Salinas: Worthy Goals, but Faulty Judgment : Mexico: Despite his mistakes and the charges against his brother, he still deserves respect for the vision of his sexenio.

What did the President know and when did he know it?

These were the fundamental questions in Watergate, the constitutional crisis that ultimately brought down former President Richard M. Nixon in 1974, forever tainting a respected international leader with the mark of domestic political scandal.

For months, similar questions have been asked in Mexico regarding former President Carlos Salinas de Gortari. They are being asked more loudly than ever now, following revelations by government investigators that Salinas’ elder brother Raul--who already stands accused of masterminding a major political assassination--had secret bank accounts in Switzerland and other countries worth more than $250 million.

Raul Salinas was a successful businessman before his brother was elected president and before he agreed to help his young sibling out by taking a $70,000-per-year government job. So Raul Salinas claims he made all his wealth honestly. But few people in Mexico--where the only thing more commonplace than political corruption is public cynicism about political corruption--believe that.

For his part, Carlos Salinas issued a public statement from exile (in Canada or Cuba, depending on which rumors you believe) expressing shock at the charges against his brother and saying he should be punished if guilty. But that did not calm the anger directed against the former president.

Most Mexicans are convinced that Carlos Salinas took it on the lam because President Ernesto Zedillo’s new government is starting to uncover the scandals of Salinas’ sexenio, or six-year term in office. They include not just the inexplicable enrichment of his brother and other former top officials, but botched investigations of three major assassinations that many Mexicans suspect were deliberately covered up.

Rarely has a once-popular political leader fallen so quickly from grace. On Dec. 1, 1994, when Salinas handed the presidential sash to Zedillo, public opinion polls indicated Salinas had the highest approval ratings ever for a Mexican president.

The only places Salinas was more popular were Wall Street and other world financial centers. There, Salinas’ efforts to modernize and open up the Mexican economy, utilizing neoliberal economic theories that he and other young Mexican technocrats studied at Harvard, Yale, Stanford and other U.S. universities, made him a darling of big international investors. It is no coincidence that the only high-visibility job Salinas got after leaving office was a seat on the board of directors for Dow Jones Inc.

It’s now hard to find anyone in this country willing to admit that they ever thought well of Salinas. But what feeds the outrage toward Salinas here is different from what keeps it boiling in Mexico. Most foreigners are disappointed in Salinas because he seemingly failed to live up to his promise as the bright young president who would finally lead Mexico into the first rank of nations by pushing through historic reforms like the North American Free Trade Agreement with the United States and Canada. But they may be rushing to judgment.

For despite Salinas’ mistakes, the gravity of the charges leveled against his brother and even the possibility that the former president himself could eventually be personally linked to a scandal, Salinas still deserves respect, however grudging, for the vision he brought to his sexenio.

No one can deny that the long-term goal for which Salinas and his generation of U.S.-trained technocrats were striving isn’t still worthwhile: a modern, efficient Mexican economy geared to compete in the world of the 21st Century. And for all the criticism Salinas is getting, especially from the political left in Mexico, no other political leader in that country has come up with a development strategy for the nation as viable as Salinas’ free-market liberalism.

So for now, if Salinas can fairly be accused of anything, it is poor judgment in some of his appointments--and hubris. He so believed in his reputation as an economic genius that he and his fellow technocrats went too long in trying to sustain a risky strategy of keeping the peso’s value artificially low to attract foreign investment into Mexico.

As with Nixon, historians will be better able to judge how well Salinas did, in the long run, trying to achieve his lofty vision. In the meantime, the harsh judgment of his contemporaries is inevitable. And, as in Nixon’s case, things could get worse before they get better.