Update Mexico - One year after(at least one side of the story):
Mexicans acknowledge changes 1 year after election
MEXICO CITY
(July 1, 2001 01:18 p.m. EDT ) - When Vicente Fox stood at a victory rally on the muggy night last July 2 as Mexico's first opposition candidate ever to win the presidency, he told cheering supporters that a new Mexico had been born.
One year later, the old Mexico can still be seen everywhere: Cops still take bribes, children still go hungry. But from the gated mansions to damp alleys of cinderblock shacks, there has been a psychological change. It's a quiet wave of pride, responsibility, hope, a fledgling revival of civic spirit, all revolutionary in a nation long dulled into cynicism.
Mexicans know better than anyone how old and deep the problems run. They want to give Fox, who was sworn in to office just seven months ago, more time before passing judgment.
But the change of heart can be felt even in one of the best-known symbols of Mexico's stagnation, the "Casa Grande," a sprawling tenement in the heart of Mexico City's toughest neighborhood, Tepito.
In 1961, U.S. anthropologist Oscar Lewis described the tenement's seemingly endless cycle of poverty in his book "The Children of Sanchez," in which he examined one family, given the pseudonym Sanchez.
Forty years later, Luis Hernandez - called Manuel in the book and the last of "Sanchez family" still at the tenement - has educated himself with dog-eared books, owns a small second-hand goods store and hopes that change in Mexico's long-corrupt government may finally have come.
"I hope that Fox can do it," said Hernandez, 68, sitting with old friends in the store on the street where he grew up. "He did well as a businessman, and he should do well as a leader - if we just let him work."
A few miles away - but worlds apart - high gates protect the mansions of the Las Lomas neighborhood. Here, writer Guadalupe Loeza said well-heeled guests at a recent dinner party felt the beginnings of a new civic spirit.
"They said, 'We want to get health insurance for our girls (servants),'" Loeza recalled. "When has anybody in Mexico said that?"
In downtown Mexico City, smack between Tepito and Las Lomas, lies a sprawling office complex that once served as the command center for resistance to change.
Even here, at the headquarters of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, the PRI, which held Mexico's presidency from 1929 to 2000, some acknowledge the change.
"One of the things our party discovered was freedom, and the freedom to think," said Francisco Labastida, Fox's rival and the first PRI candidate ever to lose a presidential race. "When we always held the presidency, we didn't have to think. The government did that for us."
Labastida said crime had grown worse under Fox, but praised the president for creating Mexico's first real division of power: Congress and the courts, which traditionally obeyed the president, have occasionally defied Fox.
Fox's election was a turning point for Mexico, Labastida concedes. "We have gained confidence in the power of our vote, and that's no doubt a triumph."
But Fox's record so far is a mix of inspiration and contradiction.
He has ordered audits to clean out corruption and fired hundreds of suspect officials - but failed to start the kind of probe into past government massacres and frauds that many expected would come with the ouster of the old regime.
He has seen the peso strengthen, inflation drop and interest rates plummet from 18 percent to 8 percent. And he has built a closer relationship with George W. Bush than any Mexican leader has ever had with a U.S. president.
But the changes Mexicans hoped to see in their everyday lives are still far off.
Fox promised 1.4 million new jobs and 4.5 percent economic growth, but the U.S. economic downturn cost Mexico 400,000 jobs and lowered growth projections to 2.5 percent. He also has proposed a wildly unpopular sales tax on food and medicine.
And for all the talk of government austerity and honesty, Fox's administration recently admitted it bought $443 towels and $1,060 sheets for the president's residence. A top Fox aide resigned after an investigation revealed the government hadn't even received the pricey housewares.
Nor have Fox's sometimes overbearing personal habits caught on. There has been no upsurge in demand for cowboy boots like the ones he wears, and his propensity to use popular slang and homespun expressions is starting to wear thin.
And yet for many Mexicans the change has already arrived - even if only in their hearts.
"We don't want to be irresponsible anymore," said Loeza, the writer, describing the tax evasion, bribe-paying and cynicism that most Mexicans have long lived by.
Historian Lorenzo Meyer said many people need to believe change has come, if only to avoid getting depressed.
"If I voted for a change, and it came out badly, then I did something bad," Meyer said. "And I don't want to admit that."
Fox consciously stokes the fires of faith, in the light of harsh economic times.
"I need the honeymoon to go on," he told reporters last week. "Don't divorce me."
Most of those who say they have seen no change - and there are many - feel Fox has abandoned the small triumphs that Mexico won in its revolution a century ago: strict separation of church and state, and lip service, at least, to justice for the poor.
Ramona Ortiz Ledesma, 93, witnessed the revolution as a young girl and hasn't been won over by Fox.
"I don't see anything good coming of that man. He doesn't talk to the common people," Ortiz said, sewing in her Tepito home. "Before, even if the presidents never lived up to their promises, at least they spoke to us and promised nice things."
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