Fox, Inc. Takes Over Mexico
by John Ross
Multinational Monitor magazine, March 2001
Maria Alonso Fernandez arises before dawn to catch the crowded
truck to the gates of the San Cristobal ranch so that she will
be first in the fields by 7:00 a.m. With 10 brothers and sisters
whose upkeep she contributes to, Maria will spend the next eight
hours stooping to pick brussel sprouts and broccoli for the U.S.
export market. The day will net her 62 pesos, 372 for a six-day
week, about $34.
Maria Alonso should not be working at all. She is 12 years
old and barred from picking in the fields by Mexican labor law.
Even if she was 14, she would still be restricted to a six-hour
day.
But Maria and the 30 other children who have been forced by
family circumstances to drop out of school and toil at the San
Cristobal ranch will have a hard time finding a sympathetic ear
to end such exploitation. Child labor is traditional out in the
Guanajuato fields. Even if the kids could get a hearing before
Mexico's new labor secretary, Carlos Abascal, a former director
of the nation's most prestigious business council, it is highly
unlikely that he would take legal action against his boss, President
Vicente Fox- the owner of the San Cristobal ranch.
On July 2, 2000, Vicente Fox, the candidate of the conservative
National Action Party (PAN), became the first member of Mexico's
opposition in seven decades to take the presidency away from the
Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), heretofore the longest
ruling political dynasty in the world.
The Fox upset of the aging ruling party involved smoke and
mirrors, a dazzling display of media marketing replete with negative
TV ads, designer polls and U.S.-style image management engineered
by such high-paid political consultants as Dick Morris, Bill Clinton's
former prized advisor. But mostly Vicente Fox soundly thrashed
the PRI because Mexicans were ready for a change after 71 years
of top-down, authoritarian rule that thrived on rampant corruption
and brutal violence.
On December 1, Vicente Fox was sworn in as Mexico's first-ever
businessman president-his PRI predecessors have all been revolutionary
generals, shady lawyers and, for the last 20 years, technocrats
trained as economists at prestigious Ivy League universities.
Who is this 6'6" upstart who finally toppled what novelist
Mario Vargas Llosa once termed "the perfect dictatorship"
from power?
THE MAKING OF A BUSINESSMAN PRESIDENT
Vicente Fox was born on the ranch where Maria Alonso illegally
labors, a hacienda or estate founded by Spanish conquistadores
in 1591.
As a pioneer exporter of vegetables destined for the U.S.
market, Vicente's father Jose Luis Fox Ponts accumulated a tidy
fortune. Vicente grew up a child of wealth.
The new president's education was an elite one. When he graduated
from the Jesuit-run Iberoamericana University in Mexico City,
future banking association president Jose Maradiaga and Roberto
Hernandez, president of Banamex, the nation's number one bank,
were among his silver-spoon classmates. They have remained firm
friends and business associates ever since.
Unlike many male Mexicans of his social milieu, Vicente Fox
did not take a doctorate at a high-tone U.S. university. Rather,
his graduate school was the Coca Cola Corporation, where he began
in 1962 as a route driver across the Guanajuato state line in
Michoacan. The president's talents for selling "the real
thing" were such that he quickly expanded his sales territory
into all of the Bajio, the fertile lowland of central Mexico,
and then north into Sinaloa and Monterrey.
By 1969, Fox and his new wife, Liliana de la Concha, a Coca
Cola receptionist, moved to Mexico City, where he went to work
as a marketing hotshot at Coke's main offices. Vicente earned
multiple promotions. In 1974, he was named president of Coca Cola
Mexico, a sinecure he held until 1979.
Offered the Latin American directorship of the corporation,
Fox instead chose to strike out on his own. But the contacts and
friendships he developed during his years at Coke served him well
for many years to come, and eventually played a key role in elevating
him to Los Pinos, the Mexican White House. Such Coca Cola cronies
as Lino Korrodi and marketing genius Jose Luis Gonzalez would
form the nucleus of the "Amigos of Fox," the grouping
that propelled and financed his campaign. Burton Grossman, the
inheritor of Mexico's first Coke bottling factory, emerged as
Fox's political patron.
According to Mexican investigative journalist Carlos Fazio,
Grossman was the new president's U.S. money man until his death
in Texas in 1999.
