Fox's Game Plan

He is an impatient man. When Mexican President Vicente Fox Quesada wants to make a phone call, he's as likely to dial himself as to wait for a secretary to do it. When he needs to talk to an adviser, he discards the standard chief-executive drill of sending a flunky to summon the official. Instead, boot heels clacking on the wooden floors of Los Pinos--the Mexican White House--Fox strides down the hall to the adviser's office himself.

In the ancient seat of empire that is Mexico City, the man at the top of the pyramid traditionally lets the world come to him. Fox, 59, with his farmer's dislike of being cooped up and his salesman's instinct for staying mobile, exercises power on the move. If it's Tuesday, this must be Santiago, Chile; or Detroit; or the state of Chiapas; or downtown Mexico City. Constantly in the public eye, the former president of Coca-Cola Mexico has made himself Mexico's motivational speaker in chief.

That temperament is ill suited to the byplays, gambits and bluffs of negotiation and is one reason his big tax-reform plan and other domestic initiatives haven't got far. But no Mexican President--ever--has gone over in the U.S. the way Fox has. "I was watching the political elite going nutso for this guy. It was like Madonna had come to town," says Ana Maria Salazar, a former Clinton Administration official now teaching in Mexico, describing Fox's appearance one year ago at an Inter-American Development Bank event in Washington. And no Mexican President has ever had the chemistry with a U.S. President that Fox has with George W. Bush. The first foreign leader to play host to Bush as President, Fox will be Bush's first state visitor next week. Their agenda: a sequel to their talks at Fox's ranch house in San Cristobal last February. Topping the agenda is a proposed new U.S. immigration policy for Mexico.

Last week Bush said he had ruled out "blanket amnesty for illegals." But that was far from a rejection of the ideas that officials of the two countries have been negotiating. These include expanding a guest-worker plan, which Bush made a point of endorsing. And the Fox administration has always rejected the term amnesty.

The sight of the poorer, smaller neighbor proposing that the world's remaining superpower rewrite its immigration laws to give Mexicans preferential status is astounding enough. But Fox and his ambitious, visionary--and equally restless--Foreign Minister, Jorge G. Castaneda, consider immigration only a first step.

They're out to set an agenda for the U.S.-Mexico relationship that would leave in the dust of history 155 years marked, successively, by warfare, suspicion and wary tolerance. "We have to reduce the gap between Mexico and the United States--the wage gap, the technology gap, the infrastructure gap," Castaneda says. "It is quite clear that Mexico faces enormous difficulties over the next 15 years or so in finding ways to finance its infrastructure: highways, airports, telecommunications, electricity, refineries, fiber optics--the works. We think that it is in the United States' best interest to help on this. That's the type of discussion and negotiation which we think should begin to take place over the next few years."