Word: portillo
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Troubled by Echeverria's uncertain response to the fiscal crisis, Mexican and foreign investors were bothered this year by the fact that the President was not behaving at all like a lame duck. While López Portillo was busy campaigning, the mercurial "Don Luis" continued working an 18-hour day-fueling rumors spread by his conservative critics that he intended to stay in power, possibly by means of a military coup. His last major act as President was a political shocker. Charging that wealthy landlords had violated Mexican law by masking their holdings under relatives' names, Echeverria...
Land's End. Placating the peasants is just one of López Portillo's problems. "His first 100 days," says one Mexican banker, "will be as important as F.D.R.'s in 1933. He must act boldly and quickly." The most critical challenge is restoring Mexicans' confidence in their own economy. To do so, he may have to conciliate industrialists and foreign lenders by trimming Echeverria's spending projects and undertaking a deflationary program of austerity. Although he has seldom revealed his plans, López Portillo will undoubtedly try to prune Mexico...
...land reform, López Portillo is unlikely to reverse expropriations already carried out. But he will move slowly on new ones. "The land is not made of rubber," he has told advisers. "It is not elastic." There will simply not be enough arable soil for everyone. Larger, more efficient holdings, however, may increase, since they are prime earners of U.S. dollars...
Cruel statistics underline López Portillo's toughest job: finding work for the 750,000 workers who enter the job market each year. Though per capita income is more than $1,200 a year, millions live on the fringe of the cash economy. Figures are vague, but estimates of unemployment run upwards of 25%; an equal number scrounge by on occasional day labor. "The best way to distribute the wealth," López Portillo told campaign supporters, "is to create more sources of work." Doing that will be difficult. The investment-public and private -needed just to employ...
...certain of election as machine aldermen in Chicago. For that reason, power tends to drain rapidly from their lameduck predecessors as Presidents-elect stake out their policies. Since he was tapped to succeed Luis Echeverria as Mexico's President 14 months ago, José López Portillo has broken with that tradition. Even though he carried out a grueling 40,600-mile campaign from the oilfields and swamps of Tabasco to the high sierra, "Don Pepe" has promised only to govern by the "laws of the country." His suitably vague campaign slogan: "La solución somos todos...