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The last murder of a national leader occurred in 1928 when President-elect Alvaro Obregon was shot. Colosio's assassination jolts Mexicans with the prospect that violence may be subverting the modern society they thought they were building. It also puts the political focus between now and the Aug. 21 presidential election on two main issues: What will be done to ease the poverty that still afflicts so many Mexicans, and how much electoral reform will the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, or P.R.I., accept without endangering its 65-year grip on the presidency -- which opponents regularly charge has been maintained through blatant vote fraud.
Mexican Presidents cannot serve more than one term, but traditionally they have secretly selected the party's nominee and, in the process, their successor. Salinas picked Colosio, who then headed the government's social development secretariat last November, and most experts considered his election close to a sure thing. Now, only five months before the balloting, the P.R.I. has to find another candidate quickly, not only to resume campaigning but also to tamp down the tide of anxiety and insecurity. Uncharacteristically cooperative, the eight candidates suspended their campaigns.
Salinas also halted trading on the Mexican stock exchange and closed banks for a day, hoping to restore investors' confidence. Washington offered a $6 billion line of credit to support the peso. "Fundamentally," Bill Clinton said, "I think they are in sound shape." When Mexico City's market reopened Friday, the stock index -- which has been volatile all year -- initially plunged 100 points but recovered to a loss of less than 1%. "We'll see several weeks of turbulence," predicts Ernesto Cervera, an analyst at a Mexico City consulting firm. Some experts say the market may be unsettled until the August election makes it clear who will be running the country and whether free-market policies continue.
As Mexico's 90 million citizens know but sometimes try to forget, their country is not a seamless unity but a patchwork of dissimilar people and unequal progress. Roughly the top half of the country has joined the 21st century; the rest is mired in unyielding poverty. Differences among the pieces of the mosaic have increased, and the gap between rich and poor has widened during the country's economic advance. Salinas began his six-year term in & office in 1988 by selling off hundreds of bloated state-owned companies and deregulating private industry; he tightened credit to bring inflation down from 50% annually to 8% and cut public spending to produce a budget surplus. Though he also created a $2.5 billion-a-year public works program called Solidarity to cushion the effects of fiscal stringency, the poorest Mexicans' share of the national income declined in real terms from 5% in 1984 to 4.3% in 1992.
But it was boom times for those perched on the upper rungs of the economic ladder. Mexico's claim to First World status begins at its dramatic glass stock-market building towering over the capital's main artery, Paseo de la Reforma. Young brokers in horn-rimmed glasses and imported ties traded the market into a 48% gain last year, even as the national economy slid into recession. In the three months after NAFTA passed in the U.S. Congress last year, more than $7 billion in new money flowed into Mexico, most of it from the U.S.