Carlos Salinas de Gortari

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(b. Mexico City, 3 Apr. 1948) Mexican; President of the Republic 1988 – 94 Carlos Salinas was born into the Mexican political élite. His father, Raul Salinas Lozano, was Minister of Industry and Commerce under President Lopez Mateos, 1958 – 64. After school in Mexico City Carlos studied economics at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), from which he graduated in 1971. He then moved to Harvard University for postgraduate work, mixing his studies with terms of employment in the Ministry of Finance and the academic world in Mexico. He eventually graduated with three degrees from Harvard, including a doctorate in economics (1978).

He returned to Mexico and a typical two-track career, teaching at the Centre for Monetary Studies of Latin America (CEMLA) and working as an economic planner in the Treasury. In that ministry he worked under José López Portillo (President of the Republic 1976 – 82) and Miguel de la Madrid (President of the Republic 1982 – 8). When the latter was selected as the governing party's candidate in 1981 he invited Salinas to help run his presidential campaign as director of the PRI's "think tank", the Institute of Political, Economic, and Social Studies (IEPES). He was rewarded with the post of Minister of the Treasury for the whole of the de la Madrid term, that is, until his own nomination by the PRI in 1987.

The 1988 campaign proved to be a landmark in Mexico's electoral history. A group of leftists, led by Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, the son of a famous reformist president of the 1930s, had left the PRI in protest at the conservative policies being pursued by the government and the undemocratic way in which Salinas had been foisted on the party by the retiring president. Cuauhtemoc Cardenas as the National Democratic Front's (FDN) candidate attracted more votes than other previous opposition candidates and claimed that the government falsified the results in order to secure a victory for Salinas. Even so the victory was narrow, with less than half of the voters supporting Salinas, a drop from a level of 76 per cent in 1982.

The congressional elections were just as bad for the government. The PRI failed to win the two-thirds majority of seats required to confirm the President's election and to pass constitutional amendments. Salinas thus started his term in an unprecedentedly weak situation, that is, dependent upon the votes of opposition parties. Despite this handicap Salinas launched himself enthusiastically into a campaign of radical economic reforms. He was fully committed to the ideas of neo-liberal economics favoured by the International Monetary Fund and began the process of restructuring the Mexican economy. This involved efforts to reduce the size and scope of the state in economic life and an encouragement of foreign investment and free trade. He began negotiating the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in order to facilitate commerce between Mexico and its northern neighbours, the USA and Canada. He thus sought to reverse the Mexican government's post-revolutionary commitment to nationalism, import substitution industrialization, and state-sponsored social protectionism.

At the macroeconomic level there was some early evidence of success but social and political costs were enormous. Unemployment, malnutrition, and the rate of business failure rose alarmingly. Opposition parties sought to take advantage of this situation and the National Action Party (PAN) gained the governorship of Baja California in 1989, the first opposition party victory at this level since 1929. The left-wing Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD) fared less well, with its activists and vote suffering in the states where it challenged the governing party. Complaints about intimidation and electoral malpractice were common.

The final year of Salinas's term was disastrous. On 1 January, the day NAFTA became operative, a rebellion of poor and landless Indians was declared in the southern state of Chiapas. Salinas chose to negotiate rather than suppress, but the string of complaints made by the rebels were an embarrassing reminder of the deterioration of conditions in rural Mexico. In March the regime suffered another damaging blow when Salinas's choice as successor, Luis Donaldo Colosio, was assassinated while campaigning in Tijuana. There was suspicion that elements within the governing party were involved and the destabilizing prospect of growing political violence caused concern in financial circles. President Clinton was forced to move quickly to support the Mexican peso. Despite these difficulties the presidential elections of July 1994 were held in calm conditions and with less electoral malpractice than ever before. In the interregnum before President Zedillo took office, however, political scandals began to surface with allegations of Salinas's involvement in assassination plots and financial irregularities. The economic collapse of December was perhaps the final nail in his political coffin and he left office with his reputation seriously damaged. He is now thought to be living in Eire.

Carlos Salinas de Gortari (born 1948) was elected president of Mexico in 1988. He quickly moved toward an economy based more on free market principles than on state control and toward better economic relations with the United States. He is, perhaps, best known for his role in negotiating the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).

Born on April 3, 1948, in the small town of Agualeguas, Nuevo León, only about 25 miles from the United States border, Carlos Salinas de Gortari was raised in a politically active Mexican family. His father, Raul Salinas Lozano, had served the state of Nuevo León in the national Senate and in 1958 became Mexico's secretary of industry and commerce, a position he held for six years. The younger Salinas, after having received his undergraduate degree in economics at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, entered the graduate program at Harvard University. Compiling an excellent academic record and writing a dissertation on "Production and Political Participation in the Mexican Countryside," he was awarded a Ph.D. in political economy in 1978.

In 1982, Miguel de la Madrid, one of Salinas' former economic professors, became president of Mexico and appointed his ex-student to a major cabinet position secretary of planning and budget. After a few years of observing his young cabinet minister's high level of performance, the president also began grooming Salinas to succeed him in the nation's highest office. In the summer of 1988, Carlos Salinas de Gortari, then only 40 years old, won the Mexican presidency in the closest presidential election of the 20th century. With strong opposition from both the right and left, Salinas, the candidate of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (P.R.I.), won the office with less than 51 percent of the popular vote. Some political analysts argued that the election had been fraudulent and that the winning candidate in reality had not received the constitutionally required majority vote.

