Mexico City ? Compared to most other Latin American countries, Mexico is doing relatively well: There has been no economic debacle, few foresee one in the immediate future, and President Vicente Fox has managed to keep his popularity from falling to the dismal levels of most of his counterparts in the region.

For a visitor such as myself, who recently returned from a trip to bankrupt Argentina and interviewed scores of politicians from Uruguay, Bolivia, Peru and Brazil, this country still looks reasonably stable.

Unlike its South American neighbors, it enjoys a free-trade agreement with the United States and a political consensus on the convenience of being a player in the global economy.

Nevertheless, things are not going well.

Two years after Fox’s historic election, which ended seven decades of an authoritarian democracy, Mexico is suffering from a serious case of political paralysis.

The opposition-controlled congress kills Fox’s most important legislative packages, his own National Action Party leaders often undermine the president by criticizing him in public, and members of the Cabinet insult one another in public.

In separate interviews with half a dozen top government officials, I got the impression that many are already tired of their jobs after completing only 20 months of the government’s six-year term.

Infighting within Fox’s Cabinet reached new levels recently when Finance Minister Francisco Gil Diaz rebuked a statement by another minister, telling reporters that the latter “may be suffering from Alzheimer’s disease.” The two ministers had earlier offered different accounts of a private Cabinet discussion in which both participated.

Mexicans joke that Fox has a “Montessori Cabinet” because, as in the private schools that follow the Montessori teaching system, everyone does whatever he wants. The joke has appeared in print so often that Mexico’s Montessori school felt compelled to call a news conference to categorically deny that it tolerates anarchy, tacitly suggesting that it is more disciplined than the government.

Whether it’s because of a stubborn congressional opposition or the government’s own incompetence, Fox has been unable to deliver on the fiscal, labor and energy reforms he announced upon taking office.

To make things worse, the government’s biggest public works project, a $2.3 billion Mexico City international airport planned to be built in Texcoco, 18 miles east of the capital, seemed doomed last week after peasants, who live nearby, blocked roads and took hostages in the municipality of San Salvador Atenco. They threatened more violence if the government goes ahead with the plan.

The peasants, supported by Zapatista guerrilla sympathizers and a host of anti-globalization groups, freed their hostages after the government released two of their leaders from prison.

But that triggered an avalanche of criticism that the Fox government tampered with the law to obtain the release of the two peasant leaders, and may have set a precedent that could encourage other groups to resort to violence to obtain their demands.

Top officials told me they couldn’t evict the peasants by force because, among other things, they had information that a judge may soon rule in favor of the peasants’ demands.

“Imagine if we had gone in with force to release the hostages, and one or more people died, and a judge comes out later with a ruling that the peasants were right,” one Cabinet member told me. “It would have been political disaster.”

Amid Mexico’s political stalemate, much of this country’s hopes for progress rely on Fox’s reservoir of popularity.

While Fox’s approval rating has gone down to 45 percent from the more than 60 percent he enjoyed shortly after taking office, he remains, along with Chilean President Ricardo Lagos, one of the most popular leaders in Latin America. By comparison, a recent Cima-Iberoamerica poll showed Argentina’s president with 16 percent, Brazil’s president with 20 percent, Peru’s president with 10 percent and Colombia’s with 9 percent.

But you get a sense of trouble in the air when the government’s own propaganda machine touts as one of Fox’s biggest accomplishments that he has so far avoided an economic debacle.

I could barely believe my eyes when, reading a comic book released by the government, I found that the first of the Fox accomplishments it listed was the absence of a massive devaluation, such as the ones that hit this country with every new government in 1976, 1982, 1987 and 1995. Incidentally, the comic book, aimed at defusing potential social explosions, was produced by a firm called Ka-boom.

My conclusion: Mexico is not a political or economic disaster, as some opposition politicians and journalists say. Rather, there is a crisis of missed opportunities and unfulfilled expectations, which could still be turned around with a more disciplined Cabinet and a more supportive ruling party.

Compared with the problems facing its South American neighbors, it doesn’t look like an impossible task.