Ernesto Zedillo

He won with 48.69% of the popular vote and became the last president to distinguish the 70-year PRI dynasty in México during the 20th century.

Ernesto Zedillo Ponce de León (born 27 December 1950) is a Mexican economist and politician.

Ernesto Zedillo was born on 27 December 1950 in Mexico City.

His parents were Rodolfo Zedillo Castillo, a mechanic, and Martha Alicia Ponce de León.

Seeking better job and education opportunities for their children, his parents moved to Mexicali, Baja California.

In 1964, at the age of 14, he returned to Mexico City.

In 1969 he entered the National Polytechnic Institute, financing his studies by working in the National Army and Navy Bank (later known as Banjército).

He graduated as an economist in 1972 and began lecturing.

It was among his first group of students that he met his wife, Nilda Patricia Velasco, with whom he has five children: Ernesto, Emiliano, Carlos (formerly married to conductor Alondra de la Parra ), Nilda Patricia and Rodrigo.

In 1974, he pursued his master's and PhD studies at Yale University.

His doctoral thesis was titled Mexico's Public External Debt: Recent History and Future Growth Related to Oil.

Zedillo began working in the Bank of Mexico (Mexico's central bank) as a member of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, where he supported the adoption of macroeconomic policies for the country's improvement.

By 1987, he was named deputy secretary of Planning and Budget Control in the Secretariat of Budget and Planning.

In 1988, at the age of 38, he headed that secretariat.

During his term as Secretary, Zedillo launched a Science and Technology reform and served in this capacity for three years until December 1991.

In 1992, he was appointed Secretary of Education by president Carlos Salinas.

During his tenure in this post, he was in charge of the revision of Mexican public school textbooks.

The changes, which took a softer line on foreign investment and the Porfiriato, among other topics, were highly controversial and the textbooks were withdrawn.

A year later, he resigned to run the electoral campaign of Luis Donaldo Colosio, the PRI's presidential candidate.

He was the 61st president of Mexico from 1994 to 2000, as the last of the uninterrupted 71-year line of Mexican presidents from the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI).

During his presidency, he faced one of the worst economic crises in Mexico's history, which started only weeks after taking office.

While he distanced himself from his predecessor Carlos Salinas de Gortari, blaming his administration for the crisis, and overseeing the arrest of Salinas' brother Raúl Salinas de Gortari, he continued the neoliberal policies of his two predecessors.

His administration was also marked by renewed clashes with the EZLN and the Popular Revolutionary Army; the controversial implementation of Fobaproa to rescue the national banking system; a political reform that allowed residents of the Federal District (Mexico City) to elect their own mayor; the privatization of national railways and its subsequent suspension of the passenger rail service; and the Aguas Blancas and Acteal massacres perpetrated by State forces.

In 1994, after Colosio's assassination, Zedillo became one of the few PRI members eligible under Mexican law to take his place, since he had not occupied public office for some time.

The opposition blamed Colosio's murder on Salinas.

Although the PRI's presidential candidates were always chosen by the current president, and thus Colosio had originally been Salinas' candidate, their political relationship had been affected by a famous speech during the campaign in which Colosio said that Mexico had many problems.

It is also notable that the assassination took place after Colosio visited the members of the Zapatista movement in Chiapas and promised to open dialogue, something the PRI opposed.

After Colosio's murder, this speech was seen as the main cause of his break with the president.

The choice of Zedillo was interpreted as Salinas' way of bypassing the strong Mexican political tradition of non-reelection and retaining real power since Zedillo was not a politician, but an economist (like Salinas), who lacked the president's political talent and influence.

It is unclear if Salinas had attempted to control Colosio, who was generally considered at that time to be a far better candidate.

Zedillo ran against Diego Fernández de Cevallos of the National Action Party and second-timer Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas of the Party of the Democratic Revolution.

At age 44, Zedillo assumed the presidency on 1 December 1994 at the Legislative Palace of San Lázaro, taking oath before the Congress of the Union presided by the deputy president Carlota Vargas Garza.

Zedillo's electoral victory was perceived as clean, but he came to office as an accidental candidate with no political base of his own and no experience.

During the first part of his presidency, he took inconsistent policy positions and there were rumors that he would resign or that there would be a coup d'état against him, which caused turmoil in financial markets.

Zedillo's cabinet needed to have members who could deal with crises.

Although Zedillo's policies eventually led to a relative economic recovery, popular discontent with seven decades of PRI rule led to the party losing, for the first time, its legislative majority in the 1997 midterm elections, and in the 2000 general election the right-wing opposition National Action Party's candidate Vicente Fox won the Presidency of the Republic, putting an end to 71 years of uninterrupted PRI rule.

Zedillo's admission of the PRI's defeat and his peaceful handing of power to his successor improved his image in the final months of his administration, and he left office with an approval rating of 60%.

Since the end of his term as president, Zedillo has been a leading voice on globalization, especially its impact on relations between developed and developing nations.

He is currently the director of the Center for the Study of Globalization at Yale University and is on the board of directors at the Inter-American Dialogue and Citigroup.

Throughout his presidency, he had four as Minister of the Interior, Esteban Moctezuma, who dealt with the Zapatistas; Emilio Chuayffet, who resigned following the Acteal massacre; Francisco Labastida, who won the primary to determine the 2000 PRI presidential candidate; and Diódoro Carrasco Altamirano, who dealt with the strike at the National Autonomous University of Mexico.