Morelia (Mexico), 1962

By Carlos Serrano Ferreira

Felipe de Jesús Calderón Hinojosa was born on August 18, 1962, in Morelia, in the Mexican state of Michoacán. He is a lawyer and former president of Mexico (2006-2012). He graduated in law from the Escuela Libre de Derecho and later obtained a degree in economics from the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México and a master’s degree in Public Administration from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

His father, Luis Calderón Vega, was one of the founders of the opposition National Action Party (PAN) in 1939, a center-right party for which he was elected federal deputy. From a young age, Felipe Calderón became involved with the PAN, serving as the first president of the Acción Juvenil (youth wing of the PAN) in 1987.

Between 1991 and 1994, he served as a federal deputy, and in 1993 he became the PAN’s secretary-general, eventually becoming the party’s president in 1996. In 2000, following the unprecedented defeat of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) and the election of Vicente Fox, a PAN member, as president of Mexico, Calderón held the position of party leader in the Chamber of Deputies from 2000 to 2003 and served as Minister of Energy from 2003 to 2004. After clashing with Fox over the internal nomination process for the presidency, he had to resign from the ministry but ultimately won the nomination against Santiago Creel.

Calderón emerged victorious in a highly contested election against center-left candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador (PRD), winning by a mere 0.56% in an election marred by allegations of fraud. López Obrador led a campaign of protest with large demonstrations and a concentration in the capital for months, but after a partial recount, Calderón was officially declared the winner, despite a significant portion of the population considering the election illegitimate until the end of his term.

To address these allegations, Calderón promoted an electoral reform approved by the main parties and initiated a war against drug cartels. This campaign, supported financially and militarily by the United States, employed 45,000 Mexican military personnel, in addition to police forces. The results were disastrous: imprecise figures suggest that over 60,000 civilians died, the competition between cartels intensified, and there was no reduction in drug production, sale, or consumption. Numerous human rights violations, including torture, rape, and executions, were reported to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (CIDH).

However, the campaign against drug trafficking served to overshadow his government’s neoliberal actions, such as the Ley Federal de Trabajo, which advanced the precarization of labor relations. Overall, Calderón’s six-year term in Los Pinos was marked by the inability to fulfill his main campaign promises, particularly his electoral slogan of being “The president of employment,” as unemployment rates remained high.