(THE FARM), TIGRES DEL NORTE, 2009The world threw up some intrepid and inspiring heroes of democracy at the end of the twentieth century. In Poland, there was Lech Walesa, the hardened union man who endured years of repression before leading his people to rise and defeat authoritarian communism. In South Africa, Nelson Mandela survived twenty-seven years on a prison island, then rid the world of the dastardly affliction of racist apartheid while avoiding a bloody vengeance that might have shattered his country. Then in Mexico there was … Senor Vicente Fox.The man who led Mexico’s final march from the authoritarian PRI to multiparty democracy was the unlikeliest of characters. He came from neither the socialist left nor Catholic right, the two factions that rose up to challenge PRI hegemony. Instead, he was a wealthy rancher and Coca-Cola executive who haphazardly stepped into politics at age forty-six and became governor of his native state of Guanajuato seven years later. While he joined the conservative National Action Party, he was never one of their true religionists.
