"Don't lose hope, better times are coming," said the Mexican President Vicente Fox this week, addressing the nation's lottery sellers.
The sombre speech contrasted with his triumphant inaugural address a year ago when pledges of jobs, justice and immigration reform raised hopes of a new Mexico in the making.
President Fox, who scored a historic electoral victory over Mexico's Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), ending 70 years of one-party rule, promised one million new jobs in his first year in office, an end to the armed conflict in Chiapas state and a new deal for Mexicans living illegally in the US.
A year later the ambitious promises have come to nothing, as the US recession bites deep into Mexico and the September terror attacks have led to tighter controls along the US-Mexico border.
The conflict in Chiapas has reached stalemate after a diluted package of Indian rights' laws were rejected by the Zapatista movement and their political allies earlier this year.
Mr Fox is a strong president with a popular touch, instituting a weekly radio address and frequent television appearances. He has been accused by opponents of "governing through publicity", as the former Coca-Cola executive turns up at border crossings to greet returning immigrants and breakfasts with street children.
Mr Fox's key tax reforms remain stalled in a Congress dominated by two opposition parties eager to reinvent themselves as viable political projects. So far they have done little more than snipe at his proposals.
The new president remains popular, with 60 per cent support, as citizens recognise that long-term problems cannot be resolved overnight.
Mr Fox's party, the centre-right National Action Party (PAN), sharply criticised their leader for putting himself above the party, which has seen no movement on its own conservative social agenda. "I am the president of all Mexicans," responded Mr Fox.
The separation of party and state may well be Mr Fox's main success to date after 70 years in which a single party controlled all aspects of government.
The death of Ms Digna Ochoa, a prominent human right's lawyer, assassinated in her office last October, reminded Mexicans that the trumpeted arrival of democracy is far from complete. "Human rights activists are still considered subversives," said a spokesman for Mr Miguel Agustin Pro, a leading citizen defence organisation.
Mr Fox also faces growing calls for a judicial inquiry into army abuses committed against hundreds of political suspects in the 1970s and 1980s, along with more recent cases of torture and murder by state security forces in rural Mexico.
His chief development project is the Puebla-Panama Plan (PPP), a proposed free-trade zone from Mexico City to Central America.
The plan faces opposition from peasant farmers and ecological groups, who fear an end to traditional lifestyles.