Carlos Salinas de Gortari
Carlos Salinas de Gortari was president of Mexico from 1988 to 1994, the Harvard economist who took office after the election of July 1988 in which the computer counting the votes went down while Cárdenas's son was ahead and came back with Salinas winning by fifty per cent to thirty-one, a result the interior minister's own party chairman later called a fraud. In six years he remade the economy. The state companies were sold, the telephone monopoly to the man it made the world's richest, the banks back to private owners, the steel and the airlines, eleven hundred firms in all. The ejido land reform of article 27 ended so that peasant plots could be sold, the debt was renegotiated under the Brady plan, inflation cut from a hundred and sixty per cent to seven. The Church was recognised and relations with the Vatican restored, and NAFTA was negotiated with Bush and signed with Clinton to come into force on 1 January 1994, the day the Zapatistas rose in Chiapas. The year that followed had the assassination of his chosen successor Colosio in Tijuana in March, the assassination of the party's secretary-general, his former brother-in-law, in September, and the peso held up by short-term dollar bonds until the December after he left, when it collapsed. He was born in Mexico City in 1948, the son of a minister, studied economics at the national university and took a doctorate in political economy at Harvard, joined the treasury. He was de la Madrid's planning and budget minister from 1982, the chief of the technocrats who had never held an elected office. The social programme Solidaridad, which paid for schools, clinics and electricity in the villages that had voted against him, was the politics. The arrest of the oil workers' leader La Quina in January 1989 by soldiers with a bazooka was the message. He left office with the highest approval any president had had and within three months was the most hated man in the country, when the crisis broke and his brother Raúl was arrested for the secretary-general's murder and found to have a hundred million dollars in Swiss accounts. He went on a hunger strike in a Monterrey slum for two days to protest. Then he went to Ireland, where he lived for a decade. He has written books defending the record and attacking his successors. He lives between Mexico, Ireland and Spain, the president the PRI does not mention.
- Lived: 1948 CE – ?
- Nationality: Mexican
- Roles: president, economist, politician
