The torch is passed
Grayson, George
embrace the Serb fait accompli. Secretary of State Warren Christopher lamely argues that the Gorazde pull-back is evidence of progress toward a diplomat- ic settlement. Has Christopher or...
...Bishop Jolson held a doctorate in economics from the Gregorian University in Rome, an MBA from Harvard...
...July 17, 1992], an article that raised questions about the future of the priesthood that few others in the hierarchy acknowledge: whether women can be ordained, whether priests should be allowed to marry, whether priests who have resigned and married might return to the active ministry, whether "temporary vocations" should be considered...
...Before Salinas unveiled his choice, old-line Priistas, the socalled "dinosaurs" who inhabit the party's labor and peasant sectors, voiced dismay over Zedillo, a forty-two-year-old Yaletrained economist who had been serving as Colosio's campaign manager...
...6:6 May 1994 REPORT FROM PANAMA THE PRICE OF DEMOCRACY WITH AN EYE TO THE NORTH iriam is twenty-nine and a single mother...
...Amen...
...Zedillo was just the man to calm squeamish investors...
...colleges and served for twenty years as a missionary in lraq and Zimbabwe...
...he taught at several U.S...
...He slashed the inflation rate from 159.2 percent (1987) to 8 percent last year, privatized hundreds of state-owned "white elephant" firms, and moved the federal government from a 20-percent deficit to a surplus...
...For him, it was more important to convince financial gurus in New York, London, and Tokyo that Mexico would not veer from liberal trade policy and market-focused reforms than to butter up ward-heelers in Mexico City, Chihuahua, and Oaxaca...
...At the same time, he must convince dirt-poor Chiapan peasants and other "have-nots" that their country's foreign-educated mandarins care about their plight, as Salinas attempted to do through Solidarity...
...Mexico's next leader will face problems more daunting than those confronting Salinas when he took the presidential oath in December 1988...
...Now Miriam says she regrets voting for Endara, because economic and social conditions have only gotten worse under his administration...
...After two Ivy-League-educated chief executives, they longed for someone who appreciated patronage and payola more than econometric models and floating exchange rates...
...In this sensitive position, Zedillo deftly salved the bruised egos of losers in the budget process, while sharply boosting outlays for the antipoverty Solidarity initiative and other social ventures...
...a grandfather, Gudman Hjalpason, was born there...
...Indeed, with the Serbs defying the UN when and where they see fit, what stock can the Bosnian government put in future Serb promises or future UN resolve...
...No similar prescription exists for the twin challenges that face his successor: Implementing widespread NAFTA-impelled changes in the economy and legal system, while opening up Mexico's authoritarian political system...
...GEORGE GRAYSON George Grayson is the Class of 1938 Professor of Government at the College of William & Mary...
...Miriam doesn't think Blades can win, but if she does go to the polls on election day it will be to cast a protest vote for him...
...It can be argued that economic modernization paves the way for political liberalization...
...Developing the political skills that the stiff, professional Zedillo exhibited in dealing with agency heads and teachers will be crucial to his success...
...Fifth, such policies also undermine the clout of heavy-handed labor chieftains, tong accustomed to sweetheart contracts with the public and private sectors...
...In Panama's last election, in 1989, she voted for Guillermo Endara, the current president, because she wanted to rid the country of Manuel Noriega and his military dictatorship...
...Has Christopher or the Clinton administration any credibility left...
...The PRD was the party of Manuel Noriega, who is now serving time in a U.S...
...An aunt takes care of her four-year-old daughter while she is at work...
...He has just completed a book on the North American Free Trade Agreement...
...2000...
...What is clear is that the international community's willingness to resist aggression elsewhere is being measured in Bosnia...
...Apart from the question of money laundering and drugrelated corruption, "leakage" of drugs from the north-bound drug pipeline has now become a serious problem, which was not the case under Noriega...
...Failure to deter the Serbs may yet bring calamitous repercussions for the region as a whole...
...He performed brilliantly as Salinas's budget chief from 1988 to 1992...
...Salinas deserves enormous credit for his unswerving commitment to economic change...
...Second, experience in making economic decisions generates demands for greater choice in the political marketplace...
...Without endorsing any of the options he described, he wrote that the crisis of ministry requires action: "Though a collapse eventually leads to decisions being taken, it would be better not to be faced with making them in necessity or in a state of collapse...
...If he is at a loss for words, he might borrow some from George Orwell...
...Secretary of State Warren Christopher lamely argues that the Gorazde pull-back is evidence of progress toward a diplomatic settlement...
...Torrijos is a mythic figure in Panama, and Commonweal...
...R.I.P...
...Fourth, market-oriented policies stimulate decentralization, which curbs the government's ability to manipulate economic resources as a tool of political control...
...influence and power for good in a world in which we must lead whether we like it or not...
...But because of Panama's deep economic crisis she sees no hope of finding other work in the near future, and for that reason she seriously considers not voting in Panama's May 8 presidential election...
...Rather than a cosmopolitan egghead, PRI's swag-bellied bosses wanted as their standard-bearer a biceps-squeezing, savvy operative, in tune with grassroots politics...
...Still, winning an election may prove easier than governing...
...This move forced the aggressive, 800,000-member teachers' union to hammer out separate accords with thirty-one different state governments in lieu of a nationwide contract...
