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July 25, 2003
 Mexico’s
President OutFoxes Himself…And Mexico
By
Joe Guzzardi
Sunday, July 6th was a dark and
solemn day for Mexico.
No, no, no… I’m not referring to the humiliating snub
Mexico’s transparent Johnny One Note president Vicente
Fox suffered from the Mexican people in the mid-term
elections.
(Here, in case you missed it, is the grim recap: only
41% of the electorate voted. Fox’s PAN party lost 54
seats while the establishment PRI (Institutional
Revolutionary Party) gained 15 seats and the PDR
(Democratic Revolutionary Party), 95.)
I’m talking about the 2-1 victory the El Salvador
soccer team
hung on the outplayed and listless Mexicans at the
Home Depot Center in Los Angeles. Mexicans care about
soccer. They don’t give a hoot about Fox.
The Mexican coach, Ricardo Valope, was so embarrassed
that he bolted for LAX moments after the game. Assistant
Coach Jesus Bracamonte was left with the nasty task of
fielding angry questions from the irate Mexican media.
Concluded
Bracamonte, “Sometimes in soccer, as in life, you
take a punch. We took a heavy punch today. But we will
learn from this.”
Mexican soccer fans are delighted to see that the
team has subsequently rallied to reach the semi-finals of
the Gold Cup. But for Fox, who took it in the chops big
time, it's lights out.
Mexicans denied Fox a vote of confidence for the best
possible reason: he didn’t earn one. Add Fox’s name to
the long list of
ineffective and/or
corrupt Mexican leaders who promised the moon but
delivered nada.
In a televised interview the day after his stinging
defeat, Fox said that he would “redouble” his
efforts with his Congressional opponents promising that
“Now begins the era of
consensus, of accords."
Uh, oh---there’s that dreaded word: “accords.”
Here’s what Fox should ask himself in light of the
licking he just took: “Could I have made more progress
domestically if I had spent as much time worrying about
Mexico’s economy as I did on
‘migratory accords’ and
‘matricula consular cards’ in the U.S?”
Fox has been a nuisance to Americans since before he
took office. And he’s been a hypocrite from the get-go,
too.
Immediately after his election, erroneously hailed by
the U.S. press as the beginning of a brand-new Mexico,
Fox leaned on his soul mate, George W. Bush, for amnesty
and for improved “human rights” for Mexicans working in
the U.S.
While U.S. newspapers were hailing the two cowboys for
forging a new era and leading the U.S. and Mexico to
greater levels of cooperation, a much less reported event
caught my eye.
Fox, in violation of the
Mexican constitution, turned out to be employing
at least 30 minors on his
family ranch in San Cristobal.
The children—some as young as 11-years-old--were
planting onions and potatoes.
A spokesman for the children, “Mario,” told the Mexico
City daily Reforma that the $7 a day the children
receive “barely pays for food and they don’t pay you
for every day you work.”
Back-pedaling immediately followed. Fox claimed that
he was no longer a co-owner of the ranch. “This is not
an issue for me,” said Fox.
“It is an issue for others whose names are Fox.”
In any case, the family argued, the wages paid at San
Cristobal were twice the going rate! So really, you see,
you should have thanked the la familia Fox for
paying the minors so handsomely.
The incident was quickly buried. Before long Bush,
never one to let the facts get in his way,
praised Fox for his willingness to fight for tougher
enforcement of child labor laws.
In the meantime, Bush gave Fox free rein to come to
the U.S., praise illegal aliens as
“heroes” and demand, according to a
July 18, 2001 Milwaukee Journal story titled
“Fox Promotes Greater Rights for Mexican Immigrants”
that 100% of them be given “the most rights possible
as soon as possible.”
Yeah, sure, Fox pitched for plenty of rights and
benefits for Mexicans—especially agricultural workers--
in the U.S. But Fox didn’t have one thing to say about
the pathetic conditions farm workers in Mexico endure.
In her May 6, 2001 story
“At Home, Mexico Mistreats Its Migrant Farmhands,” New
York Times reporter Ginger Thompson wrote:
President Vicente Fox has
been an outspoken advocate of
Mexican laborers in the United States, pressing
Washington to improve their working conditions. But in
his five months in office, he has not devoted a speech to
the cares of migrant workers at home.
(Nor has Fox spoken out about this since Thompson’s
story.)
Thompson further noted that Fox created a Cabinet
level office to oversee issues regarding Mexicans living
abroad and pushed Bush to open the border to greater
numbers of Mexican migrants.
However, wrote Thompson,
“Mr. Fox, the son of
ranchers, has not devoted any significant political
capital to the abuses against migrants who labor on
Mexican soil.”
Entire families—including children-- work from dawn to
dusk for as little as $1,500 for the three-month harvest
season. They live in squalid shantytowns and cope with
disease, filth and exhaustion.
Mexican sociologist
Hubert C. de Grammont, who has studied the plight of
the Mexican agricultural worker for 20 years, told
Thompson that
“It is difficult to try to
defend the human rights of migrants in the United States
when migrants are ignored and disrespected in our own
country.”
That’s the two-faced Fox for you. On the one hand, he
presses for more, more, more from the U.S. so that his
nationals can keep sending
remittances back home. But in Mexico, Fox is
unwilling to lift a finger to help the poorest of the
poor.
VDARE.COM takes
heat for its accurate articles about
Mexico. But Mexico has no harsher critics than
Mexicans. And little wonder, since the country has been
the
most corrupt in the western world for
75 years.
Right after Fox was elected and in the midst of the
media swooning, Anna Quinones, one of my E.S.L.
students from Guanajuato (where Fox had been Governor)
said, “I don’t know what this is all about. What makes
anyone think Fox will be different than any of the rest?”
She was right. George Bush, Karl Rove, and all the
other assorted geniuses in the Republican Establishment
were wrong. America gets to pay the cost.
Joe Guzzardi [email
him], an instructor in English at the Lodi
Adult School, has been writing a weekly newspaper column
since 1988. This column is exclusive to VDARE.COM. |
