In 1986 Gustavo Petricioli was Secretary of the Treasury and Carlos Salinas de Gortari was in the Programming and Budget Secretariat; his place was taken in 1987 by Pedro Aspe Armella
For the Economic Solidarity Pact, Miguel de la Madrid reached an agreement with the big businessmen, taking advantage of the relationship he had with the Business Coordinating Council (CCE), at that time chaired by Agustín Legorreta Chauvet; He also had the support of Fidel Velázquez at the head of the CTM, as well as the National Peasant Confederation (CNC), whose leader between 1986 and 1988 was Héctor Hugo Olivares Ventura.
Product of the pact, the interviewees agreed, the products had two prices: the normal price and the pact pricewhich was lower.
Carlos Salinas de Gortari
With the arrival of Salinas de Gortari to the presidency, in 1988, “what he did was punish the minimum wage,” said Carlos Alberto Bautista, who specified that at that time the salary was only updated to inflation.
With Salinas, Pedro Aspe was in charge of the Treasury and Ernesto Zedillo in Programming and Budget.
In the Salinas government, a price control was imposed in exchange for crushing the profits of merchants and producers, which means that they lose incentives to do business. “If I buy something at 5 and sell it at 5, why invest? If the tomato, for example, is going to be fixed, I’d better sell something else. At some point the government will have to cover that demand. That is the risk of trying to fix prices”, said Rodrigo Gordoa.
From January 1989 to May 1993, inflation in Mexico was in double digits, falling from 10% in June of that year, in the last months of the Salinas presidency.
The impact
Yes, inflation was controlled, but, the specialists consulted agreed, the purchasing power of the workers was the most affected by the solidarity pacts.
“There is a brutal stagnation in wages and purchasing power. The dramatic impact was the loss of purchasing power and the reduction of the middle classes,” said the UNAM professor.
AMLO adopts a neoliberal measure
The first alternation in power in Mexico took place in the year 2000, when Vicente Fox won the presidency. More than 20 years later, the system has not changed nor have new mechanisms been created for the country’s functioning.
“The public policy tools that (López Obrador) has are the product of those 30 years of neoliberalism,” said Gordoa.
However, unlike what happened in the past, according to Harim Gutiérrez, and what Salinas de Gortari and De la Madrid did have: “There is not an important group of large unions that are aligned with the new regime; It does not have control over trade union and peasant organizations similar to what the PRI had through organizations such as the CTM or the CNC” or with the country’s business sector.
