Carlos Salinas de Gortari
Former President of Mexico 1988-1994.

Carlos Salinas graduated with a degree in economics from the Universidad Autonoma de Mexico (UNAM) in 1969. He then moved to Harvard University for postgraduate work, mixing his studies with terms of employment in the Ministry of Finance and the academic world in Mexico. From Harvard he obtained a master’s degree in Public Administration in 1973, a master's in Political Economics in 1976 and a PhD in Political Economics and Government.

Salinas returned to Mexico to teach at the Centre for Monetary Studies of Latin America (CEMLA) and work as an economic planner in the Treasury. In that ministry he worked under José López Portillo (Mexico’s President from 1976 to 1982) and Miguel de la Madrid (also Mexico’s President from 1982 – 1988). When the latter was selected as the governing party's candidate in 1981 he invited Salinas to help run his presidential campaign as director of the PRI's "think tank", the Institute of Political, Economic, and Social Studies (IEPES). He was then appointed Minister of the Treasury for the duration of the de la Madrid term, until his own nomination by the PRI in 1987.

In the early years of his term, President Salinas launched bold initiatives such as the reversal of the 1982 Mexican bank nationalization, restoring official relationships with the Roman Catholic Church and the Vatican State, changing land property legislation, and most importantly negotiating the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) with the United States and Canada. He was fully committed to the ideas of neo-liberal economics favored by the International Monetary Fund and began the process of restructuring the Mexican economy. This involved efforts to reduce the size and scope of the state in economic life and an encouragement of foreign investment and free trade.

Salinas' term made significant changes in the following areas:

• Renegotiated the external debt through the Brady Plan.
• Reduced inflation to 7.05% in 1994, the lowest figure in 22 years.
• Reformed the Electoral System, making it citizen-controlled and independent of the Ministry of the Interior. He introduced the Voting Credential as the universal and free I.D. in Mexico, thus automatically registering all citizens in the electoral system and allowing them to vote without bureaucratic hindrances. The 1994 elections were the first to have international observers, and were considered the fairest elections in the century.
• Reformed the Clerical Laws which had forbidden Catholic priests from their citizen's right to vote, and established a new relationship between State and Church.
• Continued a privatization program initiated by his predecessor, by which the government retained only a few of the hundreds of companies and small business that were nationalized, mainly during the 1970s. As a result, the number of state-owned industries dropped from ~600 in 1988 to a minimal 250 in 1994.

After 1995, Salinas has published numerous books and articles about civil society, international relations and the development of social capital. In 2000 he published the book, Mexico: The Policy and the Politics of Modernization and in 2008 the book, The Lost Decade, 1995 – 2006: Neoliberalism and Populism in Mexico.