Back home in Guanajuato, Vicente Fox dedicated himself to
managing the hacienda and its commercial subsidiaries- the "Vegetables
Frescos" packing complex, El Cerrito Farms, Fox Brothers,
and "Botas Fox," the family boot plant in Leon whose
product became the logo of his successful 2000 campaign.
In the mid-1980's, Fox was seduced into participating in PAN
politics by Manuel Clouthier, a former director of both COPARMEX,
a business council sometimes described as "the businessman's
union," and the powerful Sinaloa state export growers association.
Clouthier was a "neo-PANista" who, like many northern-based
impresarios, had grown disgusted with the party's passivity after
the disastrous nationalization of the banking system in 1982,
the last desperate act of boom and bust oil president Jose Lopez
Portillo.
When Clouthier ran for the presidency in 1988, Fox won a congressional
seat in Leon.
In 1991, Fox ran for governor of Guanajuato. Although he probably
won by a narrow margin, PRI manipulations cheated him of the seat.
In 1995, Vicente Fox won the governorship of Guanajuato handily,
firmly establishing himself as a PAN presidential front-runner
for the 2000 "presidentiales." Smitten early by the
idea of occupying Los Pinos, Fox opened commercial offices in
Dallas, Los Angeles, Chicago and New York; ostensibly to promote
Guanajuato commercial opportunities, the outposts served to advance
his candidacy-and solicit campaign funds-in the United States.
In April 1997, more than three years before election day,
Vicente Fox tossed his sombrero into the ring during an interview
with the Miami-based Univision, a move he made official in July
soon after left-center Cuauhtemoc Cardenas won the mayoralty of
Mexico City, a precedent that demonstrated opposition candidates
could finally win high federal office in Mexico.
FOX'S GUANAJUATO
In Fox's Guanajuato, the rich got a lot richer but the poor
continued to migrate north to the United States at rates that
make the state's emigration rate the most voluminous in Mexico.
Through a state agency that scouted jobs for the U.S. H2R guestworker
program, Governor Fox even capitalized on this desperate trek
north by contracting with U.S. entrepreneurs seeking a guaranteed
low-wage, highly mobile workforce-dozens of Guanajuatenses were
signed on to work as gardeners on a private golf course in the
state of Michigan.
During Vicente Fox's years in the state house, public services
such as transportation were privatized. So were Guanajuato's few
archeological sites-a pyramid near San Miguel Allende was sold
outright to a German businesswoman as part of a 15,000 hectare
agribusiness deal, and access to the public closed off. The privatization
of such ruins as Teotihuacan and Chichen-Itza is a PAN project
originally proposed by private collector Mauricio Garza, a former
senator from Monterrey.
Vicente Fox also "maquilerized" the Guanajuato industrial
base, luring 72 maquiladoras (foreign-owned assembly plants) to
the state, most of them garment sweatshops paying the minimum
wage. On the agrarian front, Fox completed the transnationalization
of the Bajio-during his reign, Green Giant, Bird's Eye, Campbell,
and Del Monte became dominant players in the field.
Fox's social policies were grounded in the Social Christian
doctrine of good works. Although he paid lip service to the poor,
his activities on their behalf was limited to developing an extensive
system of micro-credits-small loans that would allow the marginalized
to pull themselves up by their boot straps and open up a changaro
(storefront), and purchase a vochito (Volkswagen Bug) and a tele
(television), as the then-governor defined the most pressing needs
of his poorest constituents.
WHO PAID THE BILLS?
Fox spent millions of pesos on his marathon three-yearlong
presidential campaign, featuring enormous swatches of TV time,
thousands of full-page newspaper ads, and the wit and wisdom of
Dick Morris. Who paid the bills remains unclear.
During the last dizzying days of the campaign, the PRI leader
in the lower house of Congress, Enrique Jackson, produced a wad
of checks that apparently had been shuffled between the United
States, Belgium, and Mexico before being deposited in the Amigos
of Fox bank accounts-most were funneled through a Belgium technology
company into the U.S. First National Bank and thence to something
called the Institute for International Finance in Puebla, Mexico,
where they were then dispensed to the famous Amigos. The checks
on display had clearly been obtained through means which violated
Mexico's elaborate banking secrecy laws. The PRI never filed charges
of illicit campaign financing since the evidence would not have
been admissible in court.
