President Fox, candidate of the "Alliance for Change," made minimal changes to the country despite his expectations-filled victory in July 2000. But Mexican insiders tell United Press International that one key sign that Fox was not ready to reform came shortly after his unexpected electoral victory when he appointed several officials of the old regime he defeated to his transition team and his government, especially to the federal police agencies and the presidential offices.

In all, Fox appointed only 78 members of his own party, the conservative PAN, to the entire federal government during his first year. He also discarded other allies such as the Green Party, renegade leftist activists, as well as others from the civil society that mobilized to put an end to Mexico's 71 years of one-party rule by the PRI, the intriguingly-named Party of the Institutionalized Revolution.

While analysts have speculated the reasons for this "co-optation," as writer Lorenzo Meyer labeled it back in 2001, there has been little in the way of concrete explanations. Was he threatened? Was he paid off? Some speculated that is was his innocence and good will that led him to "seek social peace" by making as few changes as possible. But Sergio Aguayo, an academic specializing on the Mexican political police, criticized Fox in 2001 for his "suicidal policy of appeasing the worst of the former regime."

Now, information from Fox's former close associates is emerging that can help answer some of these questions.

Felipe Zavala was one of the closest confidantes to Fox, serving as his personal secretary since 1991. Staying with Fox throughout the campaign and appearing next to the candidate at virtually every rally and event, Zavala just after the electoral victory was elbowed out of President Fox's inner circle by PRI officials brought in to run Fox's presidential office, and has been working at the Agriculture Secretariat since. Zavala recently declared that as presidential candidate in 1999 and 2000, Fox met privately several times with former President Luis Echeverr�a (1970-76).

"I would wait outside, but they would speak alone for hours each time," Zavala now reveals.

Zavala mentioned that Fox met about 15 times with Echeverr�a, mostly at the latter's home in Mexico City. Fox even had a sympathetic nickname for the former president, "El Huichol," which he would use as a code over the telephone when arranging their meetings.

While a presidential candidate meeting a former president in most countries would not raise eyebrows, in Mexico this has serious implications. Echeverr�a is widely criticized as the architect of Mexico's "dirty war," massive corruption, economic meltdowns, as well as the wielding of power behind the throne long after his term expired.

Some have speculated that Echeverr�a's control of the various federal police and spy agencies since he was interior minister in the late 1960s is the source of his extra-constitutional power inside the PRI. Among them is former President Carlos Salinas (1988-94), who publicly declared this in 1995 after several of his top political allies were murdered or jailed. Echeverr�a's ties to drug cartels have long been suspected, and his brother-in-law, Ruben Zuno Arce, is serving a life sentence in the United States since 1992 for the drug-trade-related murder of an agent of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration and his pilot. In that ruling, the California court determined that Zuno Arce was a member of the Guadalajara drug cartel.

Fox was widely seen as the best hope for ending these legacies of Mexican politics. A former Coca-Cola executive and gentleman rancher, Fox led a bare-knuckled fight against the PRI since joining the long-time opposition party PAN in 1988, famously mocking Salinas from the Congress. Fox became the candidate of the PAN (in coalition with the Greens) in 1999 and defeated the PRI candidate, the former Salinas loyalist Francisco Labastida, in July 2, 2000.

Mexican analysts suggest that for Fox to have held regular clandestine meetings with Echeverr�a would be the equivalent of discovering that Ronald Reagan did the same with Soviet officials during his campaign in 1980.

Echeverria is hated by Mexico's left, who have sought to bring genocide charges against him as the minister of the interior responsible for the 1968 Olympic Games massacre of students and other protestors near downtown Mexico City. The Right in Mexico blames Echeverr�a for an economic disaster whose effects are still felt. When Echeverria took office, the Mexican peso was trading at just over 12 to the dollar and there was little foreign debt. He sharply increased indebtedness and eventually the peso collapsed to about one-thousandth of its 1970 exchange rate, wiping out the savings of the middle classes.

Another sign of a possible "understanding" between Fox and Echeverr�a comes from an appointment Fox made to the Public Security Secretariat, the main ministry with police and investigative functions. To head it, the then president-elect appointed Alejandro Gertz Manero, an academic and former head of the Mexico City police department. Gertz had also been at the center of a long-forgotten scandal in 1972 as he, accompanied by six armed officers, attempted to confiscate archeological artifacts from the owner of a small museum in the city of San Miguel de Allende.

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At that time, Gertz worked for President Echeverr�a's top cop, and it was suspected that the artifacts might have been intended for the president himself, who is known to have a personal collection. The museum owner, Miguel Malo, died from a bullet to the head after he refused to hand over the collection to Gertz. The incident was ruled a suicide by the police. The details were documented at the time by Malo?s widow, who filed a report with the local police station, and several articles in the few independent media outlets (those not subject to Echeverr�a's censorship) at the time.

