Salinas Halts Hunger Strike as Change Roils Mexico : Latin America: Observers wonder about former president’s health and the stability of the ruling party.

After vowing to fast until death or until his reputation was cleared, former President Carlos Salinas de Gortari temporarily called off his hunger strike Friday, just hours after he launched it.

His suspended protest further tarnished the image of Mexico’s ruling elite, bolstered President Ernesto Zedillo’s stature, raised more questions about the stability and future of the ruling party and helped to drive the peso to near-record lows.

And while it also led many Mexicans to question the very sanity of the man who ran their nation for six years, by late Friday it appeared to win Salinas a tiny bit of the satisfaction he had sought.

Salinas, a 46-year-old Harvard Ph. D., had announced late Thursday night that he would begin a fast Friday that would last until the government of his handpicked successor exonerated him of blame in two political assassinations and the nation’s worst financial crisis in more than a decade.

But, by Friday afternoon, he said he would end the hunger strike “for a few hours” to give the Zedillo administration a chance to discuss ways to clear his name.

Salinas made his announcement to reporters who tracked him down in a working-class neighborhood of Monterrey built by Solidarity, his administration’s hallmark social-welfare program. He appeared in the area, without warning, at the home of a supporter to start his fast about 1 a.m.

Zedillo, meantime, had sought to depersonalize the conflict that began when the 43-year-old Yale-educated president shattered the traditions of the party that has ruled Mexico for 66 years by sanctioning the arrest Tuesday of his predecessor’s elder brother in connection with a political murder.

“The exercise of justice is not at the discretion of the president, but it is the strict mandate of the constitution,” Zedillo declared in a speech Friday. “At the same time, the law should not be applied in a way that hurts political reputations or personalities. To do so is very grave and an attack on unity and national peace.”

Without naming Salinas, Zedillo added: “Today, more than ever, we should act with serenity.”

Later, Salinas appeared to be doing just that, announcing a postponement of one of the briefer yet more dramatic hunger strikes in recent Mexican memory.

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After Salinas put off his planned fast, Atty. Gen. Antonio Lozano’s office announced that it currently has no evidence that Salinas had tried to impede or misdirect the investigation into the March, 1994, assassination of ruling party presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio.

The former president’s desperate acts--while helping to push Mexico’s archaic political system closer to the breaking point--have revealed flaws in a presidential system in which leaders have been expected to move from absolute power to total obscurity overnight, analysts said.

The unprecedented moves by past and current presidents have also contributed to the profound political turbulence, which intensified sharply Tuesday when Zedillo started to enforce a bold new policy of equal justice by permitting the arrest of Raul Salinas de Gortari, the analysts, politicians and ordinary Mexicans agreed.

“These are the visible strings of a much more complicated, more sinister drama,” prominent social critic Homero Aridjis observed.

Its latest act was broadcast on a late-night television news program on which Carlos Salinas--who revolutionized Mexico’s economy but left its Draconian political system intact--declared: “The most valuable thing I have is my life, and I am willing to give it in exchange for the truth.”

He then declared he would go on a hunger strike until the Zedillo government exonerated him in the collapse of the Mexican economy and the assassinations last year of Colosio and Francisco Ruiz Massieu, the No. 2 official of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI.

Salinas’ rift with Zedillo bodes ill for the PRI, analysts said. They noted it could further splinter the party by encouraging resistance from ruling party hard-liners who oppose Zedillo’s efforts to reform the PRI and separate its powers from those of the presidency.

“It’s suicide,” Aridjis said. “The system has been broken not by the opposition but from within the ruling PRI. The chain of complicity has been broken.”

In the short term, Salinas’ proposed hunger strike also appeared largely to have backfired on him. It instantly boosted Zedillo’s popularity. And it did precious little to renew any sympathy for the former president, who is widely blamed for a deepening economic recession that has made every Mexican poorer almost overnight.

“Let him die, if he wants to,” said driver Antonio Rios, who, like most Mexicans, believes that Salinas enriched himself while planting the time bomb of the nation’s deep economic crisis during his presidency.

Civil engineer Federico Jimenez, 44, observed of the proposed Salinas starvation: “This is an infantile act. Rather than fasting, we would prefer him to do something for his country. We would like him to return a good portion of what he stole. It’s better if he gives back the money and eats well.”

The former president’s conduct--which has seemed in recent days to veer from the profound to the bizarre--left many analysts and opposition leaders wondering whether Salinas is mentally well.

