MEXICO Out of Balance

...In keeping with this agenda, Salinas, within the loosely authoritarian framework of Mexican politics, has sought to create a more efficient and technocratic form of government...

...The year began with the indigenous uprising in Chiapas, continued through the first assassination of a presidential candidate in 66 years-a crime yet to be solved to the satisfaction of the Mexican public-and will climax the week of August 21 as the votes are counted in what promises to be a contentious and suspicion-laden process...

...As inequality heightens, the high-visibility components of neoliberal success are, as Denise Dresser tells us, "no longer sufficient to keep the 'other Mexico' at bay...

...First under De la Madrid, and then more forcefully under Salinas, the government has deregulated markets, promoted foreign investment, sold state enterprises, abandoned the ejidos, shrunk the public sector, and pursued policies to maintain Mexico's "comparative advantage"-low wages and a flexible work force-in the world market...

...Since Mexico was one of the pioneers of the Latin American neoliberal project, it should come as no surprise that the project should bear so much of its contradictory fruit in the Mexican political arena first...

...For a few months this past winter, events in Chiapas became a fulcrum of debate over issues of economic policy, democratic reform, and the class and caste relations of the countryside...

...As the destinies of the countries of the Americas become ever more intertwined, this Mexican debate is raising issues that reverberate well beyond the boundaries of the country-far south of Chiapas, and north of the Rio Grande...

...Mexico's default set in motion the chain of events that produced the Latin American debt crisis, the endless negotiations with First-World lenders and governments, and the ultimate implementation of the free-market economic reforms insisted upon by international financial institutions...

...Mexico, the first in the hemisphere to acknowledge its debt crisis, was thus among the first to embark on a course of neoliberal adjustment and reform...

...Under the presidencies of Miguel De la Madrid (1982-1988) and Carlos Salinas de Gortari (19881994), this course of reform has been embodied by the country's determined insertion into the global economy-most dramatically by way of NAFTA-and by the growing importance of domestic and transnational capital as driving forces of social and economic relations...

...With election day approaching, the discussion remains fierce, though the question of the PRI's authoritarian rule has clearly taken center stage...

...This August's national elections come in one of the most convulsive years in recent Mexican history...

...In August, 1982, in the midst of global recession, skyrocketing interest rates and declining commodity prices, the Mexican government of Jos6 L6pez Portillo announced that Mexico was unable to service the interest payments on its foreign debt...

...Neoliberal contradictions-macroeconomic growth and increasing investment opportunity accompanied by declining real wages, fiscal contraction, and explosive growth of the informal, marginal sector of society-are at the center of the Chiapas rebellion, the internal conflicts within the ruling PRI, and the great social crisis caused by the presence of 13 million peasants considered "redundant" by government planners...

...Under De la Madrid and Salinas, the technocratic factions of the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI)-particularly those associated with the Treasury and the Central Bank-saw their influence expand, while the clout of the old-guard politicos and the PRI-affiliated labor leadership was sharply diminished...