MEXICAN GENERAL TO LEAD FOX'S WAR ON CRIME

MEXICO CITY, Nov. 27 -- Four days before his inauguration as Mexico's new
president, Vicente Fox Quesada completed his cabinet tonight, selecting
security and justice ministers and preparing for the nation's first
democratic transfer of power to an opposition party.

Mr. Fox, who has pledged to make war on crime, drug smuggling and political
chicanery, chose Gen. Rafael Macedo de la Concha, Mexico's top military
prosecutor, as the nation's attorney general. General Macedo will be the
first military man to run the attorney general's office, which Mr. Fox has
promised to restructure after a series of allegations of corruption and
incompetence.

Mr. Fox has made several moves to curb the power of the Interior Ministry,
which has overseen the nation's internal security and occasionally earned a
reputation as a ministry of fear.

He intends to strip it of its secret-police and domestic-spying powers.
Oversight of some of those roles would be transferred, in a still
undetermined form, to a newly created National Security Council, which
would be open to advice from lawmakers and citizens' groups. The national
security commissioner will be Adolfo Aguilar Zinser, a Harvard-educated
liberal with a history of political independence.

For the new interior minister, Mr. Fox chose Santiago Creel Miranda, a
longtime congressional leader of the president-elect's National Action
Party. Mr. Creel has a reputation for favoring negotiation and consultation
over confrontation. That could prove useful when Mr. Fox deals with
Congress, where neither the National Action Party nor the Institutional
Revolutionary Party, or PRI, which ran Mexico for seven decades, holds a
majority.

For a newly created Public Security Ministry, which is to take over some
federal law enforcement responsibilities from the Interior Ministry, Mr.
Fox selected Mexico City's former police chief, Alejandro Gertz Manero. Mr.
Gertz has a record of trying to fight corruption among ranking officers in
his force.

Mr. Fox, breaking with tradition, chose his own defense minister rather
than letting the nation's generals pick their own commander. He selected
Gen. Gerardo Ricardo Vega Garcia, who made his name as a military-school dean.

Finally, the media-savvy Mr. Fox created a new Commission on Presidential
Image, whose mission may be self-explanatory.

The cabinet's members do not require confirmation by Congress.

In interviews over the weekend, Mr. Fox pledged to lead a "revolution of
hope" in Mexico, whose development as a modern nation has been hampered by
widespread poverty, political corruption and the power of the PRI, which
was pervasive until Mr. Fox won the presidency in July. The promises and
proposals he and his advisers have made would, if realized, constitute the
most sweeping change in Mexico since its 1917 revolution.