...The challenge for Zedillo will be to marginalize gradually the old guard, while broadening access to the political process for elements of the business community, professionals, women, young people, shantytown dwellers, and small farmers to whom the current regime represents repression, rigged elections, and corruption...
...declared Endara the winner anyway and installed him in office after invading the country in Operation Just Cause...
...It is perhaps a double irony, then, that the man who is currently leading the polls with 35 percent--more than twice the support of his nearest rival--is Ernesto Prrez Balladares, the candidate of the Revolutionary Democratic Party, or PRD...
...But Ortiz Arana bowed out of the contest and urged his comrades to back the president's recommendation...
...To cope with the problem, "[w]e need prayer, courage, imagination, and fortitude...
...Only by enhancing the legitimacy of the PRI-dominated system can Mexico, now in the throes of rapid change, minimize the inevitable domestic turmoil that frightens off investors and impedes the sustained growth required to vault the nation from the third to the first world...
...But the PRD was also the party of one-time populist strongman General Omar Torrijos, who was killed in a mysterious plane crash in 1981...
...This fact was evident in his selection March 30 of Ernesto Zedillo Ponce de Lern to replace the slain Luis Donaldo Colosio as the presidential nominee of the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI...
...Noriega canceled the election before all the votes were counted, but the U.S...
...Aggression undeterred in Bosnia is creating an uncertainty that breeds conflict...
...As a result, Salinas has had his way...
...Distracted by Whitewater and understandably concerned about domestic issues, President Clinton is in danger of squandering U.S...
...He raised hackles by producing an expensive new grade-school history text that implicated the Mexican army in a 1968 bloodbath in Mexico City...
...While not happy campers, the party bosses will climb aboard Commonweal scrap dealers...
...4:6 May 1994 REPORTS ON MEXICO THE TORCH IS PASSED SALINAS TO ZEDILLO resident Carlos Salinas de Gortari has transformed not only Mexico's foreign economic policy but also its domestic political priorities...
...All seven presidential candidates have promised to create jobs, but Miriam doesn't believe them, except perhaps Rubrn Blades, the internationally known salsa singer and movie star...
...First, economic progress expands the size of the middle class, which--in turn--serves as a powerful advocate for civil liberties and democratic choice...
...He also decentralized the nation's underfunded, extremely politicized educational system...
...Worse, the international community's fecklessness may encourage imprudent action by Russian hardliners or rogue states such as North Korea...
...Not only were his academic credentials impeccable, but he won praise as research director of Mexico' s central bank and as head of the FICORCA program that managed private-industry debt during the '80s...
...Miriam's earnings of 94 cents an hour put her monthly income a little above the legal minimum of $150, and in this sense she is lucky because 30 percent of Panama's work force have no jobs at all...
...In many ways, however, Salinas was coloring by the numbers in economic matters--that is, he sedulously adhered to an orthodox blueprint for reforming a hugely statist and inefficient economy...
...He made it to the top through brains and hard work, not a political pedigree and door-opening contacts...
...Nevertheless, she'd like to find another job, even if it paid less, one that would leave her weekends free and where she wouldn't have to sit so many hours on the high, broken stool that hurts her back...
...Their favorite was party chairman Fernando Ortiz Arana, forty-nine, lauded by one jowly congressman for his "patronism, clarity, talent, and faith in the principles of the Mexican revolution...
...She works six nights a week at the reception desk of a modest hotel...
...And if you had asked me what I was fighting for, I should have answered: 'Common decency.'" ET CETERA COOL & CANDID IN REYKJAVIK Jesuit Bishop Alfred J. Jolson of the ancient diocese of Reykjavik, Iceland (founded in 1056, restored in 1988), died at age sixty-five during a visit to Pittsburgh in late March...
...At the time of his appointment he was one of three priests in the world with an Icelandic heritage...
...Bishop Jolson was known to Commonweal readers as author of"A Bishop' s Concerns: Who Will Minister in A.D...
...To his credit, he defied strident nationalists, who regard Uncle Sam as an imperialist satan, to forge a free-trade agreement with the United States and Canada that links Mexico's once-cocooned economy to global markets...
...Third, free-tradeinspired contacts with democratic trading partners in North America and Europe would diminish authoritarianism in Mexico, just as Spain and Portugal's entry into the European Community fostered democracy in those erstwhile dictatorships...
...Finally, liberalization diminishes opportunities for under-the-table pay-offs or mordidas, as market mechanisms replace discretion exercised by sticky-fingered bureaucrats...
...Besides the lack of jobs, she worries about crime and drugs, which everyone here seems to agree are out of control...
...Clinton has yet to speak candidly to the American people about what is at stake morally and politically in Bosnia...
...His record was more ambiguous as education secretary (1992-93...
...If you had asked me why I joined the militia I should have answered: 'To fight against fascism,'" Orwell wrote in Homage to Catalonia in 1938...
...A hit of crack can reportedly be had on the street for as little as 25 cents...
...The polls show Blades contesting second place with two other candidates, each with the support of about 14 percent of the electorate...
...federal penitentiary on drug trafficking charges--the result of the bloodiest and most expensive drug bust in history...
...It is not clear whether President Bill Clinton is unwilling or simply unable to galvanize international resistance to Serb crimes...
Vol. 121 • May 1994 • No. 9