The Amigos of Fox also solicited contributions on the Internet.
Individual campaign contributions are not a particular concern
of the Federal Electoral Institute, which pays more attention
to how government subsidies are being spent- and sometimes embezzled.
The best bet is that the Amigos of Fox coffers were swelled by
big bucks from the Mexican north, and specifically the border
state of Nuevo Leon and its gleaming stainless steel and glass
capitol of Monterrey. "The Sultan of the North" has
long been an industrial and banking powerhouse adorned with pockets
of great wealth and vast zones of impoverished colonias.
For a hundred years, the venerable Monterrey business group
has been dominated by the various branches of the Sada and Garza
families, traditionally the money bags for the PRI's political
aspirations.
But the northern moguls' allegiance began to shift swiftly
after the PRI-sponsored collapse of the peso in 1994-95. One tycoon,
Alfonso Romo, snapped to the press that he had lost $10 million
an hour on December 19,1994, the day the peso plunged to a record
low. Juan Sanchez Navarro, the 90-year-old ideologue of the group
and the owner of Modelo Brewery, purveyors of Corona beer, was
an early convert. Another was Lorenzo Zembrano, owner of Cemex,
the cement giant which has made a hobby of buying up U.S competitors.
Another major booster was almost certainly Federico Sada,
who heads up Grupo Vitro, Mexico's first multinational, which
10 years ago purchased the U.S. glassmaker, Anchor Hocking. Fox
did substantial business with Vitro, which manufactures Coke's
unique bottle.
Fox's Coke connection brought on board another tycoon, the
aforementioned Alfonso "Poncho" Romo, who is married
to the niece of Eugenio Garza Leguera, the owner of Femsa, the
distributor of Coke in Mexico. Like Zembrano, a perpetual on Forbes
magazine's annual list of billionaires, Romo owns insurance companies,
brokerage houses, formerly the La Moderna tobacco empire (recently
sold to Brown & Williamson), and Pulsar International, whose
biotech subsidiary Semnis is internationally dominant in some
genetically engineered food seeds.
Romo has been tapped by Fox to bring jobs and investment to
the rebellion-riddled state of Chiapas. Pulsar has long-standing
plans for Eucalyptus tree plantations in Chiapas [See "Big
Pulp vs. Zapatistas," Multinational Monitor, April 1998].
Romo is also involved with the Monsanto Corporation in the Saiva
project, which is mapping the genome of plants taken from the
Lacandon jungle for commercial profit-the rebel Zapatista Army
of National Liberation, based in Chiapas, accuses Saiva of bio-piracy.
Although both Sada and Romo were appointed to Vicente Fox's
transition team, they initially declined positions in the new
government, perhaps considering that they will be well-represented
by Fox's selection of their proxies.
FOX INCORPORATED
A preliminary x-ray of the Fox cabinet shows telltale signs
of both Monterrey group and multinational influence.
Actually the new cabinet is really three distinct cabinets
operating under the rubrics of "Growth with Quality,"
"Human Development," and "Order & Respect,"
each of which is similarly tainted by commercial considerations.
One caveat: many members of Fox Incorporated were not selected
by Fox at all but rather by a consortium of four U.S. corporate
head-hunters coordinated by Korn-Ferry & Hazzard.
Here is a thumbnail sketch of who will be setting economic
policy for Mexico for the next six years:
* Secretary of Finance-Javier Gil Diaz, chief tax collector
in the Salinas administration, and more recently director of Avantel,
a WorldCom affiliate. Gil Diaz was hailed as "an authentic
Chicago boy" (he took his post-graduate degree at Milton
Friedman's University of Chicago) by Rudi Dornbusch, the MIT free-market
economic guru.
* Secretary of Commerce-Luis Ernesto Derbez spent 14 years
working as an economist at the World Bank, during which time he
was also on the board of directors of Vitro.
* Secretary of Energy-Ernesto Martens headed up Union Carbide
in Mexico for 18 years before that conglomerate self-destructed
after Bhopal. Like Derbez, he worked at Federico Sada's Vitro.
One of Martens's first projects will be to privatize electricity
generation, a process begun by Fox's predecessor, Ernesto Zedillo.
