Ex-President Salinas Is Back on Mexico’s Political Scene

It was almost like the old days--before the 1995 peso collapse, the shocking assassination charges, the lurid tales of drug corruption. There was Carlos Salinas de Gortari, staring from the front of the Mexican daily Reforma and the local edition of Newsweek.

Salinas’ recent, rare comments in the two publications have put the former president back at the center of political life. Four years after leaving office, he continues to haunt Mexicans. Now, many believe that he is preparing to return from self-imposed exile in Ireland or at least attempt a rehabilitation.

“Salinas is beginning his descent on Mexico. It’s like he was cruising out there, and now he’s beginning maneuvers to descend,” said Adolfo Aguilar Zinser, a senator and critic of the former president.

“He makes everybody nervous.”

It might seem an odd time for Salinas to reappear. Once hailed as the man who modernized his country’s economy and signed the North American Free Trade Agreement, he is now a metaphor for the fierce depression that occurred after he left office in 1994.

Members of his administration are dogged by corruption allegations. They have a handy symbol: Salinas’ brother Raul, who sits in a maximum-security jail outside Mexico City, charged with illegally amassing a fortune and murdering a former leader of the ruling party. He has pleaded innocent.

Despite his unpopularity, Carlos Salinas has reemerged after years of keeping a low profile. His brief interview with Reforma appeared almost like a campaign spread, with seven large color photos that Salinas provided of himself at a bookstore, at a university, at home in Dublin with his smiling second wife and two small children.

His tone was unapologetic.

“Make no mistake: The allegations against my administration and the never-ending persecution of my family are related to the struggle for power that is going on today in Mexico,” Salinas wrote in Newsweek. He blamed his troubles on the Mexican “nomenklatura” opposed to economic and political liberalization.

Salinas’ staunch defense of his administration and veiled criticisms of President Ernesto Zedillo’s government provoked a flood of commentary.

Hector Aguilar Camin, a prominent novelist and historian, said Salinas clearly felt that Mexicans were becoming more receptive to his arguments.

In part, the novelist said, that’s because the Zedillo administration’s cases against Raul Salinas have appeared flimsy. So Raul Salinas appears a victim, he said--another example of the Mexican tradition in which a president jails an ally of his predecessor to undercut his influence.

“The cycle of post-presidential political lynching is ending,” Aguilar Camin said. “Every president has his victim, his political prisoner. At the end of the sexenio [presidential term], the prisoner goes free.”

Other analysts are not so sure Mexicans are ready to forgive or forget. But, they note, Carlos Salinas continues to loom large over the political landscape because of the vast network of alliances he established while in power. Zedillo, in contrast, is regarded as relatively isolated.

Analysts believe that the 50-year-old Salinas may be reappearing now because the 2000 presidential race has begun in earnest. Zedillo has vowed to break with the tradition in which the president chose the PRI candidate, who has won for the past seven decades.

But it is not yet clear how the party will select its standard-bearer.

“If Zedillo doesn’t use his power for that [naming the PRI candidate], he leaves a vacuum which Salinas will try, to some extent, to occupy,” said Aguilar Zinser.