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| PRESIDENT ERNESTO ZEDILLO | |
 July 25, 1997 
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| Zedillo's
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The PRI also lost two more state governorships--bringing to six the number of states now controlled by the opposition. And, perhaps most importantly, Zedillo's party also lost control of Mexico City, where Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, a center-left politician with presidential ambitions, was elected mayor. Yet despite the results, opinion polls found that Zedillo's own stature and popularity have increased -- in part because of the role he played in creating the conditions which made the election possible. Yesterday, President Zedillo was in Chicago, where he spoke before the city's prestigious Council on Foreign Relations. We interviewed him a short time later before his return to Mexico city. |
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CHARLES
KRAUSE: In many ways, Ernesto Zedillo is an accidental president, who's
been forced by events to lead Mexico through a period of economic crisis
and democratic reform. An economist, he had never held elected office
until his inauguration three years ago, in December 1994. Yet, despite
his inexperience, he became president at a time of great uncertainty.
It was less than a year after a guerrilla uprising in the southern Mexican
state of Chiapas and just months after two political assassinations--one
of them presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio, who was gunned
down in Tijuana, not far from the U.S. border. Zedillo had been Colosio's
campaign manager and replaced him as his party's presidential candidate
shortly after the murder. Virtually unknown both in Mexico and abroad,
Zedillo was largely overshadowed during his campaign, and even at his
own inauguration, by his predecessor, Mexico's former president, Carlos
Salinas De Gortari. 
Known
throughout the world, Salinas had transformed Mexico's economy, helped
create the North American Free Trade Agreement, known as NAFTA, and
largely redefined Mexico's relationship with the United States. But
today, due to revelations that have come to light in part because of
a new openness under Zedillo, the former president's reputation has
been shattered. 
His
brother, Raul Salinas, who served in the Salinas government, is now
in jail charged with corruption and murder, while Salinas, himself,
is in exile. Zedillo's own presidency began inauspiciously. Just three
weeks after taking office, Mexico's peso collapsed, plunging the country
into its worst economic crisis in recent memory. Unemployment and inflation
skyrocketed--and only a massive bail-out by the United States prevented
Mexico from defaulting on its foreign debt.
It
was against this backdrop of burgeoning scandal and nearly continuous
economic crisis that Mexicans went to the polls on July 6th. The election
was generally agreed to have been the freest and fairest in Mexico's
modern history, in large measure because of electoral reforms, which
Zedillo supported. Yet the election outcome was widely interpreted as
a bitter disappointment for the president because, for the first time
in nearly 70 years, his own Institutional Revolutionary Party, known
as the PRI, lost its majority in the lower house of congress.