The selection of Carlos Salinas de Gortari as Mexico's next president promises no dramatic change in Mexican policy. Although a more noisy opposition than ever before in Mexico's carefully managed electoral process is guaranteed, 60 years of unrelenting victories for the government party offer little chance that Salinas will not be ushered into office.
The selection followed the standard succession scenario in which the incumbent president, Miguel de la Madrid Hurtado, personally chose his successor. Unfortunately, it did little to reassure those who wonder how long Mexico can continue to endure its seven-year-old debilitating economic and political crisis without an explosion.
Salinas, now de la Madrid's secretary of budget and planning, comes from the so-called technocrat wing of the ruling Partido Revolucionario Institucional, or Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). Intelligent, highly educated, wealthy and sophisticated, he is a member of the Mexican elite that has dominated the country since the mid-1930s and that is no less a closed circle than the oligarchies of other Latin American countries, its left-wing rhetoric and talk of revolution notwithstanding. Salinas' father is a prominent senator; he himself entered PRI politics at an early age and has held an array of jobs in both the party and the government bureaucracy.
Like the incumbent and his two predecessors, Salinas has never served in an elective office - even elective office in the Mexican fashion. "Elections" of senators, congressmen, governors, and even mayors of large cities are largely personal appointments of PRI candidates by the president. The elections themselves are won by the government through a process that is equal parts gross manipulation - as crude as stuffed ballot boxes, bribery, and intimidation - and public apathy. The PRI has never lost a major election in more than 60 years.
Salinas has climbed to the heights of this mammoth government bureaucracy at the age of 39. When he takes office next year, he will be the youngest president since the revolutionary "generals" of the 1930s, who came out of Mexico's civil war between 1910 and 1924. His inauguration is scheduled for next fall after a year of "campaigning" in the countryside, increasingly an attempt to establish rapport with the Mexican people by members of the isolated political elite. Like many of the government's candidates, Salinas' life-style and experience have given him only limited exposure to ordinary Mexican life. (De la Madrid, also the quiet-essential bureaucrat-intellectual, never warmed up the country during his travels in the 1981 campaign, and his distaste for the while process was patent. Observers will be watching to see whether Salinas can break through his bureaucratic shell.)
Salinas' campaign trail will take him to every corner of Mexico where, ostensibly, he will meet and talk with PRI representatives of all the national constituencies - compesinos, labor, businessmen, and professionals. There is a growing debate over whether these are more than paper organizations. For example, a dissident recently told newsmen that the PRI youth organization has less than 4,000 active members throughout the country.
Increasingly, a burgeoning lower middle class - a product of the enormous growth of the population and the economy since World War II - has been left
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