Vicente Fox

I

Introduction

Vicente Fox or Fox, Vicente, born in 1942, president of Mexico from 2000 to 2006, who made political history when he defeated the presidential candidate of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). It was the first time the PRI had lost the presidency since the party was formed in 1929. Fox’s election ended the PRI’s dominance, the longest single-party dominance of a country in the 20th century.

Vicente Fox Quesada was born in Mexico City of a Spanish mother and a Mexican father. His paternal grandfather was an Irish American immigrant from Ohio who moved to Mexico for health reasons and eventually purchased a ranch in the state of Guanajuato. Fox’s father continued to work the ranch, and Fox was raised there. He attended Jesuit schools in León, Guanajuato, and then pursued university studies in business administration at Ibero-American University, a Jesuit college in Mexico City.

Fox began his career working for the Coca-Cola Company in the 1960s. He rose through the ranks, and from 1975 to 1979 he served as president of the company’s Mexican and Latin American division. In the early 1980s Fox ran his own company, Grupo Fox, which specialized in agriculture and shoe manufacturing.

II

Governor

Fox joined politics late in his career. He was motivated to participate by Manuel Clouthier, the 1988 presidential candidate for the conservative National Action Party (PAN). In 1988 Fox, as a PAN candidate, was elected to Mexico’s Chamber of Deputies from his home state; he represented Guanajuato's Third District until 1991. In that year Fox ran for governor of Guanajuato, again as a PAN candidate. However, he lost the election, which many analysts described as fraudulent. In 1995 he ran again and was elected governor by a large margin.

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As governor, Fox was able to bring important outside investment to his state to promote economic growth and improve education. He also overcame the difficulties of governing a state in the face of strong political opposition in the legislature. He was willing to incorporate members of other parties into his administration and to compromise with the local congressional leaders.

While serving as governor, Fox began campaigning for the presidency, winning the nomination of the PAN and the support of several other smaller parties. He founded a grassroots organization in 1998 known as the Friends of Fox, and this organization later proved critical to his electoral victory. In August 1999 Fox resigned as governor to focus his attention on the presidential campaign.

III

President

In the 2000 presidential election, Fox ran against Francisco Labastida Ochoa, the PRI’s candidate, and Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas Solórzano, the candidate for the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD). Fox won the election with 43 percent of the vote. It was the first time since 1929 that the PRI candidate did not win the presidential election.

Fox began his term as president with two distinct handicaps. He was elected without a majority of the popular vote, and his party lacked a legislative majority in the Mexican Congress. The PRI retained the largest number of congressional seats, with sufficient voting power to thwart most of Fox’s legislative reform initiatives. Two attempts at passing legislation to reform the fiscal system—including levying value-added taxes on food and medicine—were soundly defeated. Fox also promoted a measure to reform Mexico’s Constitution that would permit private investment in the nation’s energy sector. This was an extremely sensitive political issue that was vigorously opposed by a wide spectrum of Mexicans, especially many in the opposition and particularly the powerful PRI.

Midterm congressional elections in the summer of 2003 eroded support for Fox’s party, the PAN, with its share of the vote dropping to about 30 percent. This made it unlikely that Fox and the PAN could achieve significant constitutional and legislative reform during the last years of Fox’s term as president.

Fox also lost considerable political support early in his term when he promoted a new immigration accord with the United States, hoping to capitalize on his positive personal relationship with U.S. president George W. Bush. Fox wanted a system in which Mexicans could obtain temporary work visas in the United States to cut down on the problem of illegal immigration. This initiative was sidetracked for more than two years, however, in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of September 2001 and heightened security and immigration concerns in the United States. Bush resurrected the plan again in early 2004, bringing Fox valuable political support in Mexico although the plan’s passage is likely to face stiff opposition in the U.S. Congress.

Despite a lackluster legislative record and little evidence of significant economic and structural change in Mexico, Fox remained personally popular with the electorate. He never succeeded, however, in instituting the dramatic economic reforms he envisaged. Nevertheless, as the first opposition party candidate for president to defeat the PRI, Fox’s legacy may well be significant simply as the president who led Mexico into a new age of democracy.

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