unfortunate that another
politician already had used the title, The Audacity of
Hope.
Fox speaks flawless English, learned during a year as an exchange
student at a Jesuit boarding school in Wisconsin. In his book Fox
attaches importance to his formation in pre-Vatican II Jesuit
education, at the prep school in León, the city near his native
ranch, and at Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City. Fox’s
Guanajuato was a center of Catholic resistance to the atheistic
and socialistic regime of Plutarco Elías Calles. During Fox’s
childhood, as well as now, Mexican Catholics have venerated
20th-century martyrs including the remarkable Jesuit, Father
Miguel Pro. The Jesuits who taught young Fox in the prep school
and university were closer in mind and spirit to James Schall
than to Robert Drinan.
Fox’s Mexican variety of conservatism is not the same stuff that
is advertised as conservatism in the populist, and often
nativist, echo chambers of talk radio north of the border. Fox
gets red in the face as he expresses his hot disdain for Lou
Dobbs and Bill O’Reilly — obstacles to Fox’s aims for closer
economic and political relations between Mexico and the United
States. Fox and the PAN’s closest counterparts outside of Mexico
are the European Christian Democrats. Fox’s dream of North
American economic integration may be overshadowed by the flaws of
the European Union, but anyone who knows Fox’s stubbornly
anti-bureaucratic temperament should recognize that he does not
want to install a Brussels-style bureaucracy in the New World.
If there is a parallel to the Fox phenomenon, it might be Lech
Walesa, the charismatic leader of a drive to end a dictatorship.
Once in the presidential office, Walesa, like Fox, had great
difficulty administering a government that had been designed for
the bureaucracy of the old regime.
Fox’s impatience is legendary. It drives him, and it inspired
Mexicans in the 2000 election to make the extra effort to try to
elect an opposition candidate. The man’s carpe diem
character is apparent in a conversation with him at Centro Fox.
When this interviewer had the temerity, or perhaps it was
timidity, to suggest that Fox’s vision of a North American
economic union was a good idea that might take a generation or
more to come to fruition, Fox’s “NO!” shook the rafters. “We
can’t afford to wait!”
I don’t have the nerve or the bad philological taste to try to
translate “misunderestimate” into Spanish. But however one might
say it, don’t try to do it to Vicente Fox.
(Mr. Duggan is a visiting professor in politics and
communication at Tecnológico de Monterrey in Mexico
City.)
