The name of Carlos Salinas de Gortari began showing up in political discussions and news reports even before the social media and mainstream news outlets here confirmed vote purchasing by the once dominant — still powerful — Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) for its candidate, Enrique Peña Nieto. Peña Nieto won the July 1 presidential election with 38.21 percent of the vote, followed by leftist Democratic Revolutionary Part candidate Manuel Lopez Obrador with 31.59 percent. But many voters, even citizens who sold their votes to the PRI, have been protesting Peña Nieto’s “imposed” presidency.
In the 1988 presidential election, Salinas de Gortari, the PRI candidate, won the presidency with what analysts, historians and journalists here knew was a vast fraudulent vote. Yet, the PRI’s infamous dark side blunted some early reports of what, internally, top priistas were calling a “patriotic fraud.” At the time, the first results arriving at the Ministry of Interior were so alarmingly negative for the PRI that an undefined “computer failure” occurred. Panicked top PRI officials of the outgoing administration of Miguel de la Madrid, overseeing the election, alerted priista electoral operatives across the Republic to begin the task of altering ballots and reports of voting results to reflect a Salinas win-in-the-making.
Salinas seemed for the most part to be deep into the task of staffing and organizing his new government. Much like Enrique Peña Nieto today, he was a president-elect who gives the impression he knows nothing of the millions of votes bought by the PRI to produce his “triumph.”
For some while after Salinas took office, those millions of boxed 1988 ballots remained in the locked basements of the Legislature. Then, at the peak of his presidency, Salinas followed his father’s most pragmatic political credos — protect yourself, never trust anyone — and had the ballots burned.That credo had been learned by Raul Salinas Lozano, who had risen through the ranks of the PRI, becoming Secretry of Industry and Commerce in 1959. But then, uncharacteristically, he made an erroneous choice, backing the wrong man for the presidency, and his career was ended. After that, he carefully groomed his two sons, Raul and Carlos, for careers in politics — teaching what not to do, as well what to do.
Carlos learned these lessons well. And wisely followed his father’s example by furthering his studies at Harvard University. Peña Nieto is clearly not a graduate with similar scholarly background. His interviews and speeches, in which he has tended to repeat the same banal political cliches, demonstrate this. And he is often called, behind his back, a hollow suit, a puppet of the old-guard, the dinosaurs who really run the PRI — one of them said to be Salinas de Gortari.
One of the first, swift moves, once he took office, mirrored this Salinas’ Janus-faced education and perspective. Alacrity on the rough side of his political agenda was essential to nail down his fragile credibility. He was a small man, bald, with ample ears, whose legitimacy as president was questioned.
All Mexican presidents have their strength of character, political determination and cunning questioned and tested, not only by opposing factions and personalities, but also by those within his own party, seeking any weakness from which they might profit. To be clever and inexhaustible during the selection, approval and campaign periods of the presidential candidacy process was taken for granted. It was the strength of character, the depth of courage, the versatility and steeliness of mind under pressure that every president had to prove the moment he sat in the “Eagle’s Chair.”
Salinas moved with surprising swiftness and boldness to shatter any doubts. With a sleekly-designed strike by a select military group, Salinas took down the bete noire of a string of presidents: the powerful, feared jefe of Mexico’s Oil Workers Union that ran the practical side of the government-owned oil monopoly Petroleos Mexicanos.
Joaquin “La Quina” Hernandez loathed Salinas, and had ordered his 200,000 union membership to vote against the PRI candidate. La Quina was imprisoned for the possession of automatic weapons and the killing of a federal agent.
Simultaneously, Salinas unleashed an attack on the Republic’s most pressing practical weakness, the economy — a wound left bleeding by two consecutive presidencies, that of Luis Echeverria (1970-’76), and Jose Lopez Portillo (1976-’82). This attack called for the application of intelligence and the strength to resist seductions that excited the unchecked ego and hubris that characterized both men. They dreamed nonsensical dreams of glory, the kind that might fit emperors of eras lost in the mythic past. Both made Mexicans ashamed of their brief worship of the two charlatans who had pillaged the nation.
But now, in 1988, suddenly it was the era of adept economists, talented young graduates of top U.S. universities. Salinas himself in following his father’s footsteps to Harvard, presciently earned two master’s degrees, and a doctorate in government and political economy. He admired political and economic talent, and was talented enough — articulate, charming, imaginative — to surround himself with similarly talented men. That was what Mexico needed most. His Finance Minister Pedro Aspe, a graduate of MIT, and his staff, dove into the tangle of an inherited 102 billion-dollar foreign debt. Their goal: to rejuvenate Mexico’s economic growth. Amazingly, the Salinas administration balanced the budget, then went on to produce a surplus in 1991.
By that time, the Salinas administration, seemingly miraculously was viewed by most of the Republic, as well as a majority of foreign observers, as a relentless team of bright, young, well-educated, skillful “idea men.” All seemed committed to a “modernized future.” Privatization of government firms surged — 85 percent of public enterprises would be closed, sold or allowed to go bankrupt by the end of the Salinas administration. Businessmen at home and abroad applauded: Mexico was being transformed.
This particular magic it was later revealed was accomplished though considerable corruption, especially in the area of crony capitalism. But in this transformation, it was the economy first and political reform second, “somewhere down road.” Alongside of the bright young men who could negotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) with the U.S. and Canada in their own language, Salinas had placed representatives of the party’s dinosaurs. Men for whom democracy within the party — certainly within the Republic — was an absurdity.
Yet when the Zapatatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) rose up January 1, 1994 to protest NAFTA and defend the rights of indigenous campesinos in Chiapas, Salinas didn’t respond to the usual pressures of Mexico’s “elite” and unleash the full force of the army. But he ordered the army to “dislodge” the Zapatistas from the cities, herd them back into the jungle, and set up containment positions.
With the Zapatistas contained, Salinas turned back to making his last year in office a tranquil transition. But then the man he had chosen to be the next president, Luis Donaldo Colosio, gave a stunning speech distancing himself from Salinas. Not long afterwards, as Colosio was campaigning in Tijuana, he was assassinated. But Mario Aburto, the deranged assassin, could hardly have acted on his own, many said. Was it a schism with the “Revolutionary Family?” The murder un-nerved the public. As these matters consumed Salinas’ attention, the over-valued peso, the economy as a whole — bruised by rising doubt — needed “careful handling.”
Next, the secretary-general of the PRI was shot down in Mexico City. This assassination, coupled with that of Colosio rattled the nation. The Mexican public’s loss of confidence in their country echoed abroad. A new president, Ernesto Zedillo, was picked. But no one knew him. Jittery investors, domestic and foreign, began shifting huge sums of money out of the nation. The worst crisis in decades was beginning, so thoroughly destroying Salinas’ dreams that he disappeared into exile in Ireland.