Mexico & Nafta - 14 September 2004

President Vicente Fox Quesada delivered his fourth Informe (state of the union) address to congress on 1 September. The speech was long on rhetoric and exhortation but short on humility and responsibility. The keynote of the speech was an appeal for congress to work with the government. He was interrupted 19 times: the president of congress had to appeal to deputies to behave. At the end of the Informe, despite its appeal for politicians to work together, all of the members of the Partido de la Revolución Democrática (PRD) turned their backs to the president.

The Informe is one of the great set pieces of the Mexican political calendar. In the bad old days, (ie until the end of the administration of President Carlos Salinas de Gortari in 1994) the TV coverage used to focus entirely on the president. The opposition's great game then was to try and get the cameras to show their protests. Political commentators still prefer to watch the Informe on TV rather than see it live: only by seeing it on TV, they say, can they assess its impact. 

The Informe has several parts. The president delivers a speech, usually about one hour long, which sets out his government's achievements and goals. The government also publishes a vast amount of accompanying data on all aspects of Mexican life. We pick out some highlights in our sidebars. Once the president has delivered his speech members of congress reply to him. It used to be that there would be only one speech: now all the parties comment. The president, however, only has to sit through the first of the replies, which are invariably highly critical of him. This year members of the opposition-dominated congress replied to the president's speech by blaming him and his government for the lack of progress on key reforms. President Fox argued that Mexico would not forgive politicians who failed to work together for the national good: congress retorted that Fox was coming round to the idea of bi-partisanship and consensus rather late in the day. He has two more years left in office.

Manlio Fabio Beltrones, the president of the lower chamber of congress and a prominent member of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), made the first reply to the Informe. He accused Fox of preferring to score worthless points in the media rather than work towards building a common vision for how Mexico should develop. Beltrones also said that Fox should stop trying to force reforms through congress which did not command broad support in the country. The PRI still dominates congress and the country even though it lost the presidency to Fox in 2000. Fox left congress after Beltrones's formal reply to his Informe, so he did not hear even more strident criticism of his administration. The lower chamber of congress had approved a proposal which would have forced the president to sit through comments on his Informe from all the parties represented in the chamber: fortunately for Fox this bill had been kicked out by the senate.

Beltrones's criticism was backed up by another Prií­sta, Senator Ernesto Gil Elorduy, who said that the government had compounded its arrogance with inefficiency, a lack of direction and drive and a lack of vision. Gil accused the government of wasting time trading insults with other parties while refusing to discuss the big issues facing the country. Even members of Fox's own Partido Accion Nacional (PAN) admitted that the government had resorted to dirty tricks. Jorge Zermeño, a PAN senator, said that the government had used unfair methods to attack an adversary. This was seen as barely veiled criticism of the federal government's campaign against Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the mayor of Mexico City and the leading candidate for the presidency in 2006.

Jesús Ortega, a senator from López Obrador's Partido de la Revolución Democrática, summed up the criticism of Fox by saying that he had taken office in 2000 amid great hopes and expectation but had produced little but disappointment. He accused Fox of wanting to revert to authoritarianism and of being hypocritical in claiming that he was upholding the rule of law yet going after López Obrador.

Fox's Informe accepted some of the politicians' criticisms. He admitted that the whole political process risked falling into disrepute if politicians did not address pressing problems or refused to sort them out. Fox tried to be upbeat, claiming that the best was still to come. How he will achieve this improvement is far from clear. The Informe was short on firm commitments. There was the traditional praise for the loyalty of the armed forces even though the minister of defence, General Gerardo Clemente Vega, has made less than coded criticism of the government in the past few months. One firm commitment from Fox was that he would double the spending on law and order in the 2005 budget (see p8). He also appealed to congress to help his government to do more to lower poverty, which he said was the country's most pressing problem.

• The row between President Fox and López Obrador has poisoned political debate in the country for most of this year. López Obrador claims that the federal government has been trying to undermine him, first with the broadcasting of videos showing a Mexico City official and then a colleague of López Obrador, respectively, gambling and taking a bribe. This smear has been followed by a bizarre attempt to prosecute López Obrador for contempt of court because he flouted an injunction that would have prevented the execution of a compulsory purchase order needed to improve access to a public hospital. The federal government argues that it is not plotting against López Obrador, who heads the polls for the presidential elections in 2006. Instead, the federal government is simply trying to uphold the rule of law. What is clear is that the spat has alarmed ordinary Mexicans about what will happen politically and economically in the next few years.