Educated: National Autonomous University of Mexico, and Harvard
Profile: Supertechnocratic child of the Mexican elite; nicknamed “the atomic ant,” but despite unmacho looks became his country’s president economy and (under pressure and less radically" its politics; prime mover of the North American Free Trade Agreement; left office in December; now lobbying to be the first head of the World Trade Organization. We caught him in Washington, D.C. on his way to schmooze governments in India, Pakistan and South Africa.
SALINAS: Trade wars. The expectations brought by the end of the cold war can only be fulfilled by high economic growth. And in today’s world of globalization, the only way we can have economic growth is through freer trade. That’s why it was so important that the U.S. ratified the Uruguay Round of the GATT. We hope other countries will follow suit.
Inevitably: look at the migration trends in Europe, Africa, Asia and Latin America. In today’s world, migration is a fact o life. The only way to introduce order and reduce it substantially is to increase economic opportunity at home. With globalization, this can only happen with freer trade.
A few years ago the answer would have been those in South and East Asia. But the U.S. has shown a tremendous ability to upgrade its industrial capacity. So have Mexico and other places in Latin America. This is a very dynamic situation in which some countries are going to be left behind.
It’s like the link between tradition and modernization. If you lose your traditions and values, you lose your guiding light. But if you don’t change and modernize, you also lose your guiding light. The United States is a country made up mainly of migrants who never forgot their roots. I’m very proud of being Mexican, but either we belong to the rest of the world, or the winds of change will become storms of transformation. The term “global village” is a very proper one. We are all villagers who also want to be part of the world.
