A New Mexico--or still the old? When Vicente Fox won the Mexican presidency, he captivated the nation with his promises of sweeping change. Two years later, the reality of reform has been slow and less inspiring than many hoped.

• Author: Buchsbaum, Herbert
• Position: International

Sonia Weiss Pick remembers the moment she figured out that Mexico's democracy was a sham.

She was 10, and a candidate for President was speaking on the radio. "Listen," her mother said, "that's the person who's going to be your next President."

The election was still months away, her mother hadn't seen any opinion polls, and she certainly wasn't psychic. "I realized that this system wasn't really democratic," says Sonia, now an 18-year-old Mexico City high school senior. "It was just a facade."

For 71 years, the candidate of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, known by its Spanish initials as the PRI, always won. And although Sonia didn't know it at the time, the PRI often resorted to fraud, repression, and bribery just to make sure.

So, like most Mexicans, she was stunned when Vicente Fox, a candidate of the conservative National Action Party, won the presidency in July 2000, breaking the PRI's stranglehold on power. "I was amazed," she says. "Mexico's dictatorship was finally broken."

Since then, however, the wave of optimism that accompanied Fox's election has receded. His promises to bolster the economy, stamp out crime and corruption, and improve education have gone nowhere. The economy has soured, throwing hundreds of thousands of Mexicans out of work; crime, rather than falling, has increased. Fox's approval rating, which had soared above 80 percent a year ago, has plunged as low as 48 percent. Today, many Mexicans wonder whether Fox, like democracy itself, really holds the answers to their problems.

"We are in the process of learning how to do things in a democratic system," says Reynaldo Ortega Ortiz, a historian at the Colegio de Mexico, in Mexico City. "The problem is that while we are learning, the costs to society are high."

U.S. FEELS THE EFFECTS

Mexicans aren't the only ones concerned about whether Fox succeeds. Increasingly, what happens in Mexico affects the United States, and vice versa. Mexico is America's second-largest trading partner. Mexico buys 73 percent of its imports from the U.S., and sells the U.S. a whopping 89 percent of its exports. (Check your jeans label.) Moreover, Mexico's economic problems ripple through American cities: Some 300,000 Mexicans cross the border every year in search of work, joining the 9 million Mexicans already living in the U.S. Mexican crime also takes a toll in the U.S.: An estimated two-thirds of the cocaine in the U.S. comes through Mexico, as do major shipments of ecstasy and...