Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, January 2, 1994 TAG: 9402180014
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: F3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: GEORGE W. GRAYSON
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Retiring chief executive Carlos Salinas de Gortari, who handpicked Colosio, has trumpeted a local version of perestroika with all the gusto of Mariachis blowing high notes. He privatized banks, sold off more than 800 white-elephant state firms, reformed grossly inefficient communal farms, curbed subsidies and slashed inflation from triple digits to 9 percent.
Salinas also opened his nation's once-hugely protected economy to imports. At the same time, he welcomed foreign investors formerly reviled as a menace to the sovereignty of this acutely nationalistic country of 90 million. inhabitants.The North American Free Trade Agreement serves both to crown his achievements and safeguard them from being dismantled by successors.
Salinas' will be a hard act to follow. For starters, Colosio must chalk up a convincing electoral victory. The PRI, victor in every presidential contest since its 1929 founding, should have little problem with the conservative, free enterprise-oriented National Action Party. The main threat will come from the nationalist-left Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD), whose standard-bearer is Cuauhtemoc Cardenas.
Since finishing second to Salinas in a disputed election five years ago, Cardenas has steadily lost ground. His PRD - more of a Mideast bazaar than a political party - is riven by competing personalities, ideologies and programs. But if the PRD failed to win recent gubernatorial races, it succeeded in impugning PRI victories. Its strategy involved warning reporters of fraud long before the voting began, dispatching observers to polling places, screaming foul once the results came in, and - above all - launching demonstrations, sit-ins, and marches to embarrass the PRI. Such antics gave rise to the unfair barb: "Democracy exists 364 days a year in Mexico - it's only missing on Election Day!"
Consequently, in the words of one Mexico City observer, "Colosio's campaign will have to be purer than Caesar's wife to prevent the PRD's discrediting his likely election."
Yet winning office will prove easier than managing the social effervescence excited by market-focused reforms. Even with an influx of investment, inefficient small- and medium-sized firms will go belly up, pink-slipped workers from privatized firms will scramble for jobs, a majority of the 1 million new entrants into the labor force each year will not land full-time work, and agriculture will remain the economy's Achilles' heel.
Colosio will have to demonstrate enormous skill to manage the change that emboldens modern Mexicans to look forward to joining the First World, while leaving traditional elements of society disoriented and frightened.
Fortunately, Colosio possesses political sensitivity - something Mexican insiders call an "olfato politico" - that complements his technocratic background. Unlike his country's past four chief executives, the mustachioed, 43-year-old native of Sonora state boasted elective experience before seeking the presidency. He has held House and Senate seats, coordinated Salinas' campaign, and served for three years as PRI president. As secretary of social development, his current post, he presides over a multibillion-dollar Solidarity Program to spur grass-roots advancement, particularly in villages and shantytowns where Cardenas ran strongly in 1988.
Colosio will need the political acumen of an LBJ and the inspiring vigor of a John F. Kennedy to consolidate and deepen Mexico's Salinas-propelled transformation, while preserving the social peace so crucial to attracting foreign capital.
\ George W. Grayson, who teaches government at the College of William & Mary, is author of a 1993 monograph, "The North American Free Trade Agreement."
by CNB