Fox, Vicente (1942—)

Vicente Fox, born July 2, 1942, was the first Mexican president from an opposition party elected in 71 years. The candidate from the right-of-center National Action Party (PAN), he was elected president of Mexico on July 2, 2000, defeating Francisco Labastida of the Revolutionary Institutional Party (PRI), a party in power since 1929.

[Page 253]Fox studied business administration and management at Mexico City's Jesuit-run Ibero-American University and at Harvard, joining Coca-Cola in 1964 as a route supervisor. Over the next 15 years he climbed the corporate ladder to become Coca-Cola's president for Mexico and Central America.

He entered politics in the 1980s and was elected to Congress in 1988, ran for the post of governor of Guanajuato in 1991, and won by a landslide victory on his ...