Adolfo Lopez Mateos (26 May 1909 – 22 September 1969) was President of Mexico from 1 December 1958 to 30 November 1964, succeeding Adolfo Ruiz Cortines and preceding Gustavo Diaz Ordaz. He was affiliated with the Institutional Revolutionary Party.
Biography[]
Adolfo Lopez Mateos was born in Atizapan de Zaragoza, Mexico on 26 May 1909, and he became a university lecturer and entered politics in 1946. He became secretary-general of Mexico's major party, the Institutional Revolutionary Party, and was a successful Minister of Labor under President Adolfo Ruiz Cortines from 1952 to 1958. Despite his pro-labor reputation, as President he broke the militant railworkers' strike of 1959, but afterwards he introduced a general profit-sharing plan for Mexican workers. He carried out a land reform whose extent was second only to that of Lazaro Cardenas, as 30,000,000 acres of land were redistributed to landless peasants. A low rate of inflation and a stable exchange rate were maintained, which attracted foreign investment. In foreign affairs, he finally settled a long-running border dispute south of El Paso with the United States, and maintained a foreign policy of conscious independence from the USA, refusing to break diplomatic relations with Fidel Castro's Cuba. The first left-wing politician to hold the presidency since Cardenas, he left office in 1964 and died in 1969.