MEXICO CITY — President-elect Felipe Calderon on Tuesday named a University of Chicago-trained economist as finance minister and announced five other Cabinet members, the core of an economic team endorsing free-market policies as the solution to Mexico's ills.
In a move that was widely anticipated, Calderon selected Agustin Carstens, a respected former official with the International Monetary Fund, as Mexico's equivalent of the U.S. Treasury secretary. Carstens has pledged to keep government spending in check and endorses job creation as the way to reduce Mexico's grinding poverty.
"This is exactly what Wall Street was asking for," said Alberto Bernal-Leon, an emerging-markets economist with Bear, Stearns & Co. in New York.
Bernal-Leon and other analysts praised Calderon's team as technically skilled and more politically savvy than that of Calderon's predecessor Vicente Fox, whose administration failed repeatedly to pass legislation aimed at helping Mexico's economy grow faster.
But the party of Calderon's bitter rival, defeated presidential candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, criticized the selections as more of the same for a nation that has struggled to create employment and opportunities for its people.
"Today it was decided to continue with an economic policy that has restrained the country's growth, that has generated more poverty and social inequality over the last 25 years," said Guadalupe Acosta Naranjo, secretary general of the Democratic Revolutionary Party.
Mexico's stock market closed at a record high Tuesday. But the peso sank to its lowest level in six weeks on fears that a determined leftist opposition would undermine the ability of the conservative Calderon to govern when he takes office Dec. 1.
On Monday, Lopez Obrador, who claims he was cheated out of victory in July's whisker-close election, declared himself Mexico's "legitimate president" in an elaborate ceremony in the capital's city center.
Many have derided Lopez Obrador's self-coronation as a farce meant to enhance the negotiating power of his party, which now holds the second-largest number of seats in Congress behind Calderon's National Action Party. Calderon, Carstens and other members of the new Cabinet are veteran negotiators known for their ability to forge consensus.
Still, the shadow government has raised fears that Mexico's legislature will be paralyzed by gridlock.
