Roberto Madrazo Pintado
Who is Roberto Madrazo Pintado?
He is the president of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) in Mexico.
Why watch him?
Madrazo is the PRI's most likely candidate for the presidency in 2006. The party is currently going through the process of deciding on the method for choosing its candidate. Madrazo's rivals claim that his position as party president means that he has too much influence on the process. They want him to step down.
Born: 30 July 1952
Place of Birth: Tabasco
Educated: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, graduating in law in 1974. Called to the Mexican bar in 1979.
Public Life:
He is married with five children. He comes from a political family. His father, Carlos, belonged to a prominent group of anti-clericalists, the Camisas Rojas, which fired on Roman Catholics in 1934. Tabasco was one of the most anti-clerical states in Mexico, the setting for Graham Greene's famous novel about anti-clericalism, The Power and the Glory (1940). Carlos was a deputy for that state in 1943, but two years later was imprisoned for backing the wrong presidential candidate. He was reconciled to the PRI soon afterwards and was governor of Tabasco from 1959 to 1964. He then became chairman of the PRI's national executive, but failed to modernise the party and resigned. Carlos was killed in a mysterious plane crash in 1969. Roberto has followed his father's lead, representing Tabasco twice as a deputy and then as governor.
Timeline
1971: Legal adviser to a Mexican city borough, Alvaro Obregón.
1972: Worked for the district attorney's office in Mexico City.
1976: Elected federal deputy for the second district in Tabasco.
1979-1981: Legal adviser to the mayor of Mexico City.
1988-1991: Senator, oversaw the expansion of Villahermosa airport.
1991-1993: Federal deputy for the second time for the PRI.
1994: Elected, controversially, governor of Tabasco, beating Andrés Manuel López Obrador, now mayor of Mexico City, and the frontrunner for the presidency in 2006.
1999: Ran, unsuccessfully, against Francisco Labastida for the PRI presidential nomination in 2000.
2002: Became national president of the PRI.
2003: Oversaw the PRI's recovery in the mid-term congressional elections.
Strengths
Madrazo is an experienced political operator who has lost only one election, to Labastida. He is also extremely rich; Tabasco is one of Mexico's wealthiest states and the traditional home of the oil industry. The PRI is the only party with a genuinely national support base in Mexico. Traditionally, the PRI absorbs its critics: Madrazo appears to have done that with one of his major rivals, Elba Esther Gordillo, the party's number two, who also for a time led the party in the lower chamber of congress until she tried to clinch an agreement on structural reforms with the government. Gordillo's supporters have set up a new party, Nueva
Alianza.
Weaknesses
He seems to move slowly. The current party assembly to choose the way the PRI will elect its presidential candidate is unlikely to reach a decision until after Easter. The party expects to have chosen its candidate for 2006 by November this year.
Prospects
All the signs from the opinion polls point to another showdown between Madrazo and López Obrador in 2006. When he beat López Obrador in 1994 to become governor of Tabasco Madrazo broke the rules on campaign spending. President Zedillo refused to recognise his governorship for six weeks: the economic collapse of 1995 meant that Zedillo had to accept Madrazo's victory rather than create a political problem on top of the country's economic difficulties.