The Party Is Over : Part 4

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

(Page 4 of 5)

Mexico's political system of a strong party that placed its president in power and replaced him every six years had been variously described by critics as a "rotating dictatorship" and a "six-year-long inheritable monarchy." But, owing to Salinas's amazing popularity and Colosio's easygoing, unassuming character, Salinas's decision to continue the tradition of picking the PRI candidate by himself had been largely accepted by the party bosses. The PRI had once again rallied behind its new handpicked nominee. Colosio seemed a sure winner of the August 21, 1994, elections. And his six-year term was almost sure to guarantee the continuity of Salinas's economic reforms into the year 2000.

As a smiling Salinas and his wife, Cecilia, prepared to make their appearance at the Lopez Mateos ballroom of the Los Pinos presidential residence at ten P.M., it was hard to imagine that anything could derail Mexico from its new path of economic modernization. The guests, who had been sipping cocktails in another room and were beginning to move toward the ballroom, were chatting cheerfully as they awaited the presidential couple. There was a buoyant mood in the air.

The talk over tequilas and margaritas before dinner had stayed away from politics. There were plenty of other things to talk about, all of them auspicious. Mexico's national soccer team had just qualified for the 1994 World Cup in the United States. The team's victories over the American and Canadian teams in prechampionship training games had triggered massive celebrations in Mexico City. Almost simultaneously, Mexico's world boxing champion Julio César Chavez, who publicly stated his admiration for Salinas whenever he could, had just won his eighty-ninth consecutive fight. Marathon runner Andrés Espinosa, a Mexican-born steelworker, had won the twenty-third New York City marathon. The movie Like Water for Chocolate, written by Mexican novelist Laura Esquivel, had beat a box-office records for a Spanish-language film in the United States.

It seemed Mexico was taking off on a fronts. Polls showed that the Mexican people were more optimistic about the future than they had been in years. For Salinas and his guests that night at the Los Pinos palace, things seemed almost too good to be true.

* * *

They were, but the president would not find out until later that night. When Salinas and his wife made their triumphal entry into their New Year's Eve party at ten P.M., he was smiling from ear to ear. The first lady, a somewhat introverted woman, was unusually elegant in a two-piece beige dress with a cotton top covered with spangles, low-cut enough to display a necklace with two big pearls in its middle.

A twelve-musician marimba band playing a huge synthesizer raised the volume of the music to announce the arrival of the presidential couple, to the applause of everybody. Salinas and his wife nodded to the crowd, walked across the dance floor, and took their seats at the presidential table standing on a small podium against the wall across the room. From there, they oversaw about twenty round tables laid out around the dancing area, filled with nearly two hundred guests.

The president was sitting with his recently widowed father, Raúl Salinas Lozano, a former minister of Industry and Commerce, and his three siblings with their spouses. There was his elder brother, Raúl Jr., a former leftist who with other Mexico City student activists had unsuccessfully attempted to ignite a social uprising in Chiapas in the early seventies. Raúl had since fully converted to capitalism, becoming an increasingly prosperous businessman-politician in various government administrative jobs. He sported a square-shaped mustache that accentuated his physical resemblance to his younger brother and served as a constant reminder of his status as the Mexican president's all-purpose assistant. From his successive jobs as manager of government food distribution programs he had been appointed to by the president, Raúl was known to have been making the most sensitive business and political deals for the Mexican ruler, while somehow finding the time to write short-story books with titles such as Muerte Calculada ("Calculated Death''). Then there was Enrique, an introverted business consultant who shunned the limelight; Sergio, a bohemian sociologist who moved in academic circles; and Adriana Margarita, whose bitter divorce from Salinas's former classmate and close adviser José Francisco Ruiz Massieu had long been the focus of mutual recriminations within the family.

It was one of the most joyful parties ever hosted at Los Pinos - not the least because there had seldom been such a crowd of cheerful teenagers at a presidential pa ace dinner, several guests would recall later. Salinas's four siblings and the first lady's nine brothers and sisters had all come with their children. The president's teenage children - Carlos Emiliano, named after revolutionary leader Emiliano Zapata, Juan Cristóbal, and Cecilia had also invited several friends each. It didn't take long after they had swallowed the main course - a choice of salmon or steak - for the crowd of cousins to take over the dance floor and form a conga-style lambada line that wriggled ecstatically through the tables.

"It was a family-and-friends sort of thing, where we grown-ups were a minority," recalls Nuevo León state governor Sócrates Rizzo, one of the handful of politicians who had been invited to the party as friends of the family. "There was a lot of enthusiasm, a feeling that things were going well. We all expected that with the start of the new year and the free-trade agreement there would be a massive increase of foreign investments."

© 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.