New car finance salinas

The mood inside the oil workers' ball was grim. The delegates, large men with work-scarred hands but welltailored suits, were voting for a new union leader. Their old chief, Joaquin Hernandez Galicia, a k a La Quina, bad been a god to most of them, a Mexican Jimmy Hoffa who lined his workers' pockets even as he filled his own. But La Quina defied Mexico's new young President, Carlos Salinas de Gortari, and lost. In early January, soldiers dragged the union boss from his home and jailed him for arms smuggling and murder. Now the union's new leadership, handpicked by Salinas, was asking the delegates to erase every vestige of La Quina. Even the union's name was to be changed.

Salinas had made an offer that the rank and file could not refuse. There would be no purge of local leaders; in fact, the new national leadership was handing them control of lucrative hiring and subcontracting and even union stores. The deal was worth millions. The vote, by a show of hands, was unanimous.

The oil workers' convention was a display of Mexican power politics at its Machiavellian best. In one stroke, the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, which has ruled Mexico for the last 60 years, bought off the rebellious rank and file of the country's most powerful union and made certain it would never again produce a leader powerful enough to challenge a President. The Quinazoas Mexicans immediately dubbed the deth roning-was a key test for Salinas. With it, the slight, bald and bookish economist proved he was a street fighter who just might have the steel to prevent Mexico's political system ftom coming unraveled.

Hard choices. Mexicans are impatient with hard times and hard choices, and if the country's social peace is to be maintained, Carlos Salinas must get Mexico's economy growing again and shake his party and government out of deep stagnation. The Mexican economy has been flat on its back since it was hit in the early 1980's by spiraling interest rates and again in 1986 by the collapse of oil prices. Since then, almost every available dollar has gone to service the nation's $107 billion foreign debt, leaving nothing for domestic investment. As planning minister, Salinas championed regular payments to the foreign banks, and it cost him dearly in personal popularity among Mexican workers, who saw their wages shrink by almost 50 percent under the impact of austerity budgets and economic reforms. Salinas also pressed a daring liberalization of Mexico's sheltered, inefficient economy that won him praise abroad but only more grumbling at home.

At his inauguration last December 1, Salinas served notice that Mexico had done everything right and the time for sacrifice was over. "The priority won't be to pay, but to grow again," he said. Salinas is staking his political credibility and the success of his economic program on getting a better deal from the foreign banks. U.S. policymakers are counting on him to hold the line against demands for a debtors' cartel and a moratorium on regional repayments. He, in turn, needs the Bush administration to convince the banks to reward Mexico for its reforms. Salinas's faith appears to have been wellplaced. Treasury Secretary Nicholas Brady last week endorsed new approaches for reducing Third World debt that could go a long way toward easing Mexico's cash crisis.

With his "hard times" legacy, Salinas is arguably the most unpopular President in modern Mexican history. By his own party's count he won only 50.7 percent of the vote in last July's tainted elections-20 points lower than any previous President-and took only I of every 4 votes in Mexico City. Many Mexicans are convinced that Salinas did not really win the election at all. The Quinazo has raised his political stock, but perhaps only temporarily.

Running against his own. During the campaign, Salinas had to run hardest against his own party, promising to root out the PRI's political dinosaurs, to end state corruption and to make both government and the economy leaner and more efficient. He vowed that unpopular politicians would begin losing elections. The days of hothouse politics and hothouse economics were at an end.

Since taking office, Salinas has begun living up to at least some of those promises. One month after the Quinazo, he ordered the jailing of four top Mexican stockbrokers, including one of the PRI's top contributors, on charges of fraud. In late February, he ordered the release of 400 political prisoners whom Mexico had never before acknowledged holding.

But there may be a darker side to the reformer. For many, Salinas's attack on La Quina spoke of vengeance, not reform. The old Labor chieftain detested Salinas for his economic policies, which cost the union millions in oil-field rake-offs, and he secretly poured money intothe campaign of leftist leader Cuauhtemoc Cardenas nas, Salinas's chief rival. Critics also note that Salinas has done nothing to clean up other unions where corruption is rampant but where leadership is less hostile.

Salinas's top government appointments raise other questions, The economy is in the hands of young, Ivy League-educated technocrats. But for the dirty work, he has stuck with the PRI Old Guard. Interior Minister Fernando Gutierrez Barrios and Mexico City Police Chief Javier Garcia Paniagua are veterans of a dark era when dozens, perhaps hundreds, of dissidents were tortured and then disappeared. The new chief of intelligence for the Mexico City police, Miguel Nazar Haro, was forced to step down after two months in office. Nazar Haro has been accused of torturing leftists during the 1970s, and he jumped $200,000 bail in the U.S. after being accused of running a car-theft ring,

Salinas needed La Quina to prove his mano dura, or hard hand, right from the outset. But to guarantee long-term stability, he must begin opening up Mexico's political system. The PRI's idea of democratization seems to mean choosing better candidates for the ruling party, not sharing power with rival parties. PRI officials even shrug off the idea of local primaries. The government has opened talks with opposition leaders on political reforms, including changes in the critical electoral The political struggle has convinced us that we have to make a change," says Interior Minister Gutierrez Barrios. State and local elections since July have not been noticeably cleaner. Senator Porfirio Munoz Ledo of the opposition Cardenas Front, a former PRI leader, insists the ruling party has not surrendered any of its advantages. Mufioz Ledo, who won his seat in a landslide in the capital, complains that he has been totally ignored by state-run television ever since. "This is democracy? This is reform?"

The opposition must accept at least part of the blame for PRI backsliding, however. After a stunning showing last July at the polls, it seems to have lost both momentum and the attention of the PRI. The left's Cirdenas, who came in second, has dropped off the political screen, trying to forge a single party from his fractured coalition. The rightist National Action Party (PAN), meanwhile, was shocked into silence by its slide to third place.

The Mexican President's advisers believe that if the economic crisis can be solved, political problems will vanish. And on the economic front, Mexico has made progress. In 1982, 95 percent of Mexican imports required a government license; today, only 6 percent do. On average, tariffs have been cut from 45 percent to 10 percent, the lowest in Latin America. Inflation has been cut from 1 59 percent in 1987 to an expected 30 percent this year. The number of subsidized state companies has been chopped from 1,100 in 1982 to about 400 today, reducing public-sector debt and encouraging private initiative. Salinas now seems ready to talk about selling off the state telephone company and, in a challenge to everything the nationalists hold sacred, may even be willing to sell off a small, symbolic part of the Pemex oil monopoly.

That progress has not been bought cheaply. The economy has been stagnant for more than six years, real wages are down by nearly half and 40 percent of the work force is either unemployed or underemployed. Six million youths will enter the job market during Salinas's term.

Salinas and his economists argue that the only way out of Mexico's economic dilemma is to stop the export of capital and revive investment at home. Specifically, they want to reduce the net outflow by $7 billion a year for the next six years. For political reasons, they would like the money in a mixture of new cash and reduced foreign-debt liabilities.