Mexican Takes Page From Carter, Clinton

'I'd Like to Be Like Them,' Fox Says of Project-Filled Post-Presidency

SAN CRISTOBAL, Mexico -- Mexican presidents, by long-standing tradition, not only fade away after leaving office. They go away.

Plutarco Elías Calles was escorted out of the country in shame. Ernesto Zedillo moved to the United States, and Carlos Salinas de Gortari, dogged by scandal, opted to live in Ireland.

But Vicente Fox, the former Coca-Cola executive whose election in 2000 ended seven decades of one-party rule, has set out to create the most high-profile former presidency in modern Mexican history, styled much like those of U.S. presidents. Since leaving office in December, Fox has roved across Mexico and the world, giving speeches at motivational seminars run by The Power Within group, raising money, generating headlines and trying mightily to counter the perception that his tenure was a failure.

With no Mexican role models, Fox has said he learned much from watching the post-White House lives of Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter.

"I'd like to be like them," he confided Friday, while a few steps away a group of foreign journalists descended on tequila and guacamole at his ranch house in the village of San Cristobal, a five-hour drive northwest of Mexico City.

Fox has created a foundation to promote democracy and combat poverty. He is also at work on two books: an autobiography written in Spanish and "Revolution of Hope," an English-language memoir that he is dictating to his Texan co-author, public relations executive Rob Allyn. "I don't sit at the computer," Fox said.

But Fox's biggest post-presidency venture is taking shape in San Cristobal, where he is building a democracy center and presidential library -- the first in Mexican history. The library, which is scheduled to open in November and will hold about 4 million documents and 15,000 hours of video, has been derisively dubbed "Foxilandia."

"He's trying to rewrite his time in office, so it won't be remembered as chaotic and a failure," Juan Pardinas, a Mexico City-based political analyst, said in an interview. "I have serious doubts about what's going to happen because he has a tendency to say imprudent things."

Fox -- who has been criticized for failing to deliver on promises to significantly raise wages, improve economic growth to at least 7 percent a year and strike an immigration accord with the United States -- shrugs off criticism of his refusal to keep a low profile.

"Yes, that's what Mexico says. But I don't care," he said. "I don't want to sit here and look at the trees and die. I want to walk the streets of Mexico . . . normally ex-presidents flee the country with bags of money to hide in Swiss banks."

The ranch house, with its thick concrete walls, exposed wooden beams and huge skylights, is now Fox's center of operations. Outside, mallard ducks glide across a pond and deer graze in an enclosed pasture. A statue of Don Quixote greets visitors in the driveway. Harley-Davidson motorcycles sit in the open garage -- a sign on one says: "Live to Ride. Ride to Live." Fox holds court here, in a living room filled with saddles, some trimmed in pure silver.

On the road, no sign points the way to San Cristobal, where chickens run loose in the dusty streets leading to the construction site for Fox's library. Fox's wife, Marta Sahagún, said the concept for the library was born a year ago when she visited Clinton's presidential library in Little Rock. In San Cristobal, workers drill and hammer, careful not to destroy the old brick walls that will be preserved at the site where Fox's family once owned stables.