Inheriting a country in which the government's political legitimacy was in question and which many believed was on the verge of economic collapse, Salinas had an inauspicious start. Like many of his predecessors, he asked his citizenry to tighten their belts and accept a new round of austerity measures in the effort to bring about some semblance of economic stability. In effect, he was asking the poor to accept their miserable squalor. But he did have a plan, and within a year he had begun to depart noticeably from the more timid approaches of his immediate predecessors.

While never relinquishing the mantle of "Revolutionary" leadership, Salinas de Gortari demonstrated clearly that he planned to move his country in a more conservative direction during his first two years in office. He surprised many with an early announcement that Mexico, a country with a long history of anti-clericalism, should seek to normalize its relations with the Roman Catholic Church. In February 1990, the president named a personal representative to the Vatican and a few months later, during Pope John Paul II's visit to the country, indicated Mexico should establish formal diplomatic relations with the Holy See.

In an even more startling change of direction, President Salinas, observing the collapse of socialism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, also let it be known that he would place his presidential faith less in continued statism and more in the dynamics of the free market. The new economic policy saw his government strike out against organized labor and adopt a strong stand against even the powerful petroleum workers and copper miners unions. The president also wanted the government to divest itself of costly, inefficient, and bureaucracy-laden government companies, the so-called parastatal corporations. He began selling off dozens of them to the private sector, including the government-owned airline, Aeromexico, and the large Cananea Copper Mines in the northern state of Sonora. A new, more lenient attitude to foreign capital became integral to government policy. Salinas believed that foreign capital should be encouraged, not feared, and had his congress enact legislation easing the 1973 foreign investment law which restricted foreigners to 49 percent ownership of Mexican enterprises.

The most dramatic shift of all was Salinas' announcement in the spring of 1990 that Mexico would enter into negotiations with the United States for the purpose of establishing a free trade agreement. This policy was in direct conflict with the economic model embraced by every Mexican president since the revolution. The historical tradition had been one of economic nationalism and the subsidizing of Mexican products for the purpose of keeping foreign competition out. Now, for the first time, a Mexican president, seeing trade barriers and international suspicions recede in Western Europe, admitted publicly that his country's economic future would inevitably be linked to that of the United States and that Mexico's interests could be best served by eliminating barriers to the free flow of goods and services across the international line that separated the two countries. It was a calculated gamble and one which precipitated a lively debate within the country. But many political realists agreed with the president's assessment. The idea of a Latin American common market continued to be no more than a chimera and Mexico found herself with few alternatives to stimulate badly needed economic development. Integrating Mexico's economy with that of the United States, Salinas concluded, was reasonable, prudent, and potentially beneficial.

Salinas' policy of restructuring the economy, providing social programs, and attacking corruption in government and some labor unions proved popular with the Mexican electorate. Salinastroika was the word coined to describe the transformation in Mexican economy when Salinas took office.

In the mid-term congressional elections of 1991 the P.R.I. candidates won by a margin far greater than the vote that put Salinas into office.

Salinas' critics belittled his attempts to improve the living for the Mexican populace. In 1993, statistics claimed more than 70 percent of the population earned less than needed to purchase food and meet basic nutritional requirements and about 30 percent had little or no access to health care. In 1994, these numbers were paired with the peso and foreign debt crisis that occurred shortly after he left his post, giving critics more fuel for their fire.

On March 23, 1994 presidential candidate and Salinas' rival Luis Donaldo Colosio was assassinated. Salinas has denied any involvement with the murder and rejected rumors he argued with Colosio days before the shooting. He alleged the death of Colosio was a personal and political blow against him.

Nov 30, 1994 was the last day of Salinas' presidential term . Less than one month later, the peso devaluation began, marking Mexico's most debilitating economic crisis to date.

Salinas' predecessor, President Ernesto Zedillo, exiled Salinas from Mexico in March of 1995. Since that time, reports and rumors of the ex-president in New York, Boston, Canada, Cuba, the Bahamas and Dublin, Ireland remain ambiguous.

The Mexican government moved against Salinas' brother, Ral Salinas, who allegedly stashed $83.9 million in Swiss bank accounts under false names while working in the government. Ral's wife, Paulina Castańón, was also jailed in Switzerland in a narcotics money-laundering investigation. Swiss authorities suggested the money in Rual Salinas' accounts might have come from drug traffickers, according to the New York Times . It is also alleged that Salinas' sister, Adriana, is under investigation for fraud that may have made her millions richer.

Salinas denied any involvement in the money scandal. "My brother Raul's deception is unacceptable to me," Salinas said in a New York Times interview.

Further Reading

There is no English-language biography of Mexican president Carlos Salinas de Gortari. Two recent studies of Mexican politics, Judith Adler Hellman, Mexico in Crisis (2nd ed., 1983); and Daniel Levy and Gabriel Székely, Mexico Paradox of Stability and Change (2nd ed., 1983), provide context for his economic policies. Michael C. Meyer and William L. Sherman's The Course of Mexican History (4th ed., 1990) contains a brief section on the Salinas administration.