This study examines the development of the crisis in Mexico, with the primary focus on the 6-year term of President Carlos Salinas de Gortari and the first few months of his successor, President Ernesto Zedillo Ponce de Leon. It poses the question of how a country with such seemingly bright prospects as Mexico in the wake of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) approval by the U.S. Congress could so quickly plunge into crisis. The answer is that these problems had been festering for some time. By 1994, a combination of factors-including recurrent economic crises, a failure to...