Mexico Trucker Online

SAN CRISTOBAL, Mexico — A cowboy hat perched on his head and his first-ever BlackBerry strapped to his hip, former President Vicente Fox says he’ll live the new chapter of his life his way. Tradition be damned, he has no plans to be quiet and fade away.

On a recent afternoon at his ranch in Central Mexico, Fox seemed years younger than when he left office in December after a tough six-year term at the helm of Mexico’s new democracy.

Expectations were high, and may people felt the tall, mustachioed Fox failed to deliver on promised change as the first opposition-party president in more than 70 years.

He also was called Botas, Spanish for boots, and sometimes ridiculed as a bumpkin.

But now, with the weight of a nation off his shoulders and his long-aching back, Fox’s posture is straighter than it has been in a long time.

He seems as determined as ever to forge a place in history.

“Who says I have to shut up?” Fox said over lunch at a large table made from the wooden doors of an old warehouse.

The opinions come steady: the United States should be ashamed of the walls it is building along the U.S.-Mexico border, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez is a dictator who is destroying his own people, and his successor, Felipe Calderón, must continue to battle drug cartels.

Fox rolls his eyes when asked about candidates for the U.S. presidency and declined to handicap the 2008 race.

“There is fear about what the United States will become with immigrants,” he said, “but the fear should be what will become of it without them.”

He quotes from former U.S. President Ronald’s Reagan’s efforts to tear down the Berlin Wall and Abraham Lincoln wanting freedom for the slaves.

Just as Fox rejected the role of being a strongman president, he’s rejected the tradition of former presidents disappearing from the public eye.

“He is breaking the unwritten law of Mexican politics that an ex-Mexican president should be hidden,” analyst César Hernández said.

Fox firsts

Fox’s predecessor, Ernesto Zedillo, quietly went to work at Yale. Zedillo’s predecessor, Carlos Salinas de Gortari, lived for years in Ireland — where there is no extradition treaty — presumably to evade a corruption investigation.

And Miguel De La Madrid, who came before Salinas, passes his days in a Mexico City mansion protected by soldiers in combat gear.

Fox is easy to find.

He lives on the same ranch where his family has for five generations. He grew up in this town that goes by the same name as the ranch.

“I want to stay in Mexico, walk the streets of Mexico and be a democratic citizen,” he said.

The list of Fox firsts continues.

He is building Mexico’s first presidential library, Centro Fox, that he hopes will draw students and researchers. It is to be housed on the grounds of an old hacienda, which he says took gunfire during the Mexican Revolution.

About 4 million documents will be available for the public to view, and nothing generated by his office will be held back, he said.

“He is a first,” said Fox’s former spokesman, Rubén Aguilar. “We are opening democratic space where there wasn’t one before.”

Still, some observers believe stocking Centro Fox might be in conflict with Mexican law, which holds that presidential papers are the property of the nation’s archives.

His memoirs are to be published later this year in the United States — in English — a move sure to provoke nationalist debate in Mexico.

He also was bold enough to bring a bus of reporters to his ranch last week and turn a meal of chicken mole into a news conference.

Working the circuit

Then there is his intense public speaking schedule. Since leaving office he’s had more than 20 engagements, including two visits to San Antonio and a coming trip to South America.

He jokes about whether Chávez would give him permission to visit Venezuela.

Former Presidents Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter, who travel extensively and speak openly, offer examples Fox said he hopes to be able to follow.

“I do not know how long it will last; we will see if people get bored,” Fox said of working “the circuit.”

Hernández, the analyst, said it also remains to be seen how long the government will tolerate Fox.

An ex-president being so public tends to undermine the authority of the current president, Hernández said.

In the meantime, Fox seems at ease surrounded by fields of corn and broccoli and in close proximity to a stable of horses.

His expansive, glassed-in dining room is stocked with Western-style mementos.

Eleven elaborate saddles, including one from the king of Morocco and another from President Bush, sit on wooden mounts.

Two barrels are filled with tequila brews personalized for him, and a section of the floor is covered by a large rug made of thousands of soft strips of leather.

Former first lady Marta Sahagún, whom Fox married while in office, is more of a city girl.

While he wears boots and keeps torn-off pieces of corn tortilla beside his plate, she has manicured toes, wears stylish sandals and keeps a small paging device used to summon the hired help.

They answer their own phones, check their own e-mail and manage their own schedules, an aide said.

Fox drives his own Jeep in the nearby village, although there’s often a bodyguard — complete with sunglasses, earpiece and gun — riding with him.

“Cycles come and go,” said Sahagún, who laughed as she denied any chance she’d follow Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s lead and go into politics. “The political cycle is over.”