Word: zedillo
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...DAYS AFTER THE ASSASSINATION OF presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio, his campaign manager sounded distinctly reluctant to claim his role as the governing party's new man. Addressing the assembled crowd at party headquarters, the freshly anointed candidate, Ernesto Zedillo Ponce de Leon, chose to stand in front of a floor-to-ceiling photo of Colosio and wrap himself in the shroud of the martyred hero. "We are not starting a campaign. We are continuing one. Colosio was the best man for Mexico," he said in an 18-min. speech that mentioned the slain politician's name 38 times...
...strategy was not subtle: Zedillo, 42, is appealing to his countrymen's desire for stability and continuity. In the wake of the violent peasant uprising in Chiapas last January, Colosio's assassination has led to a collective sense of unease. Though Zedillo was President Carlos Salinas de Gortari's first choice as the new candidate of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (P.R.I.), which has ruled Mexico for 65 years, he is little known and woefully short on charisma...
...background is no-frills working class. He grew up in Mexicali, where his electrician father installed movie screens. A Mexican-government scholarship sent him to Yale, and there he wrote a dissertation about his country's external-debt crisis. Zedillo then came home to a central-bank job, which paved the way for his appointment as Budget Minister and later Education Minister under Salinas. These days he lives in a comfortable though not ostentatious house in Mexico City, a far cry from his childhood home. With his own five children, Zedillo is an avid mountain biker. Though he has been...
...Zedillo tries to get his campaign under way -- the formal launch takes place a week after Easter -- police and a special prosecutor are exploring the possibility of a wider conspiracy to kill Colosio. The FBI has been called in to help probe the background of gunman Mario Aburto Martinez, who once lived in San Pedro, California. Police arrested a second suspect last week: Tranquilino Sanchez Venegas, 56, a retired security guard, who had just joined Colosio's crowd-control force and is charged with complicity in the murder...
Assuming the investigation produces no shocking revelations that somehow implicate the P.R.I. in Colosio's death, Zedillo is a strong front runner for the August ballot. His two main rivals have yet to gather steam and his party, though not the monolith it used to be, is still dominant. And, of course, he wears the glowing mantle of the martyred Colosio...