Summers Treks to Mexico for Alum Bash

A delegation of Harvard administrators and senior faculty, led by University President Lawrence H. Summers, trekked to Mexico City last week for a two-day fiesta of cocktail balls and panel discussions with top Mexican government officials and prominent alumni donors. The visit came almost exactly 10 years after Summers, then a top official at the Treasury Department, orchestrated the multi-billion-dollar loan package that rescued the Mexican peso from free-fall.

Far removed from the media maelstrom over his remarks on women in science, Summers received a warm welcome from President Vicente Fox as well as Mexican business and academic leaders.

“The Mexicans were happy to remember that [Summers] was influential in helping the U.S. come up with $50 billion to help the Mexican economy restructure its loans” in early 1995, said Biorn Maybury-Lewis ’80, executive director of Harvard’s David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies (DRCLAS), who was one of several University officials in Mexico last week for a string of Harvard events.

DRCLAS’ advisory committee meeting in Mexico City last week marked the first time that the group, which includes business leaders from 10 Western Hemisphere nations, held a session outside the U.S.

“A significant portion of the Mexican GDP was represented around that table,” Maybury-Lewis said.

The center’s 89 year-old namesake, former Chase Manhattan CEO David Rockefeller ’36, also attended, Maybury-Lewis said.

Summers’ visit and the DRCLAS advisory committee meeting coincided with a two-day Harvard Alumni Association (HAA) bash in Mexico City. The fundraiser, which kicked off with a cocktail party at the 14th century Chapultepec Castle, drew more than 400 Harvard grads, according to Summers’ spokeswoman Lucie McNeil. Alums each paid $140 to attend.

Transcripts of Summers’ and Fox’s remarks to the HAA were not immediately available. But David Carrasco, the Rudenstine professor for the study of Latin America, wrote in an e-mail that Fox “spoke of a growing friendship between him and Summers as well as between Harvard and Mexico.”

In October, the University announced a partnership with Mexico’s National Council of Science and Technology that will allow 20 to 25 Mexican grad students each year to pursue Ph.D’s at Harvard for free.

The University will pay approximately 40 percent of the program’s cost, with the Mexican government and a group of Harvard alums picking up the remainder of the tab.

[The partnership is just the latest of a series of joint programs involving Harvard and Mexican scholars.

DRCLAS and a team of Mexican anthropologists are currently engaged in a project to restore a rare 16th century codex documenting Mexico’s pre-Spanish history. The codex resurfaced in 2003 after going missing for four decades.]

SPRINGTIME FOR SUMMERS

The HAA festivities ended Wednesday with a farewell lunch at which Jaime Sepulveda, a Harvard School of Public Health alum who is now director-general of Mexico’s National Institutes of Health, hailed Summers’ role in the 1995 peso bailout.

At the time of the bailout, Summers weathered heavy criticism from House and Senate Republicans, who lambasted the Treasury Department for failing to anticipate the peso crisis.

On Jan. 30, 1995, the Clinton administration learned that the GOP-controlled Congress would not provide financial backing for the bailout.

In the next nine hours, Summers and then-Treasury Secretary Robert E. Rubin ’60 persuaded the International Monetary Fund, the Federal Reserve Bank, and finance ministers from several foreign countries to support a $49.8 billion aid package that saved the Mexican government from default.

Some observers said at the time that Summers’ spat with Congressional Republicans had dashed his hopes of becoming president of the World Bank.

But by the summer of 1995, with the Mexican economy showing signs of recovery, the Senate voted overwhelmingly to confirm Summers as deputy secretary of the Treasury, the department’s number two post.

—Staff writer Daniel J. Hemel can be reached at hemel@fas.harvard.edu.