No one ever accused Vicente Fox of being the sharpest knife in the drawer. Over the years the former Mexican president has saluted the Colombian Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa (who is actually Peruvian and has never won the coveted prize for literature), invoked the memory of the late Argentine man of letters Jose Luis Borges (the first name was Jorge) and publicly urged his fellow Mexicans not to waste their time reading newspapers. Fox's proven penchant for gaffes might not quite match another North American chief of state's gift for mangling facts and the English language, but the 65-year-old ex Coca-Cola executive may have committed his biggest blunder yet when Fox and his wife Marta granted the editors of a glossy Mexican magazine exclusive access to their ranch in his native state of Guanajuato. The cover story in the September 7 issue of Quien magazine lifted the veil on a lavish country estate that boasts a completely remodeled two-story mansion, gym, swimming pool, wine cellar, an artificial lake stocked with colorful fish and immaculately kept grounds where deer and peacocks roam.

   Trouble is, Rancho San Cristobal wasn't always so posh. Former Fox aide Lino Korrodi recalls a simple, more rustic spread in the 1990s that had neither pool nor exotic fauna before Fox won the historic 2000 election that ended 71 consecutive years of rule by Mexico's Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). Back then, says Korrodi, the future president of the republic was a cash-strapped man who didn't always have enough money to meet the monthly payroll of the ranch's staff employees or purchase vehicles to replace the ones his son Vicentillo periodically totaled. Korrodi has produced copies of ten checks issued by a group of wealthy backers named "Friends of Fox" over a twelve-month period starting in March 1999 to cover such expenses, and Fox's financially challenged circumstances before becoming president were largely a function of his poor track record as an entrepreneur after he left Coca-Cola's employ to enter politics in 1988.

    So how was Fox able to afford the multi-million dollar transformation of his once humble ranch? Inquiring minds want to know, particularly those in the congressional caucuses of the PRI and the left-wing Party of the Democratic Revolution. They are calling for the creation of a special commission to probe the ex-president's finances--and while Fox has pledged to cooperate fully with any future investigation, he has also blamed the entire kerfuffle on a politically motivated campaign to defame him. But two nagging questions remain: what on earth possessed Fox to flaunt his post-presidential opulence on the pages of a fluffy, biweekly magazine? A senator from his own National Action Party has fingered the country's limelight-craving former first lady Marta Sahagun, which is certainly one plausible explanation. The second question may be harder to answer: how did a putz like this ever become president of Coca-Cola de Mexico?