Daily Inspiration Quote by Carlos Salinas de Gortari

It reads like a tidy confession that never quite admits guilt. Carlos Salinas de Gortari, the Mexican president most associated with late-20th-century technocratic modernization, frames “centralization and big bureaucracies” as a well-meaning experiment that simply didn’t pan out. The phrasing is surgical: “as promised” evokes a broken contract without naming who wrote it, sold it, or profited from it. Responsibility dissolves into the passive voice of history.

The intent is political repositioning. By invoking what “we know” “today,” Salinas borrows the authority of hindsight to launder a controversial shift toward market reforms and decentralization as common sense rather than ideology. It’s a rhetorical sleight of hand: centralization becomes the straw man of yesterday, while the speaker quietly occupies the role of pragmatic corrector. This move also pre-empts critics from the left by adopting the language of social opportunity, not just efficiency. He’s not defending privatization or liberalization on the grounds that it makes investors happy; he’s insisting it’s about “better opportunities for society,” a moral frame that softens hard policy edges.

The subtext, especially in Mexico’s context, is that the centralized state apparatus tied to the PRI’s long dominance promised development while often delivering patronage, bottlenecks, and inequality. Yet coming from Salinas, the line is also self-exoneration: the failures are pinned on “bureaucracies,” not on the political choices that shaped them. It’s a critique that keeps the speaker safely outside the blast radius, even as it claims the mantle of reform.