Monterrey Technical Institute

Professor Socorro Marcos, a department head at Monterrey Technical Institute, was chatting recently with two postgraduate students. Julio Larios asked her to serve on his thesis committee, while Juan Carlos Cielo Flores had questions about a paper's final draft. During these discussions, Larios was in Honduras, Cielo Flores was at his office in Peru, and the professor never left her desk at the Monterrey Tech campus in this northern Mexican city.

Professor Socorro Marcos, a department head at Monterrey Technical Institute, was chatting recently with two postgraduate students. Julio Larios asked her to serve on his thesis committee, while Juan Carlos Cielo Flores had questions about a paper's final draft. During these discussions, Larios was in Honduras, Cielo Flores was at his office in Peru, and the professor never left her desk at the Monterrey Tech campus in this northern Mexican city.

Julia Bertha Gonzalez, in her 20s, from Ciudad Juarez, is a second-year graduate student in business administration at Monterrey Technical Institute. She has an undergraduate degree in nutritional chemistry. As a research assistant at the institute's quality control center, she is helping a Monterrey department store chain improve its customer service record. She and a team of other researchers hold weekly meetings with the company's middle managers and employees to monitor progress.

Top U.S., Mexican and Canadian trade officials Sunday instructed their negotiators to begin preparing draft texts of the proposed North American trade agreement. "We have exchanged information and identified problems and are now ready to begin working on concrete texts," Mexican Commerce Minister Jaime Jose Serra-Puche told reporters at a joint press conference after two days of meetings in this picturesque old mining town north of Mexico City.

The ruling party's candidate for president, Luis Donaldo Colosio, who calls himself "a man of the border," traveled Tuesday to his hometown in northern Sonora state, 50 miles south of Nogales, Ariz. The visit is part of a structured ritual that presidential hopefuls here observe in the week between their informal nomination and the political convention that officially designates them as candidates of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI).

The political party that has ruled Mexico for more than six decades on Sunday named Luis Donaldo Colosio, the social development secretary who oversees the popular anti-poverty program Solidarity, as its candidate for president. The nomination by the Institutional Revolutionary Party, known by the Spanish initials PRI, virtually assures that Colosio, 43, will be the nation's new president after elections next Aug. 24.