Carlos Salinas de Gortari

Biography

Carlos Salinas de Gortari was born in Mexico City in 1948, the son of the economist Raúl Salinas Lozano, who served as minister of industry and commerce under López Mateos. He studied economics at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, where he was active in the PRI youth movement, and then went to Harvard, earning a master's in public administration in 1973 and a doctorate in 1978.

President Miguel de la Madrid made him minister of planning and budget in December 1982, a key post during the debt crisis, which he held until October 1987. As the PRI's candidate he was declared the winner of the July 1988 election over Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas amid widespread charges of fraud, and took office on 1 December 1988.

As president he deepened the free-market course of his predecessor: he sold hundreds of state companies, including Telmex, returned the banks to private hands, renegotiated the foreign debt, set up the Solidarity anti-poverty programme, created the independent Federal Electoral Institute and negotiated the North American Free Trade Agreement, which took effect on 1 January 1994. His final year brought the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas and the murders of his chosen successor Luis Donaldo Colosio and of PRI secretary general José Francisco Ruiz Massieu.

Within weeks of his leaving office in November 1994 the peso collapsed, and he was widely blamed. After his brother Raúl was arrested in 1995 for the Ruiz Massieu killing, Salinas left Mexico and lived for years in Ireland before returning; he remains a highly controversial figure in Mexico.