Betting against time.

• Author: Meyers, William K.

Mexico's president, Carlos Salinas de Gortari, is in trouble. After staking his regime's credibility on achieving a North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), he has lost his two principal political allies, the former leaders of the United States and Canada. Now Salinas finds himself gambling with the explosive lessons of Mexico's past. With barely a year left in office, he is betting against time, a self-serving U.S. Congress, Canada's shifting political mood, and an uncertain world economy. At risk is his party's future, Mexico's political stability, and his mission to bring Mexico into the ranks of First World economic powers. The stakes are high; Salinas's time is short.

No one knows this better than Salinas himself. He must leave office next year. Since the 1930s, no one other than a member of the International Revolutionary Party (PRI) has served as Mexico's president, and the power of each has been limited only by the prohibition against serving more than one six-year term. Given the enormous stakes involved for Mexico, and the unpredictable changes in the political mood of the United States and Canada, would this reformist leader of the PRI dare tamper with the Mexican constitution's sacred "no-succession" clause, one of the few promises of the Mexican Revolution he has not broken?

Salinas's 1988 election was at best a tie; it was popularly perceived as a fraud. No matter what the official polls say, he hasn't shaken that stigma. His opponent in 1988, Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, has announced he will run again in 1994. A victory by Cardenas, a former PRI president, would probably mean a reversal of Salinas's market-oriented reforms and a return to Mexico's protectionist past. The last Mexican president who pursued development by opening Mexico to foreign capital--Porfirio Diaz (1875-1911)--was overthrown in this century's first great social revolution. More than a million people, an estimated 10 percent of Mexico's population, died in the Mexican Revolution, between 1910 and 1917. Even if the PRI manages to stay in power, the failure of NAFTA would discredit Salinas's program of liberalization and strengthen the party's old guard.

So while the foreign press hails him as "Man of the Decade," a "miracle worker," Salinas sees signs that his miracle is slipping away. Worst of all, there is little he can do about it except remain outwardly confident about his policies and the peso's value, ponder a dramatic new economic strategy, and wait on...