Carlos Salinas de Gortari

President of Mexico (1988–1994) and the architect of Mexican neoliberalism. Salinas took office after the widely disputed 1988 election, pursued aggressive privatization of state-owned enterprises, negotiated NAFTA, and — most consequentially for agrarian history — drove the 1992 constitutional amendments to Article 27 that formally ended Mexican land redistribution and opened ejido lands to commodification.

Salinas’s agrarian counter-reform and his NAFTA project are inseparable: together they reshaped the Mexican countryside, triggered the Zapatista uprising that greeted NAFTA’s first day, and set in motion the long rural displacement and outmigration that feeds into contemporary narco-history. His presidency remains a hinge point in any history connecting Mexican land reform, the drug trade, and indigenous resistance.