NEWS ANALYSIS : Death Will Test the Stability of Political System

This nation’s much-vaunted political stability will be sorely tested by Wednesday’s assassination of Luis Donaldo Colosio, the ruling party’s presidential candidate and the man who was widely expected to assume the next six-year term as Mexico’s leader.

Mexican officials had expected 1994 to be hailed as their country’s entry into the First World as a full partner with the United States and Canada in the North American Free Trade Agreement. Instead, the nation has been racked by violence, with Colosio’s killing coming on the heels of the much-publicized kidnaping of a prominent banker and a peasant uprising that left at least 145 people dead.

As an indicator of just how anxious people were here Wednesday night, usually talkative analysts were tight-lipped.

They were utterly unwilling to speculate on how the Tijuana assassination might affect this country’s political and economic future. It was anathema to commentators to even discuss the future of Colosio’s political rival, peace envoy Manuel Camacho Solis.

Although his campaign had been eclipsed by the rebellion in the southern state of Chiapas, Colosio had still represented stability and continuity. That stability was an important selling point for NAFTA as it was debated in the U.S. Congress.

Colosio was the handpicked successor of outgoing President Carlos Salinas de Gortari. His political ascension, as the presidential candidate of the Institutional Revolutionary Party--or PRI, as it is known--occurred as part of a party rite, an archaic national tradition that rescued Mexico from the chaos of civil war and political murders 65 years ago when the party was founded.

The stability that such presidential successions ensured has been the justification for the survival of the PRI amid a growing clamor here for democratic reform.

It was unclear how a successor to Colosio will be designated. PRI rules allow the National Executive Committee to call a party convention or anoint a substitute candidate, but no candidate has died campaigning since the PRI was founded.

As the Mexican Congress debates reforms aimed at ensuring clean elections and widely seen as a response to the rebels’ demands for democracy, Colosio’s death is sure to provoke questions about the nation’s stability for the first time in six decades.

Ironically, the assassination came just a day after Camacho Solis said he would not launch a maverick presidential bid, quelling rumors that had kept politicians and financial markets unsettled for months.

Camacho Solis, the popular former Mexico City mayor, had been openly disappointed when his friend Salinas passed over him in favor of Colosio. His career, however, was revived in mid-January when Salinas sent him to negotiate peace with the Indian rebels who took control of several southern towns in a New Year’s Day uprising.

In the Byzantine world of Mexican politics, it was even speculated that Salinas was intentionally promoting Camacho Solis to keep Colosio under control and retain power far longer than a lame-duck president generally does in his last year.

But the assumption that there was such a rivalry caused financial jitters in a country that depends on foreign investment in the stock market to offset its multibillion-dollar trade deficit and to finance investment.

Those concerns were compounded when Alfredo Harp Helu, chairman of Mexico’s largest financial group, was kidnaped earlier this month. He has not yet been released. This week’s edition of the political magazine Proceso termed that crime “another blow to the administration.”

But that was before an assassin’s bullets dealt Salinas the hardest blow a Mexican president and his party have suffered in decades.

* NEW ECONOMIC WORRIES: The shooting of Colosio will aggravate worries about Mexico’s business climate. D2