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Changing Presidents always creates unrest in Mexico. But the turmoil facing José López Portillo when he dons the tricolored sash this Wednesday as Mexico's 60th President poses one of the country's gravest trials of confidence in decades. The able Finance Minister of the present government and a longtime friend of outgoing President Luis Echeverria Alvarez', López Portillo inherits three major and all-but-insoluble problems...
Troubled by Echeverria's uncertain response to the fiscal crisis, Mexican and foreign investors were bothered this year by the fact that the President was not behaving at all like a lame duck. While López Portillo was busy campaigning, the mercurial "Don Luis" continued working an 18-hour day-fueling rumors spread by his conservative critics that he intended to stay in power, possibly by means of a military coup. His last major act as President was a political shocker. Charging that wealthy landlords had violated Mexican law by masking their holdings under relatives' names, Echeverria...
Land's End. Placating the peasants is just one of López Portillo's problems. "His first 100 days," says one Mexican banker, "will be as important as F.D.R.'s in 1933. He must act boldly and quickly." The most critical challenge is restoring Mexicans' confidence in their own economy. To do so, he may have to conciliate industrialists and foreign lenders by trimming Echeverria's spending projects and undertaking a deflationary program of austerity. Although he has seldom revealed his plans, López Portillo will undoubtedly try to prune Mexico...
Even Communist Party Secretary-General Santiago Carrillo called it "a step toward national reconciliation." Social Democratic Leader Antonio Garcia López went further. He described it as "the first dramatic step toward dismantling the dictatorship." Both men were referring to King Juan Carlos' decree granting amnesty to political prisoners in Spain, which was formally promulgated in Madrid last week. Although less sweeping than leftists and moderates had hoped, the decree could affect more than half of the 1,600 Spaniards who have been imprisoned for political crimes or have otherwise been penalized for illegal, quasi-political acts...
...Realm, an advisory body with a strong rightist outlook. Juan Carlos, however, seems to have had enough prestige and control over the council to get from it the kind of moderately reform-minded Premier he wanted. In addition to Suárez, the council suggested Gregorio López Bravo, conservative former Foreign Minister under Franco, and Federico Silva Muñoz, a former Public Works Minister under Franco and reputedly the most liberal of the three candidates...