released from Robben Island Prison on 11 February 1990, after thirty years of imprisonment for opposing apartheid and white-minority rule in South Africa. Apartheid ended in South Africa in 1994. Nelson Mandela was elected President of South Africa in 1994, becoming the first democratically elected president in South African history, and ending a long legacy of apartheid white rule in the country. Americas The establishment of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) on January 1, 1994, created a North American free-trade zone consisting of Canada, Mexico, and the United States. Canadian politics was radically altered in the 1993 federal election with the collapse of the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada. A major political party in Canada since 1867, the party went from controlling the government to being left with only two seats. The New Democratic Party collapsed as well, with their sets declining from 44 to 9. The Liberal Party of Canada was the only genuinely 'national' political party left standing. Regionally-based parties, such as the Quebec-based Bloc Québécois and the almost entirely Western Canada-based Reform Party of Canada, rose from political insignificance to being major political parties. After the collapse of the Meech Lake constitutional accord in 1990, the province of Quebec in Canada experienced a rekindled wave of separatism by Francophone Québécois nationalists, who sought for Quebec to become an independent country and forced a referendum on the question of independence in 1995. The 1995 Quebec referendum on sovereignty was held in the predominantly francophone province of Quebec in Canada, a majority Anglophone country. If accepted, Quebec would have become an independent country with an economic association with Canada. Quebec's voters narrowly rejected the proposal. Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a former Haitian priest, became the first democratically elected President of Haiti in 1990. A proponent of liberation theology, Aristide was appointed to a Roman Catholic parish in Port-au-Prince in 1982 after completing his studies to become a priest of the Salesian order. Aristide was later forced into exile in the Central African Republic and South Africa and returned to Haiti after several years. Ernesto Zedillo was elected President of Mexico in the 1994 presidential election, making him the last of an uninterrupted 72-year-long succession of Mexican presidents from the dominant Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). The original PRI candidate, Luis Donaldo Colosio Murrieta, was assassinated several months prior. Due to internal conflict and an economic crisis, Alberto Fujimori rose to