Fox says Zedillo speech ignored Mexican poverty

President-elect Fox says "selective, temporary intervention by the state" is needed to bring prosperity to more Mexicans

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) -- Outgoing Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo's upbeat speech to the nation Friday ignored pressing problems such as the fate of millions of poor Mexicans, President-elect Vicente Fox said in newspaper reports Saturday.

"Fighting poverty and inequality should be the highest priority," Fox said in the daily El Universal. "Macroeconomic (improvement) should serve to generate wealth, but every Mexican should have a better quality of life."

The president's speech came two months after landmark elections swept Fox into power, handing Zedillo's Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) its first presidential election defeat since the party's founding 71 years ago. Fox will take office on December 1.

Zedillo, in his final state-of-the-nation address Friday night, told Mexicans that those elections -- ending seven decades of single-party rule -- had brought the nation to full democracy.

He also hailed Mexico's recovery from the punishing economic crisis of 1995, his first year in office.

	VIDEO
CNN's Harris Whitbeck reports of the outgoing Mexican president's speech Play video (QuickTime, Real or Windows Media)

While Fox has repeatedly praised Zedillo's political reforms and the recovery of a precarious economy inherited by Zedillo, the incoming president has also said the economic upswing has yet to reach some 40 million poor people in a population of 97 million.

"To leave it up to the market to bring development to people and families, as neoliberals advocate, is the wrong path," Fox said in the newspaper La Jornada. He called for "selective, temporary intervention by the state."

Fox, who watched the speech from his office, added that Zedillo failed to address the six-year-old Zapatista rebel uprising in the poor southern state of Chiapas.

But Zedillo's speech to the opening session of the Congress elected on July 2 was received enthusiastically by lawmakers from Fox's conservative National Action Party (PAN). They rose to give Zedillo an ovation for his support of electoral reforms aimed at consolidating Mexico's democracy.

In contrast, leaders of Zedillo's own PRI, still bitter over an election loss many party hard-liners blame on the outgoing president, withheld their applause.

"There was no applause because he did not deserve it," said PRI Sen. Manuel Bartlett.

At one point during the address, PRI Deputy Salvador Castaneda stood and turned his back on the president for two minutes.

Copyright 2000 Reuters. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

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