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Ed Whitacre Jr.
Leaders like Ed Whitacre Jr. don’t ever retire, they just pause between great challenges. If boredom doesn’t get them first, a call to duty will. With reports last week from Washington, D.C., and Mexico City that the Trump administration intends to name Whitacre the next U.S. ambassador to Mexico, longtime associates of the former CEO and chairman of AT&T and General Motors are watching with keen interest, but not much surprise.
What some might not know is that Whitacre’s experience in Mexico dates at least to 1990, when Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim and others partnered with Southwestern Bell to buy Telmex, the government telecommunications monopoly. The sale was the centerpiece of efforts by President Carlos Salinas de Gortari, a Harvard-trained technocrat from Nuevo León, to privatize the Mexican economy and open Mexican markets to competition. NAFTA, initialed by Salinas, President George H.W. Bush, and Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney in San Antonio in 1992, went into effect in 1993.
https://therivardreport.com/whitacres-return-could-restore-u-s-mexico-relations/