Vicente Fox, Social Democrat and Ex-Student of Harvard

[aabdo@xxxxxxxxxxxxx (Tony Abdo)]

Well here it is Michael, another Harvard connected Latin leader.     I
finally found that after Alejandro Toledo got his Stanford PhD, he
headed for Harvard also.      Therefore, the confusion.

But 'Chente had been keeping his Harvard ties in the background.
That rascal!   But what's a 'management' course or two, anyway?
Mexicans are just happy that he didn't go to Yale.      And who can
blame them?

Maybe we ought to try to close Harvard down, along with The School of
Americas?       At least we wouldn't have to go out to Fort Benning, Ga.
to demonstrate on an annual basis.       Father Roy, are you listening?

Well, Alejandro Toledo huffed, and he puffed, but the imperialist pig
for 'democracy' couldn't blow the big bad wolf's house down.       He'll
have to do some more 'chats' for a while.

Here is Reuters, about the... uh...new  Third Way........
_________________________________
Fox's economic team seeks third way to Mexican growth
28 Jul 2000 16:30
By Richard Jacobsen

MEXICO CITY, July 28 (Reuters) - For the past two decades, Mexico's
economic destiny has been steered by men with graduate degrees from
Harvard, Yale and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Their
record is spotty at best.
Now it's the turn of Iowa State and the University of Pennsylvania and
people expected to end the reign of the "technocrats."

Since the early 1980s, Harvard-educated Presidents Miguel de la Madrid
and Carlos Salinas and Yale-educated President Ernesto Zedillo backed
economic policies that opened the country's borders to free trade with
its giant northern neighbor.
They privatized the banking and telecommunications systems, and sliced
subsidies.

But most Mexicans also hold them responsible for triple-digit inflation
in the late 1980s, a concentration of wealth among a minority, and a
botched December 1994 devaluation that triggered the deepest recession
since the 1930s.
They were known as technocrats and their policies dubbed "neoliberal"
for their efforts to shrink government's role in the economy in favor of
increased competition and the financial markets' invisible hand.

CHANGING OF THE GUARD
Vicente Fox's victory in the July 2 presidential election not only
ousted the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which has held the
presidency since 1929, but also brought an end to the technocrats' reign
over the economy.
Fox, who has a business degree from Mexico City's Iberoamerican
University and also did a management course at Harvard, has said he is
seeking a middle ground between the untrammeled free-market and the
state-dominated economy the Mexican technocrats dismantled.

He has picked to head his economic team two men who had no hand in
economic polices of the previous three governments: Luis Ernesto Derbez,
who holds a doctorate in economics from Iowa State University, and
Eduardo Sojo, who did doctoral studies in industrial organization at the
University of Pennsylvania.

Derbez is widely expected to be named finance minister after Fox takes
office Dec. 1. Sojo, who headed Fox's economic cabinet during his
1995-1999 term as governor of Guanajuato state, is also expected to
figure prominently in the new administration.

Sojo and Derbez have been side-by-side in recent talks with Finance
Ministry officials over the 2001 budget.
They have credited the Zedillo administration for fiscal discipline and
policies that set Mexico back on solid economic foundations -- growing
at an annual rate of around 6 percent.

But they also have distanced themselves from neoliberal polices seen not
to have adequately addressed how to pull 40 million Mexicans out of
poverty in a country of 97 million.

'MARKETS CAN'T DO EVERYTHING'
"The model that we're putting in place is one that believes in the
private sector, that believes in markets, that believes in competition,"
Sojo said. "But it is also one that believes in the need for selective
and temporary intervention of the government to reduce inequities, that
thinks that markets can't do everything."

Fox, often described as a pro-business conservative, joined with a group
of left-of-center Latin American leaders to draft a 1997 document -- "A
Latin American Alternative" -- that sought to outline "a new path," or
third way, for the region after neoliberalism. The group included
current Chilean President Ricardo Lagos and former Brazilian President
and maverick Governor Itamar Franco.

"We are strongly determined to overcome the neoliberal polices that have
elevated the status of the market from that of an instrument to that of
a religion," said the document.

Sojo, 44, a native of Fox's home state of Guanajuato, has been a key
member of the president-elect's economic team since 1995. From 1987 to
1992 he held senior posts at the government statistics institute INEGI.

Before joining Fox, Sojo was head of economic research at the
Technological Institute of Monterrey's campus in Leon, Guanajuato,
focusing on regional development issues.

Derbez, 53, joined Fox in 1997, leading the team that drafted the
then-candidate's 2000-2006 economic program, which includes a goal of
gross domestic product growth of 7 percent a year toward the end of his
six-year term and increased private investment in state-run energy and
petrochemical industries.

For the previous 14 years Derbez worked at the World Bank, heading
programs for Chile, Central America and in Africa.
SPAWNING SMALL BUSINESSES
A professor since 1997 at the Graduate Business Administration School at
the Technological Institute of Monterrey, Derbez speaks of spawning
small businesses rather than sweeping macroeconomic philosophy.

"The success in Spain and Italy has been that they have been able to
provide the environment so that the small entrepreneur can really
thrive," Derbez said recently in rapid-fire English. "That's what we're
looking for in terms of the overall change in the Mexican structure of
production, employment and, I hope, growth in the future."

Micro-credit and developing the so-called "rearguard" of small
businesses, as opposed to just the frontline, large-cap exporters, were
key points in "A Latin American Alternative."

Mexican economists familiar with Derbez and Sojo said they expected the
two to reflect Fox's preference for pragmatism over economic ideology.

"They won't take any measures without considering the markets, that
throw things off balance, that result in artificial growth for which we
would later have to pay with a devaluation halfway through the
administration," said Cesar Castro, head of analysts at the CAPEM
economic think tank.