QUERETARO, Mexico, March 14 (UPI) -- It has been a good week for President Vicente Fox, even if it is, once again, more to the north of the border than south of it that the applause resounds. A major drug trafficker was caught, delighting Washington. But the arrest might be a harbinger of something broader: that Fox is beginning to wield his reforming broom.
That he needs to do so was confirmed a week ago by an opinion poll published in a Mexico City newspaper, Milenio. The poll compared opinions of Fox in February this year with those in February 2001 (which was just two months after Fox had taken office.) Those judging that Fox is doing a good or very good job fell by 23 percentage points from 71 percent to 48 percent.
What was perhaps most revealing, and most in tune with Mexican sentiment, however, was that 76 percent of those polled had little or no confidence that Fox could improve the country's position.
There were high hopes in the second half of 2000 when Mexicans found, almost to their surprise -- and, some would say, to that of Fox -- that they were going to have a president who was not from the seven-decade-ruling Partido Revolucionario Institucional. And, of course, Fox had fanned those hopes with promises of change: a new broom that would sweep away corruption and create a more modern, open and successful country. A year or so on, hope has been replaced with a feeling that Fox might want to change the country but is unable to. The obstacles are too great.
For Fox the decline in his popularity holds a threat. In 2003 congressional elections will be held in which Fox covets a majority. That would improve immensely his chances of implementing reforms. But if by 2003 Mexicans have decided that Fox is a no-hoper, the more likely outturn is that he will do poorly in the polls and that the PRI will make a strong comeback.
Fox therefore needs to get a grip. And this week he, or his police, did, arresting in Puebla, in central Mexico, Benjamín Arellano Felix, one of the leaders of the drugs cartel based in Tijuana on the border with the United States.
This was a second success. Late in February the Mexican authorities said that Ramón Arellano Félix, the oldest and, by reputation, the most violent of the five Arellano Félix brothers, might have been killed February 10 in a shootout with the police. Fox said last week that DNA evidence had now confirmed that Ramón was killed. Thus, after many years in which the Arellano Félix brothers have pursued their violent and lucrative business unpunished, despite being on the FBI's most-wanted list, two have at last bumped into the Mexican authorities in less than a month. Remarkable.
Fox may well be able to claim credit for this. The drug traffickers' ability to evade capture for years owes much to Mexico's obscene tradition of impunity. If you are powerful enough, or rich enough, you can escape justice: that has been the law in Mexico. There are many allegations, moreover, of connections between the drug traffickers and the army and police. But much comes from the top. A head of state who is keen to end impunity seems to have brought about an improvement in the fight against drugs, though not yet in the tackling of corruption and common crime--some of it perpetrated unquestionably by the police.
The successes against the Tijuana cartel were hailed by U.S. President George W. Bush and by ordinary Mexicans. Provoking as much or more interest in Mexico, however, is the investigation into illegal funding of PRI candidates by the state-run oil company, Pemex. The Pemex case points to the sort of deep-seated corruption at the heart of the Mexican state that Fox the campaigner promised to expose. The investigation has not yet come to the boil. Will it?
Meanwhile Fox appears to be returning to the fiscal reforms which the Congress blocked for much of last year before finally passing a confusing luxury tax in the first hours of 2002. Fauzi Hamdan, a senator from Fox's Partido Acción Nacional party, said Wednesday that the finance minister, Francisco Gil Díaz, and the PAN want to make a second attempt to eliminate the VAT exemption on food and medicines. This measure, which may appear harsh, represents a means of addressing Mexico's very poor ability to collect tax revenues.
Fox appears to have decided that he should revisit his congressional defeats in his first year in office and turn them into victories. Perhaps his willingness to do so follows a private meeting this week with Roberto Madrazo, the man who, after a controversial internal election victory -- and, indeed, a controversial career in which he has often been accused of rigging elections and of abusing human rights -- now leads the PRI.
As head of the PRI, what game will Madrazo play? Though his election victory had all the elements of the PRI of old -- causing one congressman to abandon the party in disgust -- Madrazo, too, talks of reform and of renouncing the past. It is not impossible that he will decide to work with Fox -- at least, for a while--in order to foster his image as a (ruthless) pragmatist, a man that gets things done. If he does do so, Fox's effort to restart his presidency will also be a beneficiary.
Inside Mexico is a weekly column published on Thursdays in which our international economics correspondent reflects on events in the country in which he lives. Comments to [email protected].
