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Ultimately, De la Madrid still made the decision. A onetime student of De la Madrid's at Mexico City's National Autonomous University, Salinas was tapped for his youth and his allegiance to his former professor's policies. "De la Madrid wants his restructuring of the economy to be brought to fruition," says Susan Kaufman Purcell, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. "After six years, the program is still reversible."
Since Salinas is the architect of those measures, his selection pleased foreign creditors (including U.S. bankers, who hold $25 billion in outstanding loans to Mexico). Many of the country's workers were far less enthusiastic, blaming Salinas for the economic belt tightening. Fidel Velazquez, 87, the venerable dean of the 4.5 million-member Confederation of Mexican Workers, pointedly walked out on Salinas' hourlong acceptance speech. Asked why he had left, Velazquez responded testily, "Because I felt like it."
Other party members criticized Salinas' lack of political experience. His aides countered that Salinas could not have advanced so far had he not already mastered the political game. "He may not like the backslapping routine," says an assistant. "But he knows how to do it." Moreover, Salinas has ties with the old guard: his father Raul Salinas Lozano, 70, is a Senator who has held Cabinet and diplomatic posts.
U.S. State Department officials expressed surprise; Interior Minister Manuel Bartlett Diaz and Energy Minister Alfredo del Mazo Gonzalez were considered likelier choices. While Salinas, like De la Madrid, is favorably disposed toward Washington, he is expected to keep his distance lest he offend Mexican sensibilities. "Salinas is hardheaded enough to know that Mexico's future is bound to the U.S. and not to a tiny Third World country in Central America," says a European diplomat based in Mexico City, referring to Nicaragua. "But there has to be a little prickliness in the relationship for it to be right."
A native of Mexico City, Salinas joined the P.R.I. shortly after enrolling as an economics major at the National Autonomous University of Mexico in 1966. De la Madrid, then a law professor at the university, spotted and encouraged Salinas' budding economic talents, and the careers of the men have been intertwined ever since. Upon graduation, Salinas held a series of low-level bureaucratic jobs, then headed to Harvard in 1973, where he earned two master's degrees and a doctorate in political economy and government. Returning in 1978 to Mexico City, where he now lives with his wife and three children, Salinas worked for De la Madrid, then Minister of Budget and Planning, and assumed that post when his mentor became President.
For Salinas, the next year will be filled with rallies and speeches as he campaigns for a job that is assuredly his. Come Dec. 1, 1988, and inauguration day, however, the real challenge will begin: steering a course between populism and continued economic austerity. In the past, Mexican Presidents have taken office amid a burst of optimism and reform, but their accomplishments have usually fallen far short of their promises. If Salinas is as good a student as his academic resume suggests, he will have learned from the mistakes of his predecessors.