Tumultuous times in Mexico seemed to ride in on the coattails of NAFTA's implementation.  The country began 1994, an election year, with a violent rebellion in Chiapas, economic uncertainty and a political assassination.   On March 23, 1994, presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio was shot and killed while campaigning in Tijuana.  Colosio had been chosen to succeed President Carlos Salinas de Gortari for the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), Mexico's ruling party.  There were investigations into the assassination, but whether or not it was part of a broader conspiracy has never been resolved.

      Salinas chose Ernesto Zedillo Ponce de León to substitute for Colosio and he ultimately won the election in August with 50% of the vote (1997 was the first year that the PRI has lost a major election since its foundation in 1929).  There have been charges that the PRI has employed fraud to control the elections, "but the election of 1994 was distinctive both because it was largely considered to be free from fraud, and because there was considerable uncertainty about the outcome" (Miramontes).  Though election fraud may be fading, since Zedillo's election, more members of the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), the opposition party, have been assassinated than in the previous six year Salinas administration (Garcia).