Mexico’s Leader Asks Debt Relief
|
|
Carlos Salinas de Gortari was sworn in as President today and immediately called for a renegotiation of Mexico’s $104 billion foreign debt. He declared that a situation in which ”we are transferring abroad 5 percent of our national product each year” is ”unacceptable and unsustainable.” Carlos Salinas de Gortari was sworn in as President today and immediately called for a renegotiation of Mexico’s $104 billion foreign debt. He declared that a situation in which ”we are transferring abroad 5 percent of our national product each year” is ”unacceptable and unsustainable.” ”The priority will no longer be to pay, but to return to growth,” Mr. Salinas said in his inaugural address, to applause and cheers from an audience that included eight Latin American heads of state. ”This is not demagoguery or an admonition. It is a reasoned argument that derives from the needs of my people and the enormous effort we have made.” ”I will avoid confrontation,” the new President also said. ”But I declare emphatically and with conviction that the interests of Mexicans are above the interest of creditors.” Mr. Salinas, a former Minister of Budget and Planning, said he had instructed the new Finance Minister, Pedro Aspe, to seek permanent solutions in ”a relatively short time” in discussions with private banks and foreign governments. Mexico’s debt ‘’should be reduced in value” as a result of such negotiations, he said, and the country’s payments ‘’should be increasingly smaller in proportion to what we Mexicans produce.” Call Is No Surprise Bankers and diplomats here said Mr. Salinas’s call for a renegotiation of Mexico’s debt, the largest in the developing world after that of Brazil, came as no surprise. ”It has been clear for months that Mexico is going to need both debt relief and fresh credits,” one foreign official said. Speaking measuredly from the podium of the Mexican Congress in the first official act of his six-year term, Mr. Salinas addressed an audience of Mexican and foreign dignitaries. The visitors included Secretary of State George P. Shultz and Fidel Castro, the Cuban leader, as well as such Latin American intellectuals as the Colombian novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The new President, who won a bare 50.7 percent majority after the most tumultuous election in modern Mexican history, said the debt challenge required greater national unity and discipline. At several points during his 70-minute speech, he exhorted his countrymen to be more ”efficient” and ”productive” so that ”we will confront the negotiations with our creditors in a position of greater strength.” After six years of what he called crisis and sacrifice, in which real incomes have declined by more than 40 percent and inflation has reached as high as 160 percent a year, Mr. Salinas is under intense pressure to restore Mexico to economic health. Though promising a return to growth today, he was vague about when, saying only that 1989 would be a year of ”transition.” ”I take office as President at a complicated moment,” he said, ”between the collective hope and the weight of accumulated sacrifices, between the necessity to build for the future and the urgency of immediate achievements.” A Pledge on Politics The 40-year-old President, the youngest man to become chief executive here in more than half a century, also renewed his campaign pledge to modernize a political system shaken to its foundations by the July 6 presidential election and the charges of wide-scale vote fraud accompanying it. ”I am determined to move ahead with a democratic reform, and I have invited political parties to join me in a dialogue,” he said. Nevertheless, the swearing-in ceremonies were marred by the same disdain for political protocol that has become commonplace since July as a result of an increased opposition presence in the Mexican Congress. As Mr. Salinas’s predecessor, Miguel de la Madrid, entered the legislative chamber, the 101 legislators from the right-of-center National Action Party stood silently and raised placards that read ”Six Years of Fraud.” |