Fox Deluged With Offers to Shape New Government

By MARY BETH SHERIDAN

Aug. 8, 2000 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

MEXICO CITY — Until a few weeks ago, Alejandro Partido would have been aghast at the idea of becoming a bureaucrat.

“My perception was that you got to a government office and didn’t do anything. You arrived at 9 and left at 10 [a.m.],” the recent MBA grad said with a sniff. “Total inefficiency.”

But this is Mexico’s new era. So last week, Partido marched up to the headquarters of President-elect Vicente Fox and joined the stream of people offering their resumes.

“It’s the change of person,” Partido, 29, said. “Vicente Fox is trying to make things more efficient . . . more honorable. We want to help him.”

The line of job-seekers was indicative of a sea change in Mexico’s political culture since Fox won the presidency July 2, breaking the 71-year lock on power of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI.

In a wave of hope that brings to mind the start of the Kennedy administration, Mexicans are flocking to help Fox, a former businessman who has pledged to transform a system long run by a clique of loyalists that resembled a secret priesthood.

Fox declares he wants to remake one of the world’s most byzantine and famously corrupt governments and instead run Mexico with the efficiency of a business, rewarding merit. He plans to start by seeking the best and the brightest: He has chosen Los Angeles-based Korn/Ferry International to lead a search by five headhunting firms for candidates for about 100 top positions. He also has urged Mexicans to send him their recommendations on staff and government policies.

The response has been unprecedented. Thousands of resumes and nominations have poured in from individuals, governors and business associations. And the new team has been bombarded with ideas. Just one group of Fox advisors--those dealing with social welfare--has received 6,000 proposals in the past month.

To appreciate how extraordinary this is, you have to consider the cult of the PRI. It was the world’s longest-ruling party but operated more like a collection of tribes that groomed their own for power. Unlike in Washington, resumes were not part of the selection process in the closed PRI world.

“Everybody knew everybody’s political resume. You needed to know that resume to build a coalition and create the kind of organization you wanted. But it was not on paper. It was astonishing,” said Peter H. Smith, a Latin American studies professor at UC San Diego and author of a book on Mexican political recruitment.

Cabinet positions were parceled out to the different tribes like so many poker chips in a secret game. Expertise mattered less than political ties; politicians known as milusos (roughly, jacks-of-a-thousand-trades) would jump from, say, the Agriculture Ministry to a government-owned insurance company to an embassy.

Suddenly, that cozy insiders’ world is gone.

A Plan to Use Cutting-Edge Ideas

Fox has thrown his recruitment process open to all 100 million Mexicans. In addition to using headhunters, he recently issued a public appeal for nominations of people for his government. They must meet five conditions, said the communique, including “love of Mexico,” “recognized capability” and “achievement of results.”

It was the start of a brand-new culture in which Fox, a former Coca-Cola executive and member of the pro-business National Action Party, plans to bring cutting-edge ideas from private industry to government.

Call it Dilbert meets the Mexican Revolution.

Out goes the soaring rhetoric beloved by bureaucrats since the Spanish colonial era. Out goes the PRI language, from the “stampede” that formed around the party candidate to the system of “quotas of power” for different groups. In come terms to warm a consultant’s heart: total quality management, benchmarking, matrix-style management.

“The Americanization of the country is complete,” Carlos Monsivais, a prominent social commentator, said with a moan.

Mexicans have embraced the concept.

They have deluged the new president’s team, offering ideas in phone calls, letters and e-mail. The Fox populi has spilled over into the press: When Reforma, a Mexico City daily, offered to print readers’ suggestions for the new president, it was flooded with 1,800 letters in two weeks.

Many readers attached resumes, said Leonardo Valero, the editor in charge of the project. He said they could be seeking to serve their country or merely establishing their qualifications.

“This could also speak to a high level of unemployment,” he added.

The ideas ranged from weighty to weird. Readers suggested improvements to the water system, new methods to collect taxes, ways to save money. For example: using chain gangs of prisoners to clean up Mexico City in the dead of night.

“This reflects the great expectations that the population has about the new government,” Valero said. “We are talking about a government in which people have deposited great confidence.”

In fact, the outpouring of hopes sometimes seems like a kind of giant national Rorschach test, in which each Mexican sees in the new president the realization of his or her own needs and ambitions.

For example, Partido, the recently minted MBA, describes Fox as a kind of super-CEO who will re-engineer the bureaucracy, the stuff of a Harvard Business School case study.

“There will be programs of total quality. There will be continuous-improvement circles,” he said, brimming with business school buzzwords. “This government will make this change.”

Citizens’ Opinions Now Seem to Matter

But the flood of ideas represents more than just citizens’ hopes for a new party.

While PRI governments brought many improvements to the population, from schools to hospitals, politics operated in a top-down fashion. The system long blocked other parties from competing on equal terms, and even resorted to fraud to win elections.

But the July 2 election was truly democratic, thanks to a series of recent government reforms. Now, for the first time, citizens’ opinions seem to matter.

Hundreds of resumes have even poured in to Fox’s headhunters from Mexicans holding prominent jobs abroad, say the president-elect’s advisors.

“It’s a very emotional response,” said John E. Smith Jr., a Mexico-based headhunter who is friendly with Fox but not working with the government’s team. “Mexicans are feeling very proud of what their country has been able to do in a peaceful manner. They want to be part of a historic transition.”

Business leaders aren’t the only ones asking what they can do for their country.

Homemakers, bureaucrats, dentists and students have lined up with their resumes at the president-elect’s Mexico City office. Fox has pledged a diverse Cabinet, but probably even he didn’t have in mind the burly applicant who turned up last week attired in black tights and a rubber mask.

It was Super Animal, a professional wrestler, and he informed the secret service agents that he had his eye on the environment minister’s job, newspapers reported.

An Unheard-Of Orgy of Self-Promotion

The new equal-opportunity ambience has produced an almost unheard-of orgy of self-promotion. Aspirants for Cabinet jobs, from generals to economists, routinely tout their qualifications in press interviews.

It is a wild change from the old system of all-powerful leaders and fawning acolytes, in which the most grievous sin was to market oneself. In the past, an ambitious young person would seek a political godfather to advance his or her cause.

No more.

“I’m my own godfather,” Monsivais said. “That’s the message.”

One of the newly empowered is Mario Gaston Chapa Garza. Shunning the conventional resume route, he took out a quarter-page ad in Reforma headlined “Vicente Fox, Here I Am!” The ad, complete with photo of a T-shirt-wearing young man with windblown hair, featured a four-point list of his qualifications for environment minister, including his wish that his daughter Isabel be able to drink the water.

“Although I am not well known, I AM CAPABLE,” Chapa Garza declared, instructing the new president to consult his Web site.

Not to be outdone, another applicant took out a similar ad in Reforma two weeks later. His achievements: He had worked in carpentry, getting to know the common people, and then had embarked on a more globalized career in his father’s business.

There, he noted, he had developed the traits that Fox seeks: “teamwork, conflict management, working with a sense of mission and, most important, developing my leadership abilities.” He noted that he had recruited a dozen men whom he had trained as leaders, only one of whom had failed.

“In the event I am accepted, please contact me through prayer,” the ad read.

It was signed: Jesus of Nazareth.