A Professor's Pupil Makes Good

By Jill Smolowe

In a nation where style is often as important as substance, Carlos Salinas de Gortari seems an unlikely choice to be President. He is short and almost bald, and his bushy mustache and outsize ears are a caricaturist's delight. His appetite for hard work and rapid-fire oratory have earned him the irreverent nickname Atomic Ant. Yet last week the Harvard-educated Salinas was named the candidate of the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party for the July 1988 presidential election. Although Salinas will face opponents, his victory is virtually assured; the monolithic P.R.I. has not lost a national election since its founding in 1929.

Salinas, 39, will be Mexico's youngest President in more than a half- century. Like his three predecessors, Salinas is a technocrat and has never held an elected post, although he is the first economist ever to serve in a job occupied primarily by lawyers. Still, Salinas brings ample experience to the presidency, which carries a six-year term. As the Minister of Budget and Planning since 1982, Salinas is both credited and cursed for President Miguel de la Madrid Hurtado's austerity program. Salinas' task will be to guide Mexico's economy from the sleepy epoch of the sombrero into the dynamic age of the superconductor. At the same time, he faces mounting demands to loosen the P.R.I.'s grip on the country's political system.

While a steady devaluation of the peso has boosted exports and helped build foreign reserves of $15 billion, the reforms have produced an annual inflation rate of 130%. Additional cutbacks in public spending are certain to further antagonize Mexico's powerful labor unions, which have grown angry as purchasing power has shrunk by as much as 40% during the past five years. Moreover, Mexico has a foreign debt of more than $100 billion that consumes about $1 billion a month in interest payments. Although a showdown with the labor unions may come, Salinas is expected to follow De la Madrid's austerity course.

On the political front, however, Salinas' success may depend on how quickly he distinguishes himself from his predecessors. While charges of ballot fraud, patronage and corruption have long dogged the P.R.I., the allegations are growing dangerously heated. Last year the situation turned particularly bitter after closely contested mayoral elections in the northern state of Chihuahua, a stronghold of the conservative National Action Party, the largest of the eight opposition parties. Afterward a P.R.I. official conceded, "We may have won the elections, but we have lost the people."

Recently, the party leadership faced its most serious internal challenge ever. Led by Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, 53, the son of a former President, a faction insisted that the selection process be opened up. The party met the demand halfway. Instead of keeping the process secret, the party leadership made public a list of six names. Each of the candidates then fielded questions from party officials at televised breakfast meetings.

Ultimately, De la Madrid still made the decision. A onetime student of De la Madrid's at Mexico City's National Autonomous University, Salinas was tapped for his youth and his allegiance to his former professor's policies. "De la Madrid wants his restructuring of the economy to be brought to fruition," says Susan Kaufman Purcell, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. "After six years, the program is still reversible."

Since Salinas is the architect of those measures, his selection pleased foreign creditors (including U.S. bankers, who hold $25 billion in outstanding loans to Mexico). Many of the country's workers were far less enthusiastic, blaming Salinas for the economic belt tightening. Fidel Velazquez, 87, the venerable dean of the 4.5 million-member Confederation of Mexican Workers, pointedly walked out on Salinas' hourlong acceptance speech. Asked why he had left, Velazquez responded testily, "Because I felt like it."

Other party members criticized Salinas' lack of political experience. His aides countered that Salinas could not have advanced so far had he not already mastered the political game. "He may not like the backslapping routine," says an assistant. "But he knows how to do it." Moreover, Salinas has ties with the old guard: his father Raul Salinas Lozano, 70, is a Senator who has held Cabinet and diplomatic posts.

U.S. State Department officials expressed surprise; Interior Minister Manuel Bartlett Diaz and Energy Minister Alfredo del Mazo Gonzalez were considered likelier choices. While Salinas, like De la Madrid, is favorably disposed toward Washington, he is expected to keep his distance lest he offend Mexican sensibilities. "Salinas is hardheaded enough to know that Mexico's future is bound to the U.S. and not to a tiny Third World country in Central America," says a European diplomat based in Mexico City, referring to Nicaragua. "But there has to be a little prickliness in the relationship for it to be right."

A native of Mexico City, Salinas joined the P.R.I. shortly after enrolling as an economics major at the National Autonomous University of Mexico in 1966. De la Madrid, then a law professor at the university, spotted and encouraged Salinas' budding economic talents, and the careers of the men have been intertwined ever since. Upon graduation, Salinas held a series of low-level bureaucratic jobs, then headed to Harvard in 1973, where he earned two master's degrees and a doctorate in political economy and government. Returning in 1978 to Mexico City, where he now lives with his wife and three children, Salinas worked for De la Madrid, then Minister of Budget and Planning, and assumed that post when his mentor became President.

For Salinas, the next year will be filled with rallies and speeches as he campaigns for a job that is assuredly his. Come Dec. 1, 1988, and inauguration day, however, the real challenge will begin: steering a course between populism and continued economic austerity. In the past, Mexican Presidents have taken office amid a burst of optimism and reform, but their accomplishments have usually fallen far short of their promises. If Salinas is as good a student as his academic resume suggests, he will have learned from the mistakes of his predecessors.

With reporting by John Borrell/Mexico City and Rodman Griffin/New York