There is nothing weird about the economic reforms championed by the government of Carlos Salinas de Gortari. They are based on getting the fundamentals right: cutting wasteful subsidies to inefficient industries, controlling inflation, opening closed markets to the discipline of foreign competition. All this-crowned by the North American Free Trade Agreement-was meant to provide a stable environment in which foreign capital had the confidence to invest. There is little untried or untested about such theories. They have lifted East Asian countries from poverty to comfort in a generation, something so rare in history that the World Bank recently called it “seemingly miraculous.”
But economic reform is not cost-free. It does not just fill empty shelves. It turns societies upside down. In its first stages it opens the door to sleaze, graft and corruption; it can (and in Mexico, certainly did) widen the gap between rich and poor. Turkey’s ambassador to the United States says the appearance of pornographic TV in his country has led to a new sympathy for Islamic parties. He should take a look at Russia, where the flick of a remote brings you four hardcore channels. In Russian elections last December, voters associated economic change more with sleaze than with imported sneakers.
Above all, economic reform raises expectations. Mexicans have never achieved full democracy. Their leaders always feared, as a senior Salinas adviser recently said, that the country was “potentially violent”-and tried to contain that violence with strong institutions, particularly the Institutional Revolutionary Party (known by its Spanish initials of PRI), which for 65 years has held Mexico in a boa’s embrace. With the old politics still in place, gains from economic reform simply increased the goodies for the old elites; reform left untouched the power of PRI cronies to grab land from peasants in poor states like Chiapas. Since the 1980s, reformers have begged Salinas to accept that, as economic reform gathered pace, Mexicans would demand social and political change to go with it.
Salinas could have opened up Mexico’s politics. He did not, and history will judge him harshly. Two years ago his country’s economy was growing fast; Washington, negotiating NAFTA, was treating Mexico with a new respect. But Salinas decided. as an adviser says in the true language of technocrats, to wait for “economic reform to create a deeper-rooted tendency for the evolution to democracy.” When Salinas made concessions to his opponents, he did so as a true heir of the PRI, annulling the 1991 state elections in Guanajuato and San Luis Potosi with the airy dismissal of a Bourbon. Colosio was selected as the PRI’s candidate not by an open primary, but in the time-honored way: Salinas picked him. Not until peasants rebelled in Chiapas this year did Salinas introduce genuine reform to the electoral process.
That was bad enough. It sent a signal to horrified Mexicans that the way to Win concessions was not to negotiate peacefully but to don a ski mask and pick up an AK-47. Because of his own foolish refusal to act earlier, the reforms Salinas conceded this year merely legitimized the power of the gun. And now Colosio is dead.
He was no angel. He had managed Salinas’s fraudulent campaign in 1988. But when NEWSWEEK interviewed him recently he committed himself, with apparent sincerity, to “more democratic participation.” He was not a smooth technocrat, but a poor boy made good. He may well have been Mexico’s best hope for marrying economic stability to a’ new dispensation for Mexico’s poor.
Now Colosio is gone. And other developing countries will watch how a Mexico that is more tense than visitors can ever remember will react. Some in the PRI will blame the economic reforms for the instability. Others will want to crack down on “troublemakers”; for the first time in many years, some Mexicans worry that the army is getting restless. But any crackdown would merely store up greater violence for later. There is only one real lesson from Tijuana, and leaders in Africa and Asia had better learn it quickly. If you give people a free economy, you will one day have to give them other freedoms-to choose their own rulers, to say what they like. if not, you will one day be consumed in a fire of unmet expectations.
