For six years, Carlos Salinas de Gortari was a confident, popular and powerful president. He was a rising young free-market statesman, Washington's choice to oversee the new world order in trade.
Yet the man who had dreamed of global leadership has found himself reviled and seemingly powerless, and prepared briefly to sleep amid the dolls of a poor child's room in Monterrey during a fast to clear his sullied name.Few elected leaders go from god to goat more quickly than former Mexican presidents. But few former presidents have taken it harder than Salinas.
"Carlos Salinas de Gortari is a man who has always been in perfect control. . . . He must feel as if his life's work is crashing down upon him," said M. Delal Baer of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.
Mexican presidents have often made dramatic breaks with their predecessors, the men who selected them.
The split between Salinas and President Ernesto Zedillo, however, may be the sharpest since Lazaro Cardenas ordered former strongman Plutarco Elias Calles to exile in the United States in 1936. Calles founded the Institutional Revolutionary Party that still governs.
Zedillo has blamed Salinas for the economic crash that hit Mexico three weeks after the two old friends embraced and exchanged the presidential sash on Dec. 1. Polls have found that most Mexicans agree Salinas is at fault.
"Mexico has a rather well-established tradition" of new leaders attacking the old "to re-establish the moral authority of the regime," Baer said. "The system is eating its young, so to speak, in order to survive."
Former officials have also accused Salinas of failing to fully probe the murder of his first candidate for president, Luis Donald Colosio, a friend who was assassinated last March. Zedillo was chosen to replace Colosio.
In addition, Salinas' brother Raul was imprisoned Tuesday on charges of masterminding the September assassination of a prominent politician, Jose Francisco Ruiz Massieu, who was also a former brother-in-law.
Salinas ended his fast Saturday.