Salinas De Gortari

MEXICO CITY -- President Carlos Salinas de Gortari yesterday announced a complex plan to raise Mexican wages and bolster the nation's economy. His proposals address United States concerns about American jobs displaced by cheap Mexican labor and lay the groundwork for the 1994 presidential election campaign.At a ceremony in Los Pinos, the Mexican White House, Salinas said the complex package of economic measures would allow Mexico to "harvest and use the advantages" it earned in five years of fiscal discipline.

MEXICO CITY -- A top federal police commander was charged yesterday in the 1990 slaying of a human rights leader that aroused international outrage.Mario Alberto Gonzalez Trevino, who is charged with murder was accused of ordering the killing of Norma Corona Sapien as head of the Federal Judicial Police, which is similar to the FBI, in the western state of Sinaloa.Ms. Corona, who was head of the Sinaloa human right commission, apparently had evidence implicating the Federal Judicial Police in the kidnapping and killing of three Venezuelans and their Mexican lawyer.

Consider the timing of President Bush's just-concluded trip to Mexico and his coming journey to five Latin American nations: Both presidential forays in search of stronger economic ties within the hemisphere are a reminder to the rest of the world that the United States is not without a fallback position if the General Agreement on Tariff and Trade fails to liberalize world global commerce during its showdown session next week.In Mexico, Mr. Bush made a strong pitch for a bilateral free-trade agreement much like the pact the United States signed with Canada two years ago. His partner in this enterprise is Mexican ** President Carlos Salinas de Gortari, who has made daring changes to open up his country's closed and protected economy.

Mexico's chief boosts NAFTAMexico's president lobbied U.S. congressmen wary of a free trade treaty in Mexico City yesterday. The six-member bipartisan delegation, led by Rep. John Conyers Jr., D-Mich., talked for nearly two hours with President Carlos Salinas de Gortari about the North American Free Trade Agreement.At the same time, the nation's business leaders revved up their campaign for NAFTA, saying it will not cause them to export jobs to Mexico. Lawrence A. Bossidy, chairman of AlliedSignal Inc., predicted 200,000 new jobs in the United States in two years as a result of the pact, which would create the world's largest trade zone.

Rarely has so forlorn a little rebellion succeeded so swiftly on such a grand scale as the New Year's Day uprising in southern Mexico appears to have done -- if the government's agreement with rebel leaders is to be believed.Whether the Mayan and other poor Indians who make up the underclass of their native Chiapas state support the agreement will take some time to determine. Whether the outgoing Mexican government of President Carlos Salinas de Gortari intends that it be carried out may take longer to know.

Ernesto Zedillo is an unlikely man of destiny. The stiff, scholarly, 42-year-old economist from humble origins becomes president of Mexico today in a time of great opportunity and greater trauma. Mexico can become either more stable, democratic and prosperous for its poor multitudes or more dictatorial, erratic and dangerous for the hemisphere. The status quo is not an option.His Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), having ruled for 65 years, is in disarray, its leadership accused en masse of criminal conspiracy.

TWO MAJOR exit polls scheduled for Mexico's July 2 presidential election offer the best hope the count will be honest. There is no major violence so far to frighten voters into prolonging the status quo, as there was six years ago. There are allegations of coercion and vote-rigging, based on expectation as much as evidence. Two elections ago, in 1988, most Mexicans thought the left-winger Cuahtemoc Cardenas had won. But Carlos Salinas de Gortari of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI)

IBM puts improved OS-2 on marketIBM will begin selling an improved version of its OS-2 software to run personal computers today, beating Microsoft Corp.'s entry into the same market by a week.International Business Machines Corp. and Microsoft worked on OS-2 jointly until September 1990, when Microsoft went on to push its Windows operating system, which zoomed past OS-2 in sales. The new version of OS-2 is called 2.1.Kmart income plunges 81%Kmart Corp. reported an 81 percent plunge in its first-quarter income yesterday, blaming the blizzard in the Northeast and unfavorable conditions elsewhere for the downturn.

The success of President Carlos Salinas de Gortari in bringing a modern economy and democracy to Mexico rides on tomorrow's midterm election. The actual outcome of the votes for the lower house of the National Congress, half the upper house and six state governorships is not so important. What matters is the perception of honesty in the count.Mr. Salinas leads the Party of Revolutionary Institutions (PRI) which has governed without serious challenge for 62 years. He was elected to the single six-year term in 1988, in an election that many observers thought the left-wing opponent, Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, had won. The left and right opposition won nearly half the congressional seats.

WASHINGTON -- President-elect Bill Clinton, discarding any remaining reticence about speaking out on foreign affairs, sent up a flurry of crisp foreign policy signals yesterday.Mr. Clinton asked Israel to halt its mass expulsion of Palestinian activists, assured Russia's Boris N. Yeltsin of continued U.S. tTC support, urged Serbs to vote their hard-line government out of office and said he planned to meet next month with Mexican President Carlos Salinas de Gortari.Mr. Clinton's comments, his most specific statements about international issues since his election, broke no significant new policy ground, and most fell squarely within positions already taken by the Bush administration.