ON PASEO de Reforma, Mexico City's Champs Elysees, young smalltime entrepreneurs are still hawking rubber masks of the once revered President Carlos Salinas de Gortari.
But, though the name Salinas makes constant newspaper appearances in cartoons and on page one, the mask trade has fallen off since the heady days of a peso crisis in early 1995. Then the former president fled to other cities, ending up a year later as Ireland's most famous Mexican.
In an interview with The Irish Times, a defence of the Salinas presidency was offered by the novelist and commentator who has been seen as a Salinas intellectual, Hector Aguilar Camin.
Asked to second guess the judgment of history, Camin said: "Unless there is a dramatic change in world trends [away from neo liberalism and free trade] Salinas's policies will be vindicated. I am not so sure about his domestic image and prestige. The damage has been serious in personal terms."
The last remark reflects a wider feeling of sympathy for "the personal tragedy of this comet that fell out of the sky". Salinas might have been the head of the World Trade Organisation had it not been for the tumultuous events of 1994-95 - the currency crisis, for which he was blamed by his successor, two high profile political murders in his last year of office and the subsequent arrest of his elder brother, Raul, for one of them. Raul was also accused of being on the take to the tune of $200 million in a state job President Salinas had given him.
A source close to Carlos Salinas has said the government was reluctant to have him return to Mexico, either to give evidence in Raul's case or to reside. This seems borne out by newspaper suggestions that his evidence will be given at Mexico's Dublin embassy and not in Mexico.
A call on April 11th from a federal judge for this former president to give evidence in the murder case is a first in the modern history of Mexico. Previous evidence Salinas gave in Dublin to Mexican prosecutors was on a voluntary basis. But it is unclear whether the judge's call is an order or an invitation.
The call - and allegations that Salinas tipped off his brother, that officials were asking how he was making so much money - was front page news. (The former president has said he did not know of Raul's alleged financial activities.) All attempts Salinas has made to improve his image have been greeted in Mexico with derision.
Asked whether a Salinas return to Mexico would be destructive to public opinion and social tranquillity. Camin said the risk was more to Salinas himself. "The political lynching of Salinas has been effective in Mexico," he added.
Some observers suspect that the backlane factory making the masqueras is subsidised by "dinosaurs", enemies of the continuing Salinas policies within the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). They will not thank him if the PRI loses legislative control, and control of Mexico City, in July elections, as is being predicted. "There are groups that could be interested in completing the work with a physical lynching," he said.
But Camin rejects the idea that the pace of the changes made in Mexico was too fast, saying that economic liberalisation began in 1982, after the famous debt forgiveness deal Mexico did with banks. "In comparison with other countries, such as Spain or Chile or even Great Britain, we could say it has been too slow."
However, there is wide disagreement on this point, even among those who used to serve in the Salinas government. In the early 1980s, when banks were nationalised to stop capital flight, Mexico's debt was just over $100 billion. Now it is $160 billion, one of them pointed out. He added that foreign competition made goods cheaper but only the upper classes, some four million of Mexico's 90 million people could buy them. "The domestic market has collapsed."
Raul Garza, press secretary in the northern industrial city of Monterrey in the first three years of the Salinas presidency and for the last three of the previous President Miguel de la Madrid, said the truth about the Salinas, legacy is "somewhere in between Mexico under Salinas was a oneman regime ... He was the last strong man of Mexico and the most successful," he said. But "Salinas didn't tell us the whole treatment. It would have been better if he had said: `I've got a beautiful treatment but you are going to go a lot to the bathroom.' It was part of the double talk of all politicians."
Describing himself as being on "the clever centre" of the political spectrum and a "critical member" of the PRI, he said, however, that there could be no going back to the past. "In the 1970s Mexico was called a Third World country. Now the term is not used."
Another criticism, of the Salinas privatisation project, is that the very rich were favoured with credit from the state to buy more than 250 state enterprises from garbage collection to banks.
The quick repayment of a $50 billion package assembled by President Clinton as the peso was losing 48 per cent of its value is seen by Garza as "a conjuring trick". But another influential Monterrey commentator, Carlos Ortiz Gil, disagrees. Mexico had genuinely paid it back and the reason was to make sure that President Clinton won a second term.
However, this "former friend" of Salinas went on to say that the former president had deprived the country of a national project. "Salinas dismantled the ejidos [land plots granted as a right to peasants under the constitution], which were at the centre of the national project. "Farming was finished under Salinas. There was no help for husbandry. Everyone went broke."
The Salinas ideas were not a mistake. "The mistake was to apply them in a country that was not ready for it," Ortiz says. Nor does he think Carlos Salinas is guilty of connections with the drugs trade, as has been alleged. "Maybe he turned a blind eye to Raul's dealings, most of which were with very rich people in Monterrey."
And on the April 1994 murder of Luis Donaldo Colosio, Carlos Salinas's intended successor, and the murder of Jose Ruiz Massieu, general secretary of the PRI, a few weeks before the end of the Salinas six year term, Ortiz says wryly: "In a couple of months we are going to find that the two murders were public suicides. This is a Kafkaesque country".