The Party Is Over : Part 2

Bordering On Chaos: Mexico's Roller-Coaster Journey to Prosperity
by Andres Oppenheimer

(Page 2 of 5)

Of course, there were also domestic political considerations. Clinton, already with an eye on the 1996 elections, could ill afford to allow Mexico to go under. It was his pet project. He had gambled part of his political future on Mexico, helping push the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) through Congress over the objections of angry labor unions and many domestic producers. Only two weeks before the latest Mexican devaluation, at the thirty-four-nation Summit of the Americas in Miami, Clinton had praised Mexico as a mode for economic development and had proposed expanding the U.S.-Canada-Mexico trade agreement into a hemisphere-wide free-market area. Now, his grandiose plans seemed shattered, and the president was facing political sniping from all sides for bailing out Mexico at a time of dramatic budget cuts at home.

But while Mexico's financial collapse took Wall Street and the rest of the world by surprise that Tuesday morning, it did not happen overnight: It was preceded by a series of spectacular events over the previous eleven months, most of them unprecedented in Mexico's history since the turbulent days of the 1910_1917 Mexican Revolution. The first of a string of devastating blows to Mexico's much-cherished economic and political stability had taken place nearly a year earlier, on an eventful night that seemed borrowed from the opening page of a Hollywood script, but was only too real.

* * *

President Salinas de Gortari and his wife, Cecilia Occelli, couldn't have been in a better mood on December 31, 1993, as they dressed up for the New Year's Eve party they were hosting at the presidential residence of Los Pinos. It was to be their last New Year celebrated at the presidential palace - Salinas was about to complete his six-year term in December 1994 - and they had decided to spend it with their families and best friends. Salinas, a short, prematurely bald man with ears that seemed disproportionately large for his head, looked tanned and rested after returning earlier that day from his first real Christmas vacation in years. He had spent a week playing tennis and jogging with his children in the southern resort of Huatulco, after returning from an official visit to Asia during which he had been enthusiastically received by the Japanese government and business community.

The New Year's Eve party was to be Cecilia's occasion to play hostess - dispelling rumors that Mexico's first couple was living in virtual separation since word had gone out that the president was dating a soap opera star with whom he was alleged to have conceived a child - and to invite all the relatives and friends who for one reason or other had been left out of the president's official schedule during the year. It was not only to be a party to get together and have a good time, but also to celebrate Salinas's phenomena success.

As he entered his last year in office at only forty-five, Salinas was on top of the world. Few Mexican presidents had approached the end of their terms enjoying such popularity. Salinas had just won approval of NAFTA, the groundbreaking commercial treaty with the United States and Canada that was to go into effect at midnight - only a few hours away. The deal, which would gradually eliminate customs duties between the three countries over a fifteen-year period, was to propel Mexico into the big leagues of international trade. From now on, Mexico and its two business partners would become the world's single largest trading block. Mexico, long stereotyped as a backward country of peasants napping under cactus trees, was about to make a dramatic leap into the First World.

* * *

"Carlos Salinas de Gortari is reversing Mexico's history," Time magazine had proclaimed in naming the Mexican president 1993 International Newsmaker of the Year for Latin America. "Salinas has a most single-handedly energized a nation that used to be jealous and resentful of the dynamism exhibited north of the border."

A Harvard-trained public administrator who according to his aides was so impressed by Asia's economic success that he had sent his children to a Japanese school in Mexico City, Salinas had dazzled Wall Street and Washington, D.C. The Harvard label was tagged to him so often in U.S. press reports that amused Mexicans were joking that "Harvard-trained" had become their president's first name. Salinas was seen in the United States as the first of a new breed of Mexican leaders, the kind of young, pragmatic, U.S.-educated politicians who jogged every morning, wore Cassio plastic watches, Timberland heavy-duty shoes, and signed their government decrees with generic ballpoint pens, in sharp contrast with the pompous, visibly corrupt leaders of the past. The Mexican press had dubbed him la hormiga at mica - the atomic ant - because he seemed to be everywhere, moving like an insect, showing up at half a dozen meetings a day and generating more head lines than newspapers could accommodate.

A man of the nineties, Salinas seemed determined to challenge some of Mexico's age-old ideological hang-ups. He was somebody U.S. officials and foreign investors could talk to - in their own language. Shrugging off a century of troubled U.S.-Mexican relations - and recent economic fiascoes such as Mexico's 1982 nationalization of the banking industry - Wall Street investment firms had finally found a Mexican leader they could trust.

© 1999 by Andres Oppenheimer

About the Author

Andres Oppenheimer is a Latin American correspondent for the Miami Herald and the author of the widely praised book Castro's Final Hour. In 1987 he was co-winner of the Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on the Iran-Contra scandal. He lives in Mexico City and Miami.