President Vicente Fox conceded Sunday that his efforts at reform have fallen short in his first two years in office, but he offered a humbled defense of his administration and insisted that Mexico was “advancing well.”
In his second state of the union speech before Mexico’s Congress, Fox said his compatriots should feel proud that their country has successfully begun a broad democratic transformation despite global economic troubles and without the instability that is plaguing some Latin American nations.
“I am the first to admit that not all the goals we set for ourselves have been reached,” Fox said in remarks that were interrupted several times by heckling and hissing from opposition lawmakers.
“We should not be satisfied. There is much for us to do. However, the balance is a positive one,” Fox said inside Mexico’s legislative palace. “We have concluded the first stage of the consolidation of democracy.”
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The speech was Fox’s most public acknowledgement of a growing disillusionment with the slow pace of change since he ousted the entrenched and autocratic Institutional Revolutionary Party, known as PRI, in elections in 2000.
Buffeted by criticisms in recent weeks, Fox has begun a campaign to regain the confident and optimistic tone that carried him into office. Only a third of the way through his term, he insists that Mexicans now will begin “harvesting” the changes that his administration has planted in terms of the economy, open democracy and more respect for human rights.
The annual speech, known as the informe, is similar to the U.S. president’s annual State of the Union address. In previous years it was illegal to sell alcohol on informe day, although the government dropped that requirement this year.
Opposition leaders used the occasion to trumpet their criticisms in speeches that preceded Fox’s, accusing him of too many unfulfilled promises, an erratic foreign policy and inability to build a consensus to pass its projects through Congress.
Fox had to pause several times as the leader of the House of Deputies called for quiet after hecklers interrupted his speech. At one point, a legislator raised a banner decrying Fox’s failed pledge to create “millions” of new businesses. “From lie to lie,” read another.
“The optimism of the voters is finished,” said Cesar Camacho Quiroz, a PRI lawmaker. “It’s not enough to have control over the government without knowing what to do with it.”
Fox, whose arrival Sunday was delayed by a downpour of rain, touted the achievements of his administration. He also set out his agenda for the coming year, citing better cooperation with a recalcitrant Congress as his top priority.
Among the successes, he listed several steps in opening up the government, investigating past abuses by the PRI, a new respect for human rights and the end of “presidentialism” in favor of a shared democratic decision making process.
“These changes, many of them historic but not always quantifiable, are starting to shape the face of a modern Mexico, distinguished by legality, inclusion and full of democracy,” Fox said.
He said the government’s crackdown on drug traffickers had led to the arrests of the leaders of five separate cartels.
He boasted that his government had managed the lowest inflation rate in Mexico’s modern history, kept the peso stable and “banished” Mexico’s recurring nightmare of economic crises every six years.
Despite the criticism, a newspaper poll published Sunday indicated that Fox has recouped some of his lost popularity. Once down to 47 percent, his approval rating in the poll had rebounded to 61 percent.