Roberto Madrazo
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Image:Roberto Madrazo.jpg Roberto Madrazo Pintado (b. July 30, 1952 in Villahermosa, Tabasco) is a Mexican politician affiliated to the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) and candidate of the alliance his party has with the PVEM for the 2006 Mexican presidential elections.
He is a former senator, federal deputy, governor of Tabasco and president of the PRI. Madrazo is mainly credited for bringing cohesion to a disjointed PRI after it historically lost the 2000 presidential election. Madrazo was able to wrestle control of the PRI by negotiating deals with different power groups within the PRI and by neutralizing political adversaries within the party. It is widely perceived in Mexico that Madrazo achieved this through the use of ruthless political tactics.
Madrazo Pintado is the son of another politician, Carlos Alberto Madrazo Becerra, and Graciela Pintado Jiménez. He graduated from the National Autonomous University of Mexico with a bachelor's degree in law and specialized in urbanism at the University of California at Los Angeles.
He is married to Isabel de la Parra Trillo.
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The 2000 presidential election
Madrazo sought the PRI's presidential candidacy in 2000 but lost to Francisco Labastida, a former governor of Sinaloa and former secretary of the interior in the cabinet of President Ernesto Zedillo Ponce de León, who Madrazo perceived as having chosen Labastida as his successor.
The PRI had never lost a presidential election since its founding, and its political structure made the president the arbiter of its internal affairs. Although this was not the first time in PRI's history the presidential authority was defied, Madrazo's campaign was particularly aggressive. He attracted some followers inside the PRI but the final decision of the general voting public — unprecedentedly, the primary selection race was opened up to all registered voters in the country, not only party members — favored Labastida.
Madrazo accepted the outcome, but his aggressive internal campaign weakened now presidential candidate Labastida in the eyes of the electorate, and was seen as a factor in Labastida's defeat by the National Action Party's candidate, Vicente Fox Quesada, in the 2000 election.
After the historical loss of the presidential election in 2000, the PRI was facing what seemed his dissolution, now that they no longer had the president to take decisions and settle disputes. Political analysts predicted the PRI would disappear, but a streak of electoral victories (including Madrazo's home state of Tabasco) gave the PRI new life, and its orderly political life prevented its dissolution by internal bickering.
The PRI presidency
When the time came to choose a new national leader, Madrazo ran for the post, allying himself with the powerful Elba Esther Gordillo (as his general secretary), a leader of the national union of teachers, and defeated their adversary, Senator Beatriz Paredes in a rough election. Since then, he is a strong contender for presidency in 2006, despite later waging (and winning) a political war with influential Gordillo that caused division inside the party, and ended with Gordillo retiring from public life for a year amidst many verbal accusations (of murder against his union oppositors and conspiring against PRI members for her personal advantage) although she remained secretary general of the PRI the whole time. In early 2005 Gordillo returned, and broke publicly with Madrazo.
The 2006 presidential campaign
Madrazo's position as national leader of the PRI has given him a considerable advantage in his campaign for the 2006 presidential candidacy. As the election nears, there has been a growing discomfort among other would-be candidates, who had increasingly demanded clear rules for the internal campaign be set. Many of PRI's governors formed a group self-called Democratic Unity but nicknamed by the media as TUCOM (Todos Unidos Contra Madrazo, "All United Against Madrazo") and chose Arturo Montiel as their pre-candidate. Montiel consequently resigned after information about mansions in Mexico and France (his wife is a French citizen) has surfaced as well as enrichment by his sons.
Eventually Madrazo won the PRI candidacy and, through the party's alliance with the PVEM, he is also the candidate for that party. Madrazo faces a battle against PRD's Head of Government of the Federal District, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, whom he previously defeated in a controversial election for the Tabasco governorship in 1994 and against the National Action Party candidate, Felipe Calderón.
After a televised phone conversation between him and Elba Esther Gordillo (former PRI General Secretary and Teachers Union Leader) in which accusations of immorality and corruption flew both ways, Gordillo was suspended in her rights as militant to the PRI, pending an expulsion process from the party. Gordillo has made it clear that Madrazo is not a viable candidate for Mexico's presidency.
Shortly after that, it was revealed by Reforma, a Mexico City newspaper, that Madrazo is the owner of a luxury penthouse in a prestiged highrise tower in Miami worth eight million pesos (U.S. $800,000 dollars, approximately), as well as having bought three separate luxury apartments in Mexico City, with the alleged value of seven million pesos. Madrazo made public a declaration of assets, liabilities and expenses on January 19, 2006.
As of November 2005 Mr. Madrazo holds third place in several polls in the public's preference as the next president of Mexico.
Trivia
"Madrazo" is a vulgar Spanish term for a beating; "Pintado" the Spanish word for 'painted'. In effect, if his name were to be literally translated from Spanish to English, his name would be "Beating Painted" (or "Painted Beating", if you reverse the words to make grammatical sense) and thus has been the subject of much ridicule by the Mexican media. Madrazo himself made a pun on his name during his 2000 primarily election fight, with the slogan "Dale un madrazo al dedazo" (or "Beat the $*&!% out of the big finger"), referring to the "big finger" (dedazo) colloquially used by the Mexican president in choosing his own successor.
External links
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