Word: madrid
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...water supply in Mexico's major food-producing states of Chihuahua and Sonora is Mexican confidence in the future. Says a U.S. businessman in Mexico City: "People are scared and confused. There is no confidence left in the government, and people are going to give De la Madrid only so long to prove he can be trusted. If there is no sign of change in a few months, a lot of Mexicans are just going to leave the country." Many of them have already done the next best thing: they have exported their money. By some estimates, as much...
...domestic product this year to 8.5% in 1983 and 3.5% in 1985. That will involve a painful pruning of personnel from the country's more than 1,000 state and quasi-government organizations, plus a sharp curtailment of Mexico's dense fabric of price subsidies. De la Madrid's announcement that he was lifting price controls on 2,700 items is only the beginning...
...imposing austerity, De la Madrid could be faced with a different kind of crisis from within his own political power base, Mexico's Institutional Revolutionary Party (P.R.I.), which since 1929 has exercised a monopoly over Mexican political life (see box). Like the eleven Presidents who have held office in the past half-century, De la Madrid was hand-picked by his predecessor after secret consultations with a tiny group of economic and political oligarchs. According to the official returns, he won the national election last July with 74.4% of the 23.6 million votes cast...
...Madrid confronts a contradictory challenge: to deal with Mexico's economic problems, he must win the cooperation of key elements of his own ruling coalition, notably organized labor and the bloated 1.6 million-member public service sector. In the best of circumstances an austerity program on the scale that De la Madrid must carry out would risk provoking social upheaval. But in Mexico's case there is another danger, the possibility of tearing the country's unique political fabric in such a way as to limit the P.R.I.'s ability to cope with unrest...
...same danger applies to the other major challenge De la Madrid has set for himself: the "moral renovation" of Mexico. Corruption has long been endemic in Mexican society, from the highest reaches of government to the cop on the beat. (In Mexico City, some police cadets would literally take a week off from their academy training to learn from veteran officers how to take bribes.) The country's effective one-party system virtually institutionalized the practice, a fact that Mexicans have recognized with equanimity. But during López Portillo's term of office, the scale of corruption...