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 Editorials | At Issue | May 2005 
Mexican Democracy Lurches Forward Under Fox
 Kenneth Emmond - The Herald Mexico
| | In his May Day address, Fox admitted that the transition to democracy will take time, perhaps a generation, and that achieving it is difficult. |
It may well be that President Vicente Fox will one day be remembered for the advances he's made bringing democracy to Mexico. Those of us who were there at the time will also remember the ham-handed way in which he went about it.
What could be more laudable than the array of government audits Fox launched early in his presidency? Every few weeks another report emerges about some government department with sizable discrepancies in its accounts.
Due to flaws in the legal system, we may not see many defendants called personally to account. Yet there's progress, because audits discourage future embezzlement, and without them we wouldn't even know about the missing funds.
Still, the record is uneven. The goal of the audits is transparency in government, but the reports were curiously vague about funds that came and went in the Vamos Mexico! Foundation established by first lady Marta Sahagún.
Then there's the nasty rumor that just won't go away — because Fox hasn't provided evidence to the contrary — that the reason banks weren't forced to come completely clean on the funny accounting inherited by the savings protection fund Fobaproa, may have something to do with Fobaproa benefits accruing to Fox's family business.
With a new political party in power and the exemplary manner in which outgoing President Ernesto Zedillo handled the 2000 transition, it seemed reasonable to conclude that the "dedazo," the selection by the incumbent president of his successor candidate, had forever been laid to rest.
Then a campaign emerged, from somewhere, promoting the first lady as candidate for the National Action Party (PAN), a campaign Fox did nothing to discourage. It took the resignation of one of his most trusted advisers and a chorus of criticism before Sahagún announced her non-candidacy.
That brings us to the biggest gaffe of all. Disturbed that Mexico City's mayor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, had built up an impressive opinion poll lead in the prematurely-born 2006 presidential campaign, the administration charged him with violating a court order and had him stripped of immunity from prosecution.
Under the guise of applying "Rule of Law," it used a technicality to try to prevent the mayor — from the left-leaning Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) and a "populist" at that! — from eligibility as a candidate.
Only under intense pressure, bolstered by a million-strong April 24 demonstration of popular support for López Obrador, did the government back down.
Well, at least we can claim that under President Fox, freedom of the press has been achieved, with newspapers and broadcasters free to say what they like about the government. Or can we?
Interior Secretary Santiago Creel, defeated by López Obrador in 2000 in the Mexico City mayoralty elections, led the campaign to prevent the mayor from running for president. Now Francisco Gil Diaz, the finance secretary, is front and center in a personal vendetta with TV Azteca, which recently aired some unpleasant points of view on Fobaproa — and on him.
Gil Diaz tried to muzzle TV Azteca before it broadcast a five-part series on the horror show that is Foboproa, which cast the finance secretary in an unfavorable light.
One part, aired and later rerun, claimed that the way the multi-billion-dollar sale of Banamex to CitiCorp in 2001 was transacted violated rules and enabled Banamex's principal shareholder, Roberto Hernández, to avoid paying income tax on his profits, and that Gil Diaz approved the deal.
TV Azteca also showed its viewers documents from the finance secretary advising network owner Ricardo Salinas Pliego not to air the program. That's known as extortion, and that's the charge that TV Azteca filed against the finance secretary.
The threats had nothing to do with broadcasting. Salinas has legal problems outside of the newsroom, and soon after the program aired, TV Azteca and its top executives, including Salinas, were slapped with a $2.3 million dollar fine on an unrelated issue — charges of fraud and insider trading that, curiously, had lain dormant for two years.
An innocent like your columnist would have thought that if Banamex or its former owner had a problem with the program's content, they would file a lawsuit. And, if Gil Diaz didn't like it, that he would file a libel suit as a citizen, instead of using his position to punish a broadcaster whose views he doesn't like. This scenario still remains to be played out, and despite the scarcity of innocent players, it smacks of a threat to the principal of press freedom.
The most charitable interpretation of all these events is that they constitute a learning process for politicians, who until 2000 had never experienced any political system other than that of the immortal caudillo, the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI).
In each case the lesson is that some things that were done under the old system are looked upon as abuses of power in a democracy.
In his May Day address, Fox admitted that the transition to democracy will take time, perhaps a generation, and that achieving it is difficult.
Fair-minded observers must concede that democracy and transparency have made important gains since 2000.
Still, it's evident that some of the most difficult lessons must be learned by the president and his cabinet.
Kenneth Emmond is a freelance journalist and economist who has lived in Mexico since 1995. Kemmond00@yahoo.com |
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