Mexico’s President Shifts Focus Away From NAFTA : Commerce: In his final state of the nation address, Salinas stresses domestic initiatives over trade pact.

President Carlos Salinas de Gortari on Monday downplayed the importance of the North American Free Trade Agreement, instead calling on Mexicans to spur prosperity by bolstering domestic economic initiatives.

“Benefits will not be forthcoming in the short term, nor will they produce spectacular results,” Salinas said of NAFTA. “With or without the agreement, the evolution of our economy will not be substantially altered in the immediate future.

“The key to our development lies not outside the country but rather in our own efforts: in savings, productivity and quality,” Salinas told the Mexican Congress.

Opposition lawmakers heckled him periodically during the address, questioning the value of the trade accord and other administration policies.

The speech was the president’s fifth--and possibly most significant--state of the nation address: It was the final one before Salinas, prohibited by law from seeking reelection, names his likely successor, the candidate of the governing Institutional Revolutionary Party in next year’s federal elections.

Once the nominee is designated, Salinas, now at the pinnacle of his power, becomes a lame duck, with attention shifting to the elections.

Salinas spoke barely two weeks before a divided U.S. Congress is scheduled to vote on NAFTA. The accord would gradually ease tariffs and other trade barriers among the United States, Canada and Mexico.

While tempering expectations, the president was careful to restate his commitment to NAFTA, which he described as “a pioneering accomplishment in trade negotiations” that “will set future trends in the region and in the world.”

Salinas also detailed what he described as improvements in almost every facet of Mexican life: the economy, health, education, agricultural production, political freedoms, social justice, the environment and other areas.

Throughout the address, one opposition legislator held up a yellow placard deriding Salinas’ term as one of “fraud, corruption and poverty.”

Another prominent sign read: “Poverty doesn’t disappear with false figures.”

While Salinas once hailed the pact as the linchpin of his wide-ranging economic reforms, his remarks Monday underlined the more pragmatic approach he has adopted in recent weeks as the agreement’s future on Capitol Hill has become more questionable.

Even if the accord is passed, its benefits will not be “spectacular” and the nation’s economy will not be “substantially altered” in the short term, Salinas cautioned during his almost three-hour address, delivered before more than 500 deputies and senators gathered in the rotunda of the legislative palace.

Despite his deliberate de-emphasizing of the trade pact, Salinas stressed Mexico’s interest in international commerce and rejected a return to the highly protected, insular economy that characterized the nation until the mid-1980s.

He also defended the accelerated formation of huge Mexican financial and business groups--widely criticized here as benefiting only a handful of millionaires, including many Salinas cronies--as essential for global competitiveness.

And, Salinas boasted, the nation’s increased access to world markets has helped tame inflation by generating investment and reducing the national debt.

Dissident lawmakers interrupted the president on half a dozen occasions, unfurling banners demanding a renegotiation of NAFTA, among other points.

Mexico’s leftist opposition has called for a revised trade accord that, among other provisions, would bolster protection of Mexican workers in the United States.

Protesting legislators also denounced what they viewed as the anti-Mexican campaign inherent in recent U.S. immigration-control strategies, including Operation Blockade in El Paso and plans to post the National Guard in San Diego.

In his speech, Salinas insisted that Mexico, while improving relations with its northern neighbor, had not abandoned its commitment to protecting the “human and labor rights” of millions of expatriates now residing in the United States.