Felipe Calderón, presidential candidate of the PAN, was the most enthusiastic, saying that his own campaign platform, called "Mexico's Challenge," was a virtual extension of Slim's document, containing exactly the same points.

Democratic Revolution Party (PRD) leaders did not attend the signing ceremony, announcing cautiously, first that they hadn't been invited, and later that they couldn't sign until Andrés Manuel López Obrador had been officially anointed as the party's presidential candidate. But a few days later they came around, saying, in an unsigned, official communique, that López Obrador would sign on after his candidacy became official on December 10 and that, in any case, the party "looked forward to an interchange that would enrich the pact's framework."

The pact was born on September 29, when a group of leading Mexican entrepreneurs and "notables," convoked by Slim, met in Chapultepec Castle to discuss the needs of the country's business community and the ways in which those needs coincided with the needs of the nation. At the end of the day, they agreed on the pact: a brief document calling for a privatepublic partnership in support of the rule of law, public security, greater private investment, accelerated economic growth, greater employment and the development of the country's physical as well as social capital this last understood as inclusive of health, education and housing.

The pact was at once a statement that profitable private investment must necessarily be the driving force of economic growth, and a recognition that such growth had to be embedded in a legitimate social order, one in which a significant percentage of the population could eat dinner on a daily basis; one that was thought of as "just."

The statement is both a sign of continuity and an interesting change in the dominant attitude of Mexico's big-business class. The continuity is in the expression of the strongly felt belief that what is good for business is good for Mexico; that political parties can disagree about the details of a political-economic agenda but that at the end of the day, legitimate political debate had to be constrained by an agreement about the basics: the maintenance of an appropriate climate for investment.

BEYOND GLOBALIZATION

The change (perhaps better understood as a reversion to past attitudes) is in the expression of the need for the existence of a national business class as part of the broader Mexican community, with economic and political demands that ought to be supported and protected.

This is an attitude that goes back to the "national-popular" relationship between the dominant business classes and an older version of the PRI and is a notable shift from the transnational free-market discourse of recent years. It is the expression of a belief that Mexico needs a national economic strategy that goes beyond the simple immersion of the country in the global economy.

The pact is obviously a probusiness document, emanating from the most powerful businesspeople of the country, but it is one that has a great deal in common with the anti-freetrade strategies of the MERCOSUR countries who wish to build a protective wall (a porous one, to be sure) around their own economies before going head-to-head with the powerful economies of the North.

This is not, in other words, a "neoliberal" pact, less for reasons of ideology than perceived self interest. It would not be far off the mark to label it a "Henry Fordist" pact. The pro-capitalist, ultraconservative, anti-union Ford, far from seeking out the cheapest labor markets for the production of his automobiles, paid his workers higher-than-average manufacturing wages so that, he frequently said, they could buy the products of their own labor, thereby supporting the industry.

HEALTH, EDUCATION

He also understood the value of investments in health, education and housing in the creation of a more productive labor force. This understanding is quite different from the neoliberal program, always imperfectly followed, which has called for the privatization and deregulation of virtually everything, along with the cutting of public budgets, all-too-often in the areas of health, education and housing.

Having said that, Ford left no doubt who was in charge of his production process (himself) and who should be in charge of national economic policy (industrialists like himself). The recognition of a minimal level of well-being necessary for the development of a productive economy did not extend to a recognition of a need for broader participation in the decision-making process.

Granted, we are in a vastly different time and place, but this is an attitude not terribly different from the one expressed in the Pact of Chapultepec. Political democracy, in this vision, becomes the clean, fair and open competition among elites. It is not a call for greater popular participation in the political process. Hence the cautious attitude of at least one wing of the center-left PRD.

In any case, it is an interesting sign that free-market neoliberalism has failed to live up to the expectations of some of its strongest supporters.

frosen@terra.com.mx