The son of a Mexican senator, Salinas joined the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) at age 18 and studied economics at the National Autonomous University of Mexico and at Harvard University, earning a Ph.D in 1978. From 1971 on he held successively more important economic-affairs posts in the government and was supported in his rise by Miguel de la Madrid, who had been one of his professors at the National Autonomous University. When Madrid became president of Mexico in 1982, he made Salinas his minister of planning and the budget, a post that Salinas held until Madrid named him in 1987 to be his successor as the presidential candidate of the PRI in 1988.
No PRI candidate for the presidency had won less than 70 percent of the popular vote in 60 years. In the elections of July 1988, however, Salinas won a bare 50.4 percent of the vote, according to the official tallies; the opposition parties contended that Salinas’ total share of the vote would have been even lower had the PRI not resorted to vote fraud. As president, Salinas continued Madrid’s program of economic retrenchment and privatization. He sold off hundreds of inefficient state-owned corporations to private investors and spent some of the proceeds on infrastructure and social services. He also took steps to open the protected Mexican economy to both foreign investment and foreign competition. In 1991–92 his government conegotiated the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which reduced tariffs between Mexico, the United States, and Canada when it went into effect in 1994. The positive accomplishments of the administration were offset by the revelations of scandals and the assassinations of high-ranking politicians. Shortly after Salinas stepped down from office, his brother Raul Salinas de Gortari was arrested and charged with complicity in one of the murders. The shame was of such magnitude that Salinas elected to go into a self-imposed exile rather than live in the country he had just governed.