Mexico prepares for arrival of Fox's Guanajuato Boys

Fox, center, will be inaugurated as the first opposition president in modern Mexican history

GUANAJUATO, Mexico (Reuters) -- Roll over Chicago Boys. The Guanajuato Boys are here.

A discreet but influential group of friends from Guanajuato, the home state of Mexican President-elect Vicente Fox, is preparing to share power and to reinvent government.

Before it was the Chicago Boys, a term used throughout Latin America to denote Chicago University-educated economists who have in recent decades, as finance and economy ministers, led the region into freemarket economics and away from heavy state intervention.

Not many of the Guanajuato Boys -- most educated by Jesuits or in Jesuit-run universities, like Fox himself -- have been appointed to high-profile ministries in the new government, which takes office on Friday as Mexico's first administration to surge from the opposition in 71 years.

Rather, they have been handed lower ranking but pivotal positions, or in some cases, named as coordinators of strategic areas to ensure individual ministerial decisions are all tinged with the Fox style -- like powers-behind-the-throne.

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One of their main tasks will be to ensure the way government works changes from the autocratic, aloof institution it had become by the end of the seven-decade tenure of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI).

The term invented by Fox in Guanajuato and now imposed on the national scene is "re-engineering government."

"To sum up, what we are looking for ... is a new project of government," Fox said, highlighting efficiency, quality control and accountability as foundation stones of his administration.

All collaborators with Fox when he was governor of the central, agricultural state from 1995-99, the Boys actually include one Guanajuato Girl -- Martha Sahagun -- Fox's press spokeswoman and rumored one day to become Mexico's first lady.

Most of the hometown gang are not members of Fox's conservative National Action Party (PAN), with which he himself has an at times chilly relationship.

Fox named Eduardo Sojo, a 44-year-old economist with a degree from the University of Pennsylvania who ran his economic cabinet in Guanajuato, as his coordinator for public policies.

Sojo's responsibility will be to make sure decisions taking by the economic ministries are congruent, and obey the aim of fighting poverty. That will nominally place Sojo above Finance Minister Francisco Gil Diaz, one of the original Chicago Boys.

Another collaborator, farm mogul Javier Usabiaga who is known as the "Garlic King," was agriculture minister in Guanajuato and will play the same role at federal level.

Systems engineer Carlos Flores, 39, who devised a regional development plan for Fox in Guanajuato, will run strategic planning and regional development in the federal government.

Luis Romero Hicks, 43, an economist educated at Lawrence University, Wisconsin, and who was finance minister in Guanajuato, will head state export-import bank Bancomext.

And Fox camp insiders said Ramon Huerta, a 43-year-old public administrator from Guanajuato, would be given a key position in the Interior Ministry under Interior Minister Santiago Creel, another close aide to Fox.

Hicks recently told Reuters that many programs implemented in Guanajuato, such as a micro-credit scheme for small businesses, could be transferred to the federal level.

"The Guanajuato experience is valid. You can apply a lot to the national level with enormous chances of success," he said.

The 50,000-strong civil service in Guanajuato is minuscule when compared with the 1.7-million employees at federal level.

Critics, some of whom claim re-engineering government in Guanajuato led to little but a change in style, say there are too many differences in running a state and running a country for Fox's Guanajuato experience to be of much use.

"The task on a federal level is enormous," acknowledged Ramon Munoz, 40, who spearheaded Fox's re-engineering of Guanajuato and who has been named by the President-elect as his federal coordinator for "government innovation."

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

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