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Vicente Fox's Mexican Revolution
Relaxing in a big leather chair on the family ranch where he was raised, Vicente Fox Quesada sees a new Mexico. When he was born here 58 years ago in this central Mexican farming village that surrounds a little peach-colored Catholic church, Mexico's political dynasty, the PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party), was already firmly in control of the country. As a youth, Fox played around the family boot factory and drove 500 miles with his brothers to the Texas border to sell broccoli and brussels sprouts, and later when he became the chief executive for Coca-Cola in Mexico, the PRI was always there; it was Mexico's stage, scenery, lights, and director. It seemed as much a part of Mexico as the mighty Sierras and the magnificent sea.
But last July, Fox stole the show. He routed PRI candidate Francisco Labastida, a decent but colorless bureaucrat who recited party dogma to a nation that had heard it all too many times before. Fox was different. At six feet four inches tall-six feet six and a half in his signature monogrammed cowboy boots-he is Mexico's tallest leader ever, and he used that height like a tower from which to lob bombs at the PRI. He called Labastida "Shorty" and played off Labastida's name to call him la vestida, or transvestite. He used farm-hand language and an almost childish impatience to conduct politics in a way Mexicans had never seen. He shocked people-and took a temporary hit in opinion polls-- when he petulantly shouted "Hoy! Hoy! Hoy!" at Labastida and a third candidate, former Mexico City Mayor Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, in a live joint television appearance, demanding that the three hold a formal debate "Today! Today! Today!" People were turned off at this new spectacle, but only for a while. By election day, "Hoy! Hoy! Hoy!" was the delirious chant of Fox supporters who turned downtown Mexico City into a fiesta of strangers hugging strangers and believing that the big, rough man who was tough enough to take down the PRI was going to bring something different, something better, to Mexico.
Not long after his election, Fox returned to the quiet of his family ranch, surrounded by an army of siblings-he is one of nine...