Word: portillo
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...middle class, rather than the desperately poor, that De la Madrid must worry about. Public confidence in the country is sinking along with the economy. Mindful of Lopez Portillo's earlier promise of abundance, Mexicans, as one well-connected local lawyer put it, "feel deep bitterness at the deception." That, in turn, raises the specter of instability in Mexico, a matter of major concern to the U.S. Talk of a military coup is circulating on the dinner-party circuit in Mexico City. There is little likelihood of such a thing: the Mexican military has stayed removed from civilian affairs...
...21st President since its epochal revolution of 1910. Like most of his predecessors in the 53-year history of Mexico's monolithic and dominant Institutional Revolutionary Party (P.R.I.), De la Madrid was the personal choice of the man he was replacing, in this case Jose Lopez Portillo, 62. De la Madrid's campaign was designed not so much to guarantee him victory-that was assured under Mexico's system of "guided" democracy-as to give him the political savvy to handle...
Most of Mexico's political frustration is now directed at outgoing President Lopez Portillo. When he took office in 1976, the urbane Mexican leader was seen as the right man to correct the errors of his left-leaning predecessor, Luis Echeverria Alvarez. The charismatic President speedily pushed Echeverria's henchmen out of office, restored international business confidence in Mexico with pro-business rhetoric and a pledge of conservative fiscal policies, and promised the Mexican people an administration of "abundance." Lopez Portillo aimed to create millions of jobs, open up the country's political system to limited dissent...
...beginning, Lopez Portillo had both luck and geology on his side. When he took office, Pemex, Mexico's national oil company, had begun turning up one oil and natural gas discovery after another in the country's southern Tabasco and Chiapas states. With an output of some 2.7 million bbl. per day, Mexico became the fourth largest oil producer in the world...
...Lopez Portillo did not need many lessons. He launched Mexico upon a grandiose development program, spending billions of dollars on such huge development projects as a national agricultural production system and the first of 20 planned nuclear reactors. The number of federal bureaucracy employees in Mexico jumped from 1.2 million (a figure that Lopez Portillo had promised to cut) to 1.6 million. To finance his expansion program, Lopez Portillo borrowed heavily abroad, planning to repay the debts with oil revenues, which amounted to $14 billion in 1981. By 1979, it was already becoming clear that Lopez Portillo was seriously overspending...