Help From His Amigo

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Democracy's heroes don't always make heroic Presidents. Lech Walesa toppled Polish communism in the 1980s, but presided over a mediocre government in the 1990s. Many fear the same will be true of Mexican President Vicente Fox. Riding a wave of hope and optimism in 2000, Fox defeated the dictatorial Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which had ruled Mexico since 1929. But since then, he's faced mostly legislative defeats and diminished stature. It wasn't until last week, when George W. Bush finally proposed the U.S. immigration reforms that Fox has long urged, that Fox got to savor his first big presidential victory. "I was given six years to improve Mexico and I'm going to do it," a reanimated Fox told TIME in an interview at the Mexico City presidential palace, Los Pinos. Waiting for the immigration announcement "has been a long, three-year haul," he said. "But I feel vindicated."

The timing couldn't be better for Fox: this week he plays host to Bush and 32 other hemispheric heads of state at the Summit of the Americas in Monterrey. The rich industrial city sits in Mexico's cowboy north, a favorite backdrop for Fox and his conservative National Action Party (pan). Mexicans now wonder if Fox's immigration win — which may grant temporary U.S. legal status to millions of Mexican migrant workers — can help him revive other reforms, from tax policies to the judicial system.

Fox started his presidency with an amazing 80% approval rating. And he has scored some important wins — Mexico's first serious crackdown on drug lords and the opening to public scrutiny of its corrupt and cryptic bureaucracy. In a nation where Presidents have long ruled like Aztec Emperors, Fox eschews executive fiat and has so far avoided the ego-driven financial catastrophes that marked Mexico's last four presidencies. As a former Coca-Cola executive and state governor, Fox was thought to bring the sorely needed touch of an honest CEO.

But while his probity is still unquestioned, "we all overhyped his managerial skills," says a former high-ranking government official. "He's a corporate cheerleader more than an administrator." He has proved less than skillful with Congress, where the center-left PRI still has a strong plurality and which last month torpedoed Fox's ambitious $9 billion fiscal-reform plan after he insisted on an unpopular sales tax on food and medicine. That has dampened prospects for other measures dear to investors, such as opening the energy sector to foreign capital and revamping Mexico's ossified labor unions. Though polls show Fox is still popular, "he keeps overestimating the political power of that personal appeal," says pri Congressman Carlos Flores.

Fox has also seemed hesitant or unable to tackle dark human-rights abuse cases from the PRI era, including the massacre of hundreds of pro-democracy demonstrators on the eve of the 1968 Mexico City Summer Olympics. All that, combined with a weaker peso and a stagnant economy that is hemorrhaging factory jobs to China, resulted in the pan losing more than 50 seats in the 500-member lower house of Congress in last July's midterm elections.

At the same time, Fox has had to watch his stock plummet in Washington, where he was once feted as Bush's cowboy-boot-wearing friend. But after Sept. 11, Bush turned his back on Fox's immigration- reform ideas as a threat to U.S. border security. Mexico was all but forgotten in the U.S. — until late 2002, when the country opposed Bush's Iraq war plan in the United Nations Security Council. Mexicans, whose foreign-policy attitudes are staunchly noninterventionist, applauded Fox — but Bush took it as a betrayal and virtually blacklisted the Mexican leader.

But Bush faces a re-election campaign this year, and a larger swath of the traditionally Democratic Latino vote could be decisive in several closely contested states. Though Bush aides deny that political motive, Fox is Bush's amigo again — and in Bush's immigration-reform speech last week, Fox's ideas were suddenly "good" for U.S. border security. "We never stopped being friends," Fox insists. "I've always told [Bush], I'll do for you what I can, and what I can't do I'll tell you up front, as I did on Iraq. Our friendship has matured as a result." Fox has less than half of a six-year term left — Mexico's constitution bars re-election — and Bush's immigration plan must still pass the U.S. Congress this year. But since the more than $14 billion Mexicans send home each year from the U.S. is now Mexico's No. 2 source of income — and since hundreds of migrants die each year crossing the U.S.-Mexico border illegally — the proposal does give Fox a fresh political starting point at home.