Fredo Arias-King, an aide to Vicente Fox who handled the international relations of the campaign, was familiar with the incident in 1972 since Malo had been a friend of his family, which also hails from San Miguel.

"When president-elect Fox made the announcement [appointing Gertz] sometime in October of 2000, I had some of his closest associates, who were after all my friends and former campaign colleagues, show him those yellowing newspaper clippings from 1972 about the incident involving Gertz and the museum owner," Arias-King told UPI.

"Those articles clearly link Gertz to both Echeverr�a and the failed extortion attempt that ended in Malo's suicide. But Fox ignored them and went ahead with the appointment anyway. Fox reportedly answered "That was 30 years ago, surely he's changed by now."

Undaunted, Arias-King later approached Martha Sahag�n, a key Fox aide who later married the president, as well as Ramon Munoz, another Fox top aide, individually to discuss the problem. According to Arias-King, upon seeing the articles, both tacitly and reluctantly admitted that there was some kind of a political arrangement behind Gertz?s appointment, but both stressed that it was "temporary." Sahag�n added that she was "attempting to reverse it," while Munoz mentioned that "we put as his second in command (at the SSP) someone who has nothing to do with him," and who presumably would keep an eye on him.

Arias-King mentions that that was the last time he could speak to both of his former campaign colleagues. "After those two meetings, I became a sort of persona non grata at the Mexican Kremlin." When he ran into by-then first lady Sahag�n at an event in late 2001 and attempted to bring up the matter of Gertz once again, Sahag�n signaled to her bodyguard, who 'politely but firmly pushed me away from her,' recalls Arias-King.

Arias-King recently published an article titled "Mexico's Wasted Chance" for the Washington-based journal The National Interest where he puts the Gertz incident in a broader context of a proclivity to appoint Echeverr�a people by Fox. Other officials associated with Echeverr�a that Fox appointed to high office were the ambassador to Washington (Echeverr�a?s former personal secretary), the national security advisor Adolfo Aguilar Zinser (who headed the "Third World University," a pet project of the former president) and a raft of other officials placed at key posts throughout the federal government.

Just six weeks after Gertz settled in his SSP office, Joaqu�n "El Chapo" Guzm�n, formerly a lieutenant of the Guadalajara cartel, escaped from a maximum-security prison. He is still at large and heading his own cartel. Gertz lasted about four years at the helm of the SSP before being replaced with a PAN official, who shortly thereafter died in a helicopter crash.

Both Zavala and Arias-King say they did not come forward sooner with this information because people by then seemed to have lost interest in these stories from the transition, as Fox was already widely seen as a disappointment, and because it may have been used by Fox's opponents against the PAN and its new presidential candidate. Both say they still are sympathetic to the PAN and even helped the campaign of the new President Felipe Calderon, who happens to have also widely criticized Fox for his proclivity for "gratuitously placing PRI officials at the helm and getting nothing in return," as the candidate said before a business convention late last year.

Calderon has instead vowed that he, in an allusion against Fox, prefers "temporary inexperience to permanent sabotage," quoting former Czechoslovak President V�clav Havel's dictum. Calderon won with a narrow margin the July election against a leftist candidate who had promised "real change" and accused Fox of "selling out" to the previous regime.

Fox may have understood that the PRI was divided into two camps, one headed by Salinas and his allies, the other by Echeverr�a. Since his opponent Labastida was more in the Salinas camp, perhaps Fox calculated that reaching out to Echeverr�a -- in the realpolitik style of a 'Nixon in China" -- could bring him needed information, political cover or even personal security. However, unlike with Nixon and Mao, it is unknown what Fox presumably negotiated with Echeverr�a, if anything, or what the content of those conversations were. Fox's term has now ended, but the historians are already beginning work.

Since Echeverr�a's power is said to derive from the federal police and intelligence agencies, it perhaps is no coincidence that he may have negotiated for his ally Gertz to head the Public Security Secretariat. Members of the previous regime also surrounded the president at his office and controlled access to him and the presidential agenda. Fox may have allowed this to assuage elements of the previous regime, maybe even Echeverr�a, about his intentions.

It is commonly believed that to reach high offices, Mexican political hopefuls need to make "agreements" with powerful underground elements, whereby rules of the game are arrived at and areas of activity delineated. Sudden rashes of contract killings of police officers or politicians are seen in the media as a breakdown of these "agreements" or this "balance." Sometimes, what seems like a police crackdown on a drug cartel can merely reflect a war between rival cartels.

The new president-elect, Calderon, may not be immune to this law in Mexican politics. Shortly before he took office, he appeared at a public rally alongside Gertz.

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