“By going on a hunger strike, Salinas is reflecting the alteration of his mental capacities,” said Porfirio Munoz Ledo, leader of the populist Democratic Revolutionary Party, or PRD. “This action is the ultimate in arrogance.”

A brilliant economist and political scientist with two doctorates from Harvard University, Salinas left office Nov. 30 with some of the highest popularity ratings in Mexican history.

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But as Mexico’s economy unraveled after the sudden, forced devaluation of the peso Dec. 20--setting off soaring inflation, sky-high interest rates and a recession--the former president’s popular stock plummeted to all-time lows this week, especially after his brother’s arrest.

“This is a siege mentality,” Salinas administration chronicler M. Delal Baer said. “He has been made the scapegoat for every sparrow that falls from the sky. Salinas needs to distinguish between the judgment of his legacy and the judgment of his brother.”

Three times in the last week, Salinas has called national television stations to profess his innocence and blame Zedillo for the economic crisis, breaking a decades-old tradition of former Mexican presidents fading into the background.

Salinas also announced that he was bowing out of the race to head the World Trade Organization, a prestigious position that he had lobbied for in a costly tour to Asia, Europe and Africa last December.

His campaign for the WTO post had reminded many Mexicans of former President Luis Echeverria’s ill-fated bid for the job of United Nations secretary general after he left office in 1976--and a peso devaluation followed.

His successor, Jose Lopez Portillo, named Echeverria Mexico’s ambassador to UNESCO, the U.N. cultural arm. But after Echeverria made a series of embarrassing statements, Lopez Portillo yanked him from that post. Lopez Portillo also cut off government funding for Echeverria’s think tank, the Third World Studies Center.

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Echeverria appeared to win revenge years later when Lopez Portillo--who presided over a bitter 1982 peso devaluation after pledging to defend the Mexican currency like a dog--was hounded into exile by detractors. After Echeverria joined the criticism, Lopez Portillo took out full-page advertisements that read, “Et tu, Luis?”

“They are kings for six years and suddenly they lose it all,” Aridjis said, characterizing the lives and status of Mexico’s all-powerful presidents.

That abrupt change, Baer added, is particularly devastating for a high-caliber technocrat like Salinas, whom she called “enormously powerful, very disciplined and very much in control. He is now confronting a situation where he has no control, and all the discipline in the world will not restore his control.”

Destroying the reputation of his predecessor is the traditional means by which a Mexican president builds his own credibility, analysts noted.

But in recent changes of administration, the attacks have escalated. In his first months in office, Salinas himself ordered the arrests of the director of the state oil monopoly and a powerful labor boss. And now, Zedillo has allowed the arrest of the former president’s brother.

As the targets have reached closer to home, former presidents have found that to keep silent is an ever more difficult task. And with each breach, analysts said, the PRI’s systemic hold on power weakens. “This is a generation that was not steeped in the rules, so they are breaking them left and right,” Baer said. “That isn’t all bad. But now, there aren’t any rules.”

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Profile: The Salinas Brothers

Raul and Carlos Salinas de Gortari are among five children of wealthy and politically connected parents. Their father served as a Cabinet minister and a senator.

CARLOS SALINAS DE GORTARI

* Born: 1948

* Education: National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM); graduate work in economics at Harvard University

* Career: Teaching and research at UNAM and Harvard in early to mid-1970s.

* Held positions in the Ministry of Finance, Ministry of Planning and Budget and the Institute of Political, Social and Economic Studies. Was named minister of planning and federal budget from 1982-87.

* In 1987 was named as presidential candidate by the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). Served as president from Dec. 1, 1988 through Nov. 30, 1994.

* Current events: In wake of brother’s arrest has withdrawn his U.S.-backed candidacy for president of the World Trade Organization.

RAUL SALINAS DE GORTARI

* Born: 1946

* Education: National Autonomous University of Mexico; two masters degrees from French universities.

* Career: In early 1970s, worked in the planning department of a private construction firm.

* Held positions in the Ministry of Planning and Federal Budget and CONASUPO, the federal government’s huge food distribution agency. During the presidency of his brother, Raul was CONASUPO planning director and later an evaluation coordinator for the federal Solidarity poverty relief program.

* Spent part of 1994 as a visiting researcher in Mexican and U.S. universities.

* Current events: Arrested last Tuesday on charges he masterminded last year’s murder of the PRI’s secretary general, Francisco Ruiz Massieu.