* Director of PEMEX (the nationalized petroleum monopoly)-Raul
Munoz Leos was president of Dupont-Mexico for 12 years. As PEMEX
director, Munoz Leos is charged with selling off its petrochemical
branch-an asset for which Dupont is a bidder.
On the eve of George Bush's visit to Fox's San Cristobal hacienda
in February, Fox also appointed Carlos Slim, the richest man in
Latin America, as well as his old friends Romo and Zembrano to
the Pemex board of directors.
* Secretary of Communications & Transport
Brought into the new government by Fox head-hunters, Pedro Cercsola
is a veteran privatizer who made his bones selling off Telmex,
the government phone company, to the lowest bidder, Carlos Slim,
and Cintra, the holding company for the two national airlines.
* Secretary of Agriculture-Javier Usabiaga, who is known in
the Bajio as "the King of Garlic." Usabiaga and Foxes
have been partners in the export vegetable business for 50 years,
exploiting child labor in Guanajuato and reaping fortunes. He
will continue to remove protections and supports for Mexico's
non-corporate small farm sector, a project begun long ago by the
nation's three previous neo-liberal presidents, Miguel de la Madrid,
Carlos Salinas and Ernesto Zedillo.
* Secretary of Foreign Relations Jorge G. Casteneda is the
liberal son of a patrician family (Casteneda's father was once
foreign minister too). Along with National Security advisor Adolfo
Aguilar Zinser, Casteneda is a liberal who once worked with Cuauhtemoc
Cardenas before signing on with Fox Inc. for the 2000 campaign.
Zinser ran Cardenas's 1994 presidential campaign.
Other notable staff positions in the Fox Inc. hierarchy include
National Water Commissioner Clemente Jaime, president of the milk
distribution giant Lala and the nation's leading commercial water
bottler; and Secretary of Government (sometimes referred to as
the Secretary of the Interior) Santiago Creel, whose agency supervises
internal security, and who is the scion of the Creels of Chihuahua,
whose mining and timber interests devastated the northern Tarahumara
sierra.
Perhaps the most vital figure in this corporate boardroom
of a government is Francisco Ortiz Ortiz, a man who literally
sells soap to the Mexican people for a living-he headed up marketing
as Proctor & Gamble for 11 years. Ortiz Ortiz now heads up
the all-important Office of the Image of the President.
THE GREAT DIVIDE
It is no secret that Vicente Fox embraces neo-liberalism and
free trade. Last August, he and George W. Bush held hands in Austin
to extol the extension of NAFTA all the way to Tierra del Fuego,
through the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas. In October,
when Fox returned to Austin for the annual Global Fortune forum,
he was greeted by a standing ovation from the heads of the U.S.'s
500 richest corporations. "Fox! Fox! Fox!" the CEOs
chanted, "Hoy! Hoy! Hoy!" ("Today! Today! Today!"-
his campaign slogan). "Okay boys," the Mexican president-elect
boomed from the podium in his earthiest tones, "let's all
roll up our sleeves and help build a new nation."
But the policies and personages exhibited by Fox Incorporated
will not build a new Mexico. Indeed, above all Fox promises more
of the same when it comes to economic and trade policy.
Mexico continues to be home to 70 million poor people, according
to Julio Bolvitnik, an economist of poverty and a Fox social adviser,
27 million of whom live in extreme poverty. The United Nations
defines extreme poverty as not earning enough in a single day
to meet their nutritional needs.
The neoliberal song and dance that "trickle down"
economics will cause "all boats to rise" is a fallacy
in an economic landscape where there is no trickle down. Fox's
mind-set of Social Christian "good works" and volunteerism,
micro-credits and the Bank of the Poor will hardly feed the millions
mired in extreme poverty, or address the structural problems which
generated it. The changaro, the vochito and the tele that Fox
so demeaningly asserts poor Mexicans desire, have little to do
with the true aspirations of those on the bottom rung of this
gravely divided society.
The stark polarization of wealth and power in Mexico will
always bode social explosion, guerrilla outbursts and out-of-control
violence unless a radical redistribution of wealth is undertaken-and
such a radical redistribution is clearly not the business of Fox,
Incorporated.
John Ross is a Latin American correspondent and novelist.
He is the author of numerous books, including The War Against
Oblivion: The Zapatista Chronicles.
Mexico
watch
Central America watch
Index
of Website
Home
Page