Mexico Party Names Pick for President : Politics: Luis Donaldo Colosio is virtually assured of winning next year’s election. The ruling party candidate would usher in closer economic ties with the U.S. under NAFTA.

The political party that has ruled Mexico for more than six decades on Sunday named Luis Donaldo Colosio, the social development secretary who oversees the popular anti-poverty program Solidarity, as its candidate for president.

The nomination by the Institutional Revolutionary Party, known by the Spanish initials PRI, virtually assures that Colosio, 43, will be the nation’s new president after elections next Aug. 24.

If he wins, Colosio will oversee implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement and the new economic relationship between his country and the United States. Colosio strongly supported the trade agreement and, as a native of a border state, is expected to continue good U.S. relations, which have improved notably under the current administration of President Carlos Salinas de Gortari.

Colosio’s nomination breaks with a trend toward increasingly more technocratic presidents who are remote from the party and the people.

While he is U.S.-educated, like his more technocratic colleagues, Colosio is the first PRI presidential candidate in three decades who has previously won an election: He has served as both a deputy and a senator for his home state of Sonora. Colosio was also campaign manager for Salinas.

Before joining the Cabinet, he was PRI chairman. In his current position, Colosio has administered the multimillion-dollar Solidarity poverty relief program.

As a result, he is as well known to people throughout the country as any politician except President Salinas and possibly Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, presidential candidate for the leftist Democratic Revolutionary Party, who is widely believed to have been cheated out of a victory in the 1988 election.

“Colosio is a man of the party,” political commentator Rafael Segovia said. “He knows the tiniest villages in the nation because he has visited them all.”

In his speech Sunday accepting the party’s nomination, Colosio stressed his commitment to continuing Salinas’ free-market reforms.

“As a public official and a legislator, I have participated in these decisions and, as an economist, I am convinced that they are correct,” he said. “Let it be clear that there is no turning back.”

He also pledged to keep careful accounts of campaign expenses, a longstanding source of irritation for opposition parties that accused the PRI of funding its campaigns with government money.

The main boulevard where PRI headquarters is located was blocked off to traffic Sunday night as thousands of supporters gathered carrying flags, banners and balloons of red and green, the colors of both the flag and the party.

“This is like our Christmas present,” said Alejandro, a 25-year-old grain vendor, shouting to be heard above the din of honking horns and mariachi music.

Colosio’s nomination ended the months of speculation that every six years grow up around the mysterious ritual of selecting the PRI’s presidential candidate. Party officials had said the candidate would not be announced until January, but Cardenas apparently forced an earlier announcement by charging that the purpose of Vice President Al Gore’s visit to Mexico this Tuesday is to influence the choice of the PRI nominee.

While the constitution prevents Mexican presidents from running for reelection, they in practice choose their successors. No one here doubts that Colosio was directly selected by Salinas, following a tradition called the dedazo , or big finger, that dates back to the ruling party’s founding in 1929.

The choice of Colosio was widely expected, especially after the U.S. Congress approved the North American Free Trade Agreement earlier this month.

With NAFTA to reassure foreign investors that the free-market economic reforms of the last two administrations will continue, Salinas was free to bypass candidates strictly identified with economic reforms--such as Finance Secretary Pedro Aspe Armella--and choose someone with more domestic popular appeal.

The PRI, known for machine politics and often accused of fraud, has come under increasing pressure both inside and outside the country to conduct clean elections. The strength and Election Day vigilance of opposition parties on both the left and right have grown until the country now has three governors from the opposition.

As PRI chairman during the first four years of the Salinas administration, Colosio tried to reform the party by introducing primary elections as a way to let the rank and file choose candidates and individual, direct party membership--rather than automatic affiliation through union memberships.

However, the changes were widely opposed by party stalwarts, particularly organized labor, and after a halfhearted attempt at implementation during the 1991 midterm elections, they were quietly dropped.

Not everyone is convinced that Colosio believed in the proposed reforms.

“He was like a great dinosaur cloaked in the guise of democracy,” newspaper columnist Carlos Ramirez wrote at the time.

The result is that the PRI has undergone little substantive change since the 1988 elections, which Salinas officially won with 50.6% of the vote, the narrowest margin in the party’s history. With the party machinery still creaky, the PRI needed a candidate with political skills.

In contrast to Salinas, who was considered cold and intellectual when he was nominated, Colosio is described as charismatic and a captivating public speaker.

Profile: Luis Donaldo Colosio

Born: Feb. 10, 1950

Hometown: Magdalena de Kino, Sonora

Education: B.A. in economics at Monterrey Technical Institute in 1972, M.A. in regional development and urban economics at University of Pennsylvania in 1977

Family: Wife, Diana Laura Riojas, an economist; children, Luis Donaldo, 7, and Mariana, 6 months

Quote: “I belong to a generation that has been marked by great changes and social movements, not only in Mexico, but all over the world.”