Inside Mexico: The presidential first lady
By Ian Campbell, UPI
Chief
Economics Correspondent
Mexican President Vicente Fox (2nd R) and his wife Marta Sahagun (R) stand next to Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chrétien (2nd L) and his wife Aline (L) during a welcoming ceremony, 27 February 2003 in Mexico City. AFP PHOTO/Alfredo ESTRELLA
QUERETARO, Mexico, May 16 (UPI) -- More than two years into the government of change, it is mostly what has not changed that takes the eye in Mexico. But President Vicente Fox's controversial wife, the role she plays in Mexican life, and her alleged ambitions: these are something new.
Marta Sahagún is Fox's second wife. They married on July 2, 2001, half a year into Fox's presidency. Her own involvement in politics had brought them into contact. She ran in 1994 for the position of mayor of Celaya, in central Mexico, but was not elected.
But as Fox's confidante and wife she has acquired a prominent role in Mexican political life, frequently with Fox in official engagements -- a tiny, always elegantly dressed figure with a shy smile, at the side of the giant, clumsy-looking president -- but also traveling constantly and taking a lead on her own account, in Mexico and even outside it.
Sahagún promotes many good causes, not least, the cause of women, "transmitters of life, but also of values," she said in a meeting this week with the Mexican University Federation. She speaks of the need to protect women from violence, domestic and otherwise, and has called the murder in the past decade of more than 300 young women in Juárez, a town close by the U.S. border, the most outrageous example in Mexico of violence against women.
In the still macho culture of Mexico, where, for example, a car insurance TV ad shows a man's wife foolishly crashing the car, an assertive first lady can be a welcome force for change.
Yet her role is controversial. The vehicle that facilitates her political activities is her own foundation, the Fundación Vamos México, which is -- according to Jorge Chabat, a researcher into politics at the CIDE college in Mexico City -- privately funded with offices in Los Pinos, the presidential palace. This means, Chabat says, "there is a kind of confusion in the role between the public and the private."
Olga Wornat, an Argentine journalist who
is writing a soon-to-be published biography of Sahagún,
spoke this week on Mexican radio. She described Sahagún
as "restless, ambitious, astute, (a person) who loves the
limelight and power." She said that Sahagún intends
to be president and that Fox's mother and his adult children from
his first marriage do not believe the marriage will last beyond
Fox's six-year term.
Wornat said, too, that if she were close to Sahagún or
the presidency, "she would be very wary of having her (Sahagún)
as an enemy, because as an enemy she is terrible, very terrible."
Sahagún was a person who "knows what she wants"
and "will attain it, by hook or by crook."
Wornat's depiction of Sahagún turns
her into a Lady Macbeth. How realistic is this portrayal?
Chabat has a different view. "She is a nice person, a kind
person," he says. "Yes, I think she wants to be president,"
he says, "but she faces a lot of competition for the candidacy
(of the PAN)."
As to the marriage of Fox and Sahagún, Chabat thinks it likely to last. "There was a sentimental relationship between them before he was a candidate (for the presidency)," Chabat says. Fox and Sahagún are united, in Chabat's view, by affection and a shared love of politics. Both want to change Mexico.
And Sahagún has some skills that Fox himself lacks. She "has political sensitivity, more than her husband, she scents things, she knows what's going on," Chabat says.
The feeling in Mexico is that Sahagún is very clever and more subtle than her husband, whose efforts to effect change in this country dominated for 70 years until 2000 by the Partido Revolucionario Institucional have been clumsy and, so far, largely unsuccessful.
Small wonder, then, that the opposition PRI and some potential presidential rivals in the PAN fear Sahagún. She has a high public profile. She is traveling the length and breadth of the country and associating herself with numerous good causes. She might attract strong support from female voters. And there is no constitutional impediment to prevent her from putting herself forward as a candidate in 2006.
But would that be a good thing? The PRI developed a system of transferring power from one president to another. It was the dedazo, the fingering, from dedo, which means finger. The incumbent president picked out the man that would succeed him and he became the PRI candidate. An election was held and, for decades, the PRI always won it, with a mix of intimidation, vote-buying -- for the vote of poor Mexican peasants can be bought cheaply -- and, in 1988, the help of an electoral computer which is widely believed to have broken down conveniently.
After all that, Mexicans are keen on democracy. But the wife who succeeds her husband into office is not unknown in Latin America. In London they made a successful musical about it, but in Argentina the conjugal succession did not do much good.
It would be a positive development, however, if a woman becomes president of Mexico and Sahagún might prove a good one. But, after decades of dedazo, nervousness about a husband-to-wife succession may not be misplaced. And the controversy over his wife's role and suspicion about her ambitions may not be helping Fox as he tries to be the first president of change.