As the victory by Enrique Peña Nieto, presidential candidate of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), seemed a much surer thing that it turned out to be, many of Mexico’s political analysts, scholars, former office-holders and veteran news hawks began murmuring the name of former president (1988-1994) Carlos Salinas de Gortari.
Salinas is a political bogyman and a man of considerable mystery in Mexican political life. Since 1994 he has officially “resided” in Dublin, Ireland, which does not cherish extradition treaties. He is 64 now and been out of office for 18 years. The mystery comes in various forms. Primary among these are: where’s he at (indicating paranoia), and what’s he doing (demonstrating dread). During the run-up to, and during Peña Nieto’s campaign, he was either here strategizing or possibly ducking back to Ireland. Salinas generally tries to keep a low profile, both at his own choosing, and honoring the preference of the “Revolutionary Family.” That Family, meaning the PRI and its adjuncts and allies, tried to expel him after his presidency ended ignominiously in 1994. Many Mexicans still believe he ordered the assassinations of several high ranking priistas, murders for which his brother, Raul, was convicted and sent to prison. Yet today he’s said to wield sharp political power. This, despite those who blame him for his party’s shattering defeat in 2000 by the pro-Church, pro-business National Action Party (PAN).
Each incoming president must demonstrate to competing groups and powerful individuals that he truly is able to take over the rule of the Republic, that he has huevos. Salinas did this dramatically, and in a way that took care of two birds with one stone. Joaquin Hernandez Galicia (aka “La Quina”) was the jefe of the 200,000-member oil-workers union, operating Mexico’s government-owned monopoly, Petroleos Mexicanos (Pemex). La Quina had a lot of power, and with it he had created his own sprawling domain – ”a principality of corruption” – headquartered in parts of the states of Tamaulipas and Tabasco. He oversaw what seemed to many Mexicans as a country within a country, operating independently of government oversight. He used the the gains of corruption to nourish his private empire, buying farms, building union-owned and -operated housing, factories, corner stores, supermarkets, clothing businesses, hospitals, fire departments and funeral homes. The former welder’s spending was devastating Pemex, and maintenance was becoming sloppy and negligent. And La Quina took care of any opposition within his domain swiftly. Those who violated his rule often died in peculiar accidents; one committed suicide by shooting himself in the head three times.
La Quina represented a problem for Salinas who knew that foreign investment in some (limited) areas of Pemex was necessary in order to bring the company into the modern world. And the union boss had already made it clear that he would allow no foreigners into Pemex, which he said “should always be in the hands of Mexicans.” Besides, he had encouraged Pemex workers to vote against Salinas, a man he didn’t like or trust.
January 10, a month after Carlos Salinas had taken office, federal police and army troops came through the front door of La Quina’s Ciudad Madero home. They hauled him away in his underwear. Police said that a detective had been killed, and that two Uzi submachine guns and thousands of rounds of ammunition had been found. La Quina was convicted and sentenced to 35 years in prison.Salinas’ popularity soared with this move. And then soared again with his reforms restoring relations with the Catholic Church.These reversed the anticlerical tradition dating from the days of President (1857-65, 1867-72) Benito Juarez. Helped by the visit of Pope John Paul II in May 1990, Salinas launched constitutional amendments, and added new laws allowing churches to again own property and teach religion in private schools. Priests were authorized to vote and wear clerical garb in public. Devout Mexicans, as the media noted, were at last freed from their “double lives,” pledging alliance to the decidedly secular PRI, while sending their children to (actually illegal) Catholic schools, and attending Mass.
The reforms Salinas initiated were hailed by many Mexicans and foreign onlookers as part of a new Mexican era. Chief among these was the selling off government-owned businesses, including the inefficient telephone giant, Telmex.
When a Pemex storage facility leaked fuel into the sewage system of a centrally located industrial barrio of Guadalajara, residents repeatedly complained of the odor. In April,1992, the protests became desperate. Firemen checked the sewers, and the fire chief assured a press conference that while several different kinds of plants flushed solvents into the sewer lines, the situation was under control. Shortly after 10 a.m. the next day, April 22, 1992, the neighborhood was destroyed as six miles of streets exploded. More than 200 were killed, a late part of the barrio destroyed. The next day, a young female reporter from a just-launched local newspaper, Siglo 21, joined a group of Pemex technicians examining the rubble. They believed her blond hair and khaki pants indicated that she was an American explosive expert. She listened quietly to their conversation, and nailed the story. The day after the story appeared, Salinas arrived on the scene with the mayor of Guadalajara and the governor of Jalisco. Having surveyed the disaster, he stood listening to the governor, wearing a PRI insignia on his jacket, try to explain why effective preventative measures hadn’t taken after citizens complained of the odor of gas. Deftly, Salinas reached out as cameras recorded the scene, and ripped off the governor’s PRI insignia. Angrily, he told the man, “You don’t deserve to wear that.” The mayor was imprisoned and the governor was forced to resign. That too boosted Salina’s popularity, especially among Tapatios.
That was a part of Salinas’ Janus-faced instincts and political technique. He was taught the ropes of political strategy by his father, Raul Salina Lozano, who had climbed the ranks of the PRI to become secretary of Industry and Commerce (1959-1964) in the administration of President Adolfo Lopez Mateos. The father was subsequently mentioned briefly as a possible presidential candidate.
When that passed, he assumed he would be offered another well-paying post in the new incoming administration. But, in a sudden failure of political instinct, normally extremely adept, he didn’t back the man, Gustavo Diaz Ordaz, that Lopez Mateos, had decided to choose as Mexico’s next president. Diaz Ordaz put an end to Salinas Lozano’s political career.
From then on, the elder Salinas invested his ambitions in his two sons, Raul and Carlos. Carlos learned several basic, essential “procedures of self-protection” from his father. In the harsh world of politics: Select your allies with extreme care; be loyal, but only up to a point; in every situation keep your options open, if much of the time unknown; depend on no one – and disguise that, too – yet make others depend on you.
Salinas earned two master’s degrees, and completed his doctorate in government and political economy in 1978. He was immersed in European and U.S. traditions of meticulous critical analysis and exacting research, as well as progressive examination of global economics and sluggish Third World habits and disadvantages.
Thus, these two worlds were to mesh in his presidency. His keen-minded obsession with modernity convinced him that Mexico’s enchantment, its dependence and comfort in the past had to give way new ways of organizing itself., This would lead, he preached, to a break the historical cycles of self-destructiveness and embrace the orderly, enriching, technologically adept procedures that would place it among the ranks of “advanced” nations. But echoes of the lessons he’d learned from his father’s experience led him to try to accomplish this with “the personalized top-down control and back-room deal-making of the old-time authoritarian PRI,” as one publication put it.
This was the root of Salinas‘ campaign for the North American Free Trade Agreement. But it was jammed down everyone’s throat, especially millions of small farmers. It was typical of Janus Salinas: The economy first, democracy later. Democracy meant that you had to trust too many people, and his political lessons pictured that path as too dangerous.
But his best reforms undermined many of the cornerstones of the PRI, alienating many long-time leaders, while attracting popular approval for the president. The reforms of communal farms ejidos undermined the party’s power in the countryside, diminishing the PRI’s farmworkers’ unions. On the first day of 1994, indigenous groups in Chiapas, calling themselves Zapatistas, rose up against the Mexican government. Salinas had been determined that this final year would be devoted to guaranteeing a smooth transition. But that was not to be.
This is the first of a two-part series.