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Carlos Salinas de Gortari (born April 3, 1948) was President of Mexico from 1988 to 1994.
Salinas promoted privatization of state industries and free trade agreements, most notably NAFTA with the United States and CanadaCanada historically the Dominion of Canada is the second-largest, and northernmost, country in the world. It is a decentralized federation of 10 provinces and 3 territories, governed as a constitutional monarchy, and formed in 1867 through an act of Confe. Many believe that his government lacked legitimacy because he won the elections in suspicious circumstances involving a complete shutdown of the computer systems that were concentrating the results of the vote in 1988. That impression was reinforced when at a later date the Mexican Congress voted (the majority of the opposition included) to destroy without opening it the electoral documentation that could prove otherwise.
During his presidency Salinas opened a three-year dialogue with the Zapatista Army of National LiberationThe Zapatista Army of National Liberation Ejercito Zapatista de Liberacion Nacional EZLN is an armed revolutionary group based in Chiapas, one of the poorest states of Mexico. The EZLN claims to represent the rights of the indigenous population, but also armed indigenous revolutionary movement. He offered a ceasefire after a few days of fighting in 1994.
He left the presidency internationally acclaimed as an economic genius, campaigning for head of the World Trade OrganizationThe World Trade Organization (WTO) is an international organization which oversees a large number of agreements covering the "rules of trade" between its member states. It was created in 1995 as a secretariat to administer the General Agreement on Tariffs (WTO), but less than a month after he left power new president Ernesto Zedillo Ponce de Leon (Salinas's minister for budget and planning and, later, his minister of education) devalued the Mexican peso (by approximately 200%), plunging Mexico into a deep economic crisis known as the December Mistake.
A key event in recent Mexican history, "The December Mistake" ( Spanish: el error de diciembre) refers to incoming President Zedillo's decision to liberate the Mexican peso which lead to an immediate devaluation of 20%. While it took place under Zedillo, and much of the disastrous impact can be traced back to that administration's cronyism and mismanagment of the devaluation, the blame for the underlying causes is usually placed with the outgoing Salinas administration.
While experts agree that a devaluation was necessary, they also tend to concur that the way the government handled it was politically inept: A few days after a private meeting with major Mexican entrepreneurs in which his administration asked them for their opinion of a planned devaluation, Zedillo suddenly announced his government would let the peso exchange rate float freely against the US dollar, by stopping government measures to keep it at a fixed level (by selling dollars, assuming debt, and so on). That resulted in the peso crashing from three pesos to the dollar to six to the dollar in the space of a week (although in the interim dollars were selling for up to 30 pesos in some regions).
Mexican businesses with debts to be paid in dollars, or that relied on supplies bought from the USA, suffered an inmediate hit, with mass industrial lay-offs and several suicides. Businesses whose executives attended the meeting at Zedillo's office were spared the nightmare — forewarned, they quickly bought dollars and renegotiated their contracts into pesos. To make matters worse, the devaluation announcement was made mid-week, on a Wednesday, and for the remainder of the week foreign investors fled the Mexican market without any government action to prevent or discourage it until following Monday when it was too late.
The December Mistake caused so much outrage that for a long time, Salinas did not dare return to Mexico (he was campaigning worldwide for WTO head at the time). The incident also served to make it clear that his influence (if any) on the Zedillo administration was over.
Salinas was blamed for supposedly ignoring the economics problems of his administration, and, his prestige lost, he exiled himself to Dublin, Ireland, where he eventually married again. Although he is free to return to Mexico and does so from time to time, he always stirs controversy. His brother Raúl went to jail accused of masterminding a political assassination of a member of their own party and of committing fraud while working for the government during Carlos's presidency.
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