New Hope in Mexico After a Turbulent Year : President Zedillo is off to an impressive start

This has been a tumultuous--although historic--year in Mexico, and more turmoil may be coming yet. That’s one reason it was reassuring to see Ernesto Zedillo inaugurated last week as president in a largely peaceful process that almost seemed anticlimactic, given all that preceded it.

As 1994 approached, Mexico prepared to celebrate both the new year and the nation’s formal entry into the North American Free Trade Agreement with the United States and Canada; then-President Carlos Salinas de Gortari had boosted that monumental pact as his country’s ticket to First World prosperity. Yet on New Year’s Day Mexicans awakened to a jolt that reminded them that millions of their countrymen remain trapped in the Third World: an Indian uprising in Chiapas that remains unresolved.

From that point on, things got worse. In March the country was stunned by its first major political assassination in years--the murder of the leading candidate to succeed Salinas as president, Luis Donaldo Colosio of the powerful Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI.

Although Colosio’s killer was captured at the scene, the shooting hangs as a question in the minds of many Mexicans. Was the killer a deranged loner or a puppet in some larger plot? The ongoing speculation was fueled in September when PRI Secretary General Jose Francisco Ruiz Massieu also was gunned down by an assassin.

But in looking back on these events and other worrisome developments, such as a resurgence of drug violence and kidnapings for ransom, all would do well to also recall how Mexico kept moving forward in 1994 despite its traumas.

Particularly noteworthy was the fact that in August the nation was able to conduct its most open and honest elections in a century--voting in which Zedillo, a 42-year-old economist who had been Colosio’s campaign manager, was elected. It is hard to envision an event that could be more reassuring to foreign investors worried that political turmoil could somehow stall the remarkable economic reforms, such as NAFTA, that Salinas began during his six-year term.

Like the former president, Zedillo is an Ivy League-trained technocrat more skilled at financial numbers-crunching than political glad-handing. And the key financial posts in Zedillo’s Cabinet are manned by holdovers from the Salinas years, including Treasury Secretary Jaime Serra Puche and Commerce Secretary Herminio Blanco. Even Foreign Minister Jose Angel Gurria is a noted financial expert. Clearly Zedillo will stay the economic course.

However, Zedillo has also taken the unprecedented step of naming a member of the opposition National Action Party, Antonio Lozano, as his attorney general. If Lozano is allowed to do his job unimpeded, he could go a long way toward calming the fears of Mexicans that at least some of the violence that plagues their nation, including the political killings, stems from PRI political corruption paid for by drug money.

Mexicans also point with hope toward Zedillo’s appointment of Arturo Warman, an expert on Mexico’s indigenous tribes, as secretary of agriculture and natural resources. His expertize could help Zedillo settle the simmering Indian conflict in Chiapas.

For all the controversy that Salinas’ economic reforms spawned, he left office as popular as any Mexican president in decades. Obviously Zedillo has a tough act to follow. But in his Cabinet appointments, Mexico’s new president is off to an impressive start.