PEÑA NIETO, ENRIQUE
Atlacomulco (México), 1966
By Carlos Serrano Ferreira
Enrique Peña Nieto is a lawyer, a member of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), and the current president of the United Mexican States since 2012, as well as a former governor of the State of Mexico (2005–2011).
Peña Nieto was born into a family with a long tradition in Mexican politics. His great-grandfather, Severiano Peña, was the mayor of Acambay four times (1914, 1916, 1921, and 1923). He is related to two former governors of the State of Mexico, Alfredo del Mazo González, his father’s cousin, and Arturo Montiel Rojas, a distant relative of his mother. He is often associated with the alleged “Atlacomulco Group” within the PRI, which managed to elect, in addition to Peña Nieto and his two relatives, four more governors from the same state (Isidro Fabela, Alfredo del Mazo Vélez, Salvador Sánchez Colín, and Carlos Hank González).
Raised in a conservative Catholic environment, his parents took him and his three siblings to Mass every week. He counts among his relatives two bishops, particularly Arturo Vélez Martínez, the influential bishop of Toluca for nearly thirty years until his death in 1989. He was educated largely in Catholic institutions, such as the Colegio Plancarte de Atlacomulco, run by the Sisters of the Order of the Daughters of Mary Immaculate of Guadalupe, where he attended the four years of primary school. He also studied the first year of secondary school at the Dennis Hall School, a Marist boys’ boarding school in Maine, USA, and graduated from the Universidad Panamericana, a university maintained by Opus Dei, with a law degree between 1984 and 1989. His strong political ties with this ultraconservative organization are often highlighted.
His thesis focused on El Presidencialismo Mexicano y Álvaro Obregón, whom he admired for strengthening the executive power and presidentialism. He dedicated his work to his relative and political godfather, Arturo Montiel Rojas. Later, he earned a master’s degree in Administration from the Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey (ITESM).
Peña Nieto joined the PRI early in his law studies. From 1990, he held several party functions: first, he was the secretary of one of the districts of the Movimiento Ciudadano de la Confederación Nacional de Organizaciones Populares (CNOP), the PRI’s popular sector; he was a representative of the Comisión Coordinadora de Convenciones for the Asamblea Municipal del Frente Juvenil Revolucionario (FJR, the PRI’s youth); a delegate for the Frente de Organizaciones y Ciudadanos in various municipalities of his state; and an instructor at the PRI’s Centro de Capacitación Electoral. In 1993, he was appointed treasurer for the electoral campaign of the PRI gubernatorial candidate Emilio Chuayffet Chemor. After his victory, Peña Nieto served as the private secretary to the Secretary of Economic Development, Juan José Guerra Abud, from 1993 to 1998.
This period also marked the beginning of his troubled marital life. In 1994, he married Mónica Pretelini, with whom he had three children. She passed away suddenly in 2007 from a heart arrhythmia caused by an epileptic attack, and doubts were raised at the time about the real circumstances of her death, even involving her husband. During their marriage, Peña Nieto had two children from extramarital affairs, one of whom died in the first year of life from cancer. In 2008, he announced his engagement to the famous telenovela actress Angélica Rivera, and they married in 2010. While his first marriage ended under suspicion, the second one began similarly: Rivera managed to have her first marriage annulled by the Catholic Church with little explanation, which many viewed as further proof of Peña Nieto’s close ties with the Church hierarchy and their support for his future presidential candidacy.
In 1999, Peña Nieto was the financial sub-coordinator of the campaign for Arturo Montiel Rojas, who won the governorship for the 1999–2005 term. Under his political godfather’s auspices, Peña Nieto held several government positions, such as private secretary to the Secretary of Economic Development, Carlos Rello Lara, and president of the board of the Institute of Social Security of the State of Mexico, among others. Between 2000 and 2002, he was Secretary of Administration and, in September 2003, he won a mandate as a deputy from the State of Mexico’s Atlamoculco district. He remained the PRI’s parliamentary group coordinator until September 2014.
Although Arturo Montiel Rojas’ presidential ambitions were thwarted by allegations of corruption (even though he was never convicted, he appeared on Forbes’ 2013 list of the 10 most corrupt Mexicans), Peña Nieto won the 2005 PRI gubernatorial nomination and subsequently secured the governorship of the State of Mexico, the country’s most populous state, with 49% of the vote. In alliance with the Green Party of Mexico (PVEM), he defeated Rubén Mendoza Ayala, the PAN and Convergencia coalition’s candidate, who received 25.6%, and Yeidckol Polevnskyy of the Unidos para Ganar coalition, who garnered 25.11%.
During his governorship, Peña Nieto claimed to have fulfilled many of the 608 campaign promises he had officially registered, such as constructing more than 83 kilometers of highways and building 10 municipal hospitals. However, his administration did not address some of the state’s most pressing issues, such as a lack of a metropolitan public transportation system linking the State of Mexico with the Federal District. By December 2010, the state had one of the country’s highest unemployment rates, above the national average, and continued to be one of the most unequal states in Mexico. While poverty decreased slightly from 43.9% to 42.9% between 2008 and 2010, the percentage of people living in extreme poverty rose from 6.9% to 8.1%.
A key event during his tenure was the brutal police repression he ordered in 2006 in the town of San Salvador Atenco, where security forces destroyed homes and shops, killed a young man, and arrested 207 people, including nine minors and a paraplegic. Widespread torture was reported, and five foreigners were illegally expelled. The most serious allegations involved sexual abuse: 26 of the 47 women arrested reported sexual torture, abuse, humiliation, and rape. This police action was widely supported by the mainstream press, but in 2011, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) accepted the sexual abuse allegations. By 2014, 22 state government officials had been arrested for involvement in these crimes.
Despite this, Peña Nieto was considered the most nationally recognized governor by Consulta Mitofsky in 2008 (68.4%), and by 2011, he was a leading candidate for the presidency. His popularity was achieved by distancing his image from the PRI, focusing on personal attributes such as youth and attractiveness, and largely through his strong relationships with major media outlets, particularly Televisa, which was accused by The Guardian in 2012 of providing favorable coverage for Peña Nieto.
During his presidential campaign, Peña Nieto faced what became known as the “Mexican Spring,” led by the Movimiento YoSoy132 of university students. They questioned his involvement in the Atenco case, but after his responses and support from the mainstream press, they shifted their focus to advocating for