Vicente Fox
Vicente Fox was president of Mexico from 2000 to 2006, the first from the opposition since the revolution, the six-foot-five rancher and former Coca-Cola executive with the cowboy boots who won the election of 2 July 2000 for the conservative National Action Party by six points and ended the PRI's seventy-one years, which was the achievement. His presidency did not do much else. The congress he never controlled blocked the tax, energy and labour reforms, the immigration agreement with Bush that was to be the whole enchilada died on 11 September 2001 with everything else. The Zapatistas marched to the capital in March 2001 and the indigenous-rights law that came out of it satisfied nobody. The economy grew at two per cent while China took the maquiladoras' work. What the six years did leave was the freedom of information law of 2002, the opening of the dirty-war archives and the special prosecutor who charged Echeverría, and the Seguro Popular health insurance for the uninsured. There were the housing loans that built two million homes, and a currency and a budget that stayed stable, which in Mexico had not been nothing. He was born in Mexico City in 1942 and raised on the family ranch at San Cristóbal in Guanajuato, the son of a Spanish-Irish father and a Basque mother, studied business at the Ibero-American University, joined Coca-Cola as a route salesman in 1964 and was its president for Mexico and Central America by 1975, when it overtook Pepsi. He entered politics in 1988 with the PAN, and was a congressman and governor of Guanajuato in 1995-99. He campaigned for the presidency for three years with a foundation of his own outside the party. The attempt in 2005 to strip López Obrador, the mayor of the capital, of his immunity over a road easement, which would have kept him off the ballot, brought a million people into the Zócalo and was dropped. The election of 2006 that Calderón won by half a point, with Fox's own campaigning against López Obrador ruled improper by the electoral tribunal, was the term's end. His wife's sons' businesses were the scandal. He has spent his retirement at the ranch, which is a museum and a library, and on television and Twitter, where he calls Trump names and has advocated legal marijuana. He has quarrelled with every president since.
- Lived: 1942 CE – ?
- Nationality: Mexican
- Roles: president, businessman, politician
