figure is said to be 12.

The next highest recorded rates show that in Czechoslovakia, Denmark and Sweden about 25 people out of 100,000 kill themselves. Dr. Buda said that three countries that do not publish suicide data, the European part of the Soviet Union, East Germany and Rumania probably had suicide rates above 30 per 100,000.

Dr. Buda and Laszlo Csehe-Szombathy, director of the Academy’s Institute of Sociology, said in separate interviews that high suicide rates had a history in Hungary provable by statistics going back for more than a century.

»The population has a positive attitude to suicide, » said Dr. Buda. » ‘He was right, he was a brave man,’ many people will say. ‘He didn’t want to face more suffering, so he accepted death heroically.’ »

But Mr.1990s did the country have genuinely free and competitive elections, and when the PRI was finally ousted from power by the PAN, the result was gridlock that left long-festering problems unaddressed. Chief among them was the state oil monopoly Pemex, which lacked the capital or expertise to develop new fields offshore but which was prevented from partnering with multinationals by a constitutional commitment to nationalization considered sacrosanct by two generations of Mexicans. With reform blocked, Mexico’s oil production declined by a quarter in the last decade, and exports to the United States declined by a third.

Mr. Peña Nieto, who took office a year ago, managed to break the impasse by fashioning Mexico’s version of a grand bargain with the PAN and left-wing legislators. The parties agreed on and