Vicente Fox's Borders Policy: Sign Books, Ignore Critics

Vicente Fox is a tall cowboy with a deep voice and he likes to travel light. The entourage of the sometime bullfighter and former president of Mexico has shrunk to his wife and an aide. Early Thursday, after the former first lady was forced to check her toothpaste and creams at the airport metal detector, the trio boarded a quick hop from Philadelphia to Washington.

What ensued was a fiasco of the sort that is now air travel north of the Rio Grande. Elapsed time to Washington: five hours.

"There was no explanation why we have this delay, there was no apology because of the delay," Fox said after he arrived. "I mean, I would like to see President Clinton coming to Mexico and see if we treat him like that!"

Welcome to America, Se¿or Presidente! It's not what it used to be.

But then, Fox knows America. He gets it, he digs it, in all its mythic promise, its big dreams and weird nightmares.

He says so in his new memoir, "Revolution of Hope" -- the American-style flacking of which has brought him to Washington. He is that rare enough creature, a former Mexican president who has not vanished, a step ahead of one allegation or another.

Out of power just a year, he's barnstorming U.S. cities, chatting up Jon Stewart, Bill O'Reilly, Larry King. At the Borders on L Street NW, he signs more than a hundred books for a long line of American and Mexican fans. He has the thick, crinkled, perfectly imperfect features of an aging Gregory Peck. Those worn-saddle arroyos around the eyes and mouth are the kind Hollywood would want to apply to an old gunslinger, probably the rogue. But Hollywood would never stand for the blocky mass of a mustache.

A scrum of Mexican reporters calls out in Spanish from behind a rope.

"Se¿or Fox, what do you say to the people who accuse you of corruption?"

"Have you already bought it?" Fox replies in Spanish, holding up a copy of the book to the reporters.

"There are better things to read!" comes a reply.

"Buy one!" urges the author, selling books as energetically as he used to hawk Coca-Cola, when he was president of its Mexican operations at age 32. He sips from a 20-ounce bottle of the non-diet stuff as he signs.