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Mexico's Fox takes over with challenges ahead
December 1, 2000

\BY ELLIOT BLAIR SMITH


MEXICO CITY'Vicente Fox ends the ruling party's 71-year government monopoly and embarks on his revolution of hope today when he is sworn in as president of Mexico.

\His inauguration caps a dizzying ascent that led the onetime Coca-Cola truck driver from country back roads to the pinnacle of power in the world's 11th-largest country.

\Fox, 58, will breakfast with homeless children in a Mexico City slum before taking the oath of office at Congress, witnessed by 20 foreign heads of state. The U.S. delegation is to be led by Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. Afterward, Mexico's new president plans to greet about 100,000 celebrants in the capital's central square and begin a three-day victory tour taking him from the country's poverty-stricken south to the prosperous north.

\The charismatic Harvard MBA and former governor of the small central Mexican state of Guanajuato triumphed in the July presidential election in this paternalistic, tradition-bound society by marketing libertarian politics like a New Age soft drink.

\Fox vows he won't reside in the Mexican presidential palace, Los Pinos, which he associates with the former ruling party's vise-grip on power.

\Having smashed the world's longest-running political dynasty, Fox faces significant residual challenges in a country where more than 40 million of its 100 million people live in poverty, 39 percent of the population is malnourished and 10 percent illiterate.

\In an effort to balance election euphoria against the circumspect realities of his six-year term, Fox cautions that only 13 percent of the federal budget is available for discretionary spending. He has scaled back his expectations for the country's annual economic growth to 4.5 percent from 7 percent.

\Peter Ward, a Mexican scholar at the University of Texas, says, It's much better to exceed sensibly set targets than to underperform unrealistic targets.

\Fox's political agenda envisions ambitious domestic reforms'some requiring constitutional amendments'without a congressional majority or even the unqualified support of his own party, the center-right National Action Party, known as the PAN.

\Among his political innovations, Fox plans to:

\* Name an anti-corruption czar to reduce the shadow of graft, violence and crime.

\* Appoint a border czar to integrate economic relations with the United States.

\* Create an office of migrant affairs to more vigorously represent millions of Mexicans abroad.

\* Propose a program of universal scholarships to improve the country's education system, in which the average student completes just nine years of schooling, and offer micro-credits to ignite small business.


Gannett News Service

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