The chief aide to President Vicente Fox resigned Monday, complaining about first lady Martha Sahagun’s presidential ambitions.
“The country has certainly advanced politically, enough that it is ready for a woman to reach the presidency of the republic,” Private Secretary Alfonso Durazo said in a letter of resignation, which was widely quoted by Mexican news media. “Nonetheless, it is not prepared to have the president leave the presidency to his wife.”
The president’s office said Fox had accepted the resignation but “does not share either the points of view or the reasons” cited by Durazo.
Durazo has served as the chief organizer at the presidential residence, Los Pinos, since Fox took office in December 2000 and added the job of chief presidential spokesman last 2003.
In the 19-page resignation letter, Durazo said, “my reasoning is ever-more distant from the logic inside Los Pinos.”
“I do not understand nor share many of the decisions and it would be disloyal to oppose them or inconsistent to support them without being in agreement,” he said.
Durazo’s support of Fox ahead of the 2000 presidential election was evidence of Fox’s ability to draw support well beyond his own National Action Party, or PAN.
Durazo, a lawyer and journalist by training, spent his early career as a bureaucrat hopping from post to post in administrations led by the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI.
He had been private secretary to Luis Donaldo Colosio, who was the PRI’s presidential candidate when he was assassinated in 1994 and who became a symbol of calls for reform within the PRI.
Durazo has said the killing was one of the factors that led him to quit the PRI and endorse Fox’s campaign for the presidency for the National Action Party in 2000.
