v.p. free

This just occurred to me the other day: Mexico has a president, but it does not have a vice president.I guess when they were just operating under a one-party system, there really wasn't any great need to have a VP. If something happened to the president, well, the party could just just hand-pick his replacement, just as it had hand-picked the prez himself.But now that multi-party politics are here, you'd think the party who won would want to have a VP ready, just in case.

I was asking a few people here what would happen if President Fox were to die, and they seemed to think that the Interior Minister (Secretaria de Gobernacion) would take over on an inteim basis until the Congress chose a new president. But Fox is from the PAN party and the Congress is controlled by the PRI - the guys who had the presidency for 71 years under the old system.It seems to me that this might be a little too much temptation to lay before the eyes of the PRI, a party that has never shown itself averse to political assasinations. If I were the PAN (not to mention Fox himself), I'd want some mechanism in place to make it less tempting for an opposition Congress to get rid of the president.