Carlos Salinas de Gortari (born April 3, 1948, Mexico City, Mexico) is an economist and politician who was president of Mexico from 1988 to 1994.
The son of a Mexican senator, Salinas joined the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) at age 18 and studied economics at the National Autonomous University of Mexico and at Harvard University, earning a Ph.D. in 1978. From 1971 on he held successively more important economic-affairs posts in the government and was supported in his rise by Miguel de la Madrid, who had been one of his professors at the National Autonomous University. When Madrid became president of Mexico in 1982, he made Salinas his minister of planning and the budget, a post that Salinas held until Madrid named him in 1987 to be his successor as the presidential candidate of the PRI in 1988.
No PRI candidate for the presidency had won less than 70 percent of the popular vote in 60 years. In the elections of July 1988, however, Salinas won a bare 50.4 percent of the vote, according to the official tallies; the opposition parties contended that Salinas’s total share of the vote would have been even lower had the PRI not resorted to vote fraud. As president, Salinas continued Madrid’s program of economic retrenchment and privatization. He sold off hundreds of inefficient state-owned corporations to private investors and spent some of the proceeds on infrastructure and social services. He also took steps to open the protected Mexican economy to both foreign investment and foreign competition. In 1991–92 his government co-negotiated the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which reduced tariffs between Mexico, the United States, and Canada when it went into effect in 1994. NAFTA was greeted with protests by some Mexicans, notably Zapatistas, who staged an uprising in Chiapas state; it was quickly suppressed.
Salinas’s tenure was also marred by revelations of scandals and the assassinations of high-ranking politicians. Shortly after he stepped down from office in November 1994, his brother Raul Salinas de Gortari was arrested and charged with complicity in one of the murders. In addition, the country’s economy collapsed in December, and Carlos was partly blamed. He subsequently went into self-imposed exile for some five years before resettling in Mexico. During this time Raul was convicted, and family troubles continued as another brother, Enrique, was murdered in 2004. The following year Raul’s sentence was voided, and in 2008 he was cleared on “unjust enrichment” charges. Despite such difficulties, Carlos continued to be hugely influential in Mexico’s politics.