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Miguel de la Madrid

Miguel de la Madrid Hurtado (12 December 1934 – 1 April 2012) was President of Mexico from 1 December 1982 to 30 November 1988, succeeding Jose Lopez Portillo and preceding Carlos Salinas de Gortari.

Biography[]

Miguel de la Madrid Hurtado was born in Colima, Colima, Mexico on 12 December 1934, and he worked for the Bank of Mexico before being employed at the Secretariat of Finance and in various bureaucratic posts under President Luis Echeverria. De la Madrid served as Secretary of Budget and Planning from 1979 to 1982 under President Jose Lopez Portillo, and, despite lacking experience with elected offices, he ran for President in 1982 as the PRI candidate. He supported the liberal values of representation, federalism, and a strong legislature and judiciary, and he won 74.3% of the vote to PAN candidate Pablo Emilio Madero's 16.8%. However, the 1983 municipal elections in Chihuahua saw the corrupt and unpopular PRI lose the nine largest municipalities in the state to PAN, and the local PRI bosses claimed that the Catholic Church, local businessmen, and foreign interests had conspired to defeat the PRI. The 1986 gubernatorial elections in the same state were rigged in the PRI's favor, triggering a public outcry which led to De la Madrid overseeing electoral reforms: the number of proportionally-elected deputies was raised from 100 to 200 to better represent the opposition parties, the Senate came to have two senators from each state and two from Mexico City, and Mexico City was given its own "Legislative Assembly of the Federal District of Mexico".

De la Madrid's presidency also saw the rise of the Guadalajara Cartel, the deaths of 600 people and the injuring of 7,000 after a petroleum explosion in the Mexico City suburb of San Juan Ixhuatepec on 19 November 1984, the 19 September 1985 Mexico City earthquake which killed between 5,000 and 30,000 people and led to widespread criticism of the government's incompetence (as the Mexican Army was only deployed to deter looting, not assisting in rescue efforts), the 1986 FIFA World Cup (during which De la Madrid was booed by a crowd of 100,000 for his response to the earthquake), and the 1986 murder of DEA agent Kiki Camarena, which led to the United States launching Operation Leyenda to crack down on drug trafficking in Mexico. In 1988, in spite of skyrocketing inflation, controversial privatizations, and unpopular austerity measures, De la Madrid chose the neoliberal technocrat Carlos Salinas de Gortari as his successor in El Dedazo ("the finger-pointing"). After leaving office, he became Director of the Economic Culture Foundation (FCE) and became a philanthropist. He died in 2012 of cardiac arrest at the age of 77.

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