Former Mexican President Vicente Fox Quesada is engaging in a series of verbal battles both with Venezuelan ruler Nicolás Maduro and Mexican presidential hopeful Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO).
Fox, who has had an ongoing rift with leftists, broke out like loose cannon over the past few months in an attention attracting campaign that has no real goal and is not leading him anywhere except to make people think that at 75 years old it is odd that he’s seeking attention at all. Some think – this writer included – that he is suffering from senility because if not, what else could it be?
It is also a well-known fact that he has been taking the anti-depressant Prozac for many years and perhaps this has affected his mental capabilities.
Just over the past week he visited Barranquilla, Colombia where he participated in a conservative forum at a local university called “Populism in Latin America,” where launched a political broadside against Nicolás Maduro provoking an international reaction involving even Bolivia president Evo Morales.
Fox said that “to have people living in hunger and fear in order to perpetuate himself in power is a crime against humanity.”
He added, in his usually picturesque slang that Maduro either resigns or “he’s going to leave with the feet at the front in a coffin.”
To many the tirade was funny but Evo Morales said that if anything happens to Maduro, Fox will be to blame and for instigating a magnicide.
Fox retorted in a tweet: “…and who’s going to make Maduro responsible for the Venezuelans fallen today?”
Morales engaged in a senseless discussion against Fox who obviously responds to anything anyone sends his way and contradicting politicians he doesn’t like – particularly “populist leftists” – with whom he’s more than willing to exchange verbal punches.
With AMLO, Fox has an ongoing fight since Fox was president when he used all the power of the presidency to interfere in the presidential election which was finally won by his candidate and then National Action Party (PAN) peer Felipe Calderón.
In those days Fox sued AMLO and finally dropped the unfounded charges. He got on AMLO’s nerves with his constant verbal onslaught to the point that in one speech AMLO told President Fox “shut up you chatterbox” or “cállate, chachalaca,” a phrase that got a laugh even from Fox’s staunchest admirers.
But at least at the time – 2006 – the matchup between former Mexico City Mayor AMLO and President Fox was political and made sense.
Nowadays Fox is spending a lot of time attacking AMLO and is even claiming he will singlehandedly make certain that AMLO is not elected president because he is going to impose in Mexico the type of populism Nicolas Maduro is enacting in Venezuela provoking heavy protests.
Last week AMLO – always in electoral campaign without saying so – sent a message to Fox from industrial hub San José Iturbide in Fox’s home state of Guanajuato and 30 kilometers southeast of San Miguel de Allende:
“He is part of the corruption and living high on the hog. Fox is highly irritated and says that he’s not going to allow any change and that he’s going to use all the naughty tricks he knows to do it. I am telling him here from San José Iturbide to calm down, to cool off, that he’d better get psychologically prepared because when I am president we are going to cancel his monthly pension of five million pesos ($279,743).”
AMLO also said he did not know Venezuelans Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro and had absolutely no links with either of them or the type of socialism they have imposed on the Venezuelan people.
Of course, Fox promptly retorted that “he’s not going to be president and he is not going to take away my pension” in the constant chatter he carries on.
The truth is that nobody is paying attention to Vicente Fox nowadays; he had his 15 minutes of fame while president but that period is over and should do what all former living presidents are doing nowadays, stay mum regarding both Mexican and international politics.
That’s why many of us who are watching Vicente from far away consider that his behavior is a wacko one and again, perhaps, for the excessive use of Prozac and other anti-depressants.
In his desire for attention, Fox is even buying television time at Milenio Television newscast in which he delivers a non-stop 15 minute monologue every Tuesday evening.
Will Fox pay heed and follow the example of former presidents? Of course not and he’s willing to take on anyone who contradicts him.
Is this senility? I am no shrink but it looks like it!
