Porfirio Muñoz Ledo
Porfirio Alejandro Muñoz Ledo y Lazo de la Vega (born July 23, 1933 in Mexico City) is a Mexican politician. He is one of the founders of the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD). He is the current Mexican Amb*ador to Cuba since January 2022.
Biography
Muñoz Ledo studied law at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) from 1951 to 1955 and later pursued graduate studies at the University of Paris.
He served as a member of the cabinets of presidents Luis Echeverría as Secretary of Labor (1972–1975); and José López Portillo as Secretary of Education (1976–1977). He was President of the Ins*utional Revolutionary Party (PRI) during the presidential campaign of 1975–1976.
Muñoz Ledo was Mexican Amb*ador to the United Nations (1978–1985), where he presided the UN Security Council, the Group of 77 and the negotiations of the Global Economic Agreements.
In 1988 he broke with the PRI and won a seat in the Senate running as a candidate for the leftist Frente Democrático Nacional (FDN) coalition. The following year (May 5, 1989), Muñoz Ledo, Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas and other leading center-left and leftist politicians formally founded the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD).
Muñoz Ledo served in the Chamber of Deputies from 1997 to 1999. He was the first member of an opposition party to preside Congress in the post-revolutionary period as President of the Chamber of Deputies in 1997. He ran for the presidency in 2000 as the Authentic Party of the Mexican Revolution candidate but before the elections he gave his support to the National Action Party candidate Vicente Fox who later designated Muñoz Ledo amb*ador to the European Union (2001–2004).
In 2005 he returned to the PRD to join Andrés Manuel López Obrador in his presidential campaign.
In 2009 until 2012, he again served in the Mexican Chamber of Deputies as a Deputy for the PT.
On August 27, 2018, the parliamentary group of the National Regeneration Movement (MORENA) proposed him as president of the Chamber of Deputies and therefore of the Congress of the Union for the first year of the LXIV Legislature.
In late 2020, he ran for president of the MORENA party, but came in second place. In January 2022, he was appointed as Mexican Amb*ador to Cuba.
References
Further reading
- Camp, Roderic Ai. "Porfirio Muñoz Ledo" in Mexican Political Biographies. Second edition. Tucson: University of Arizona 1982, pp.:211–12. ISBN:0-8165-0743-0
- Gil, Carlos B. ed. Hope and Frustration: Interviews with Leaders of Mexico's Political Opposition, especially Chapter 7, "Porfirio Muñoz Ledo". Wilmington: Scholarly Resources Books 1992. ISBN:0-8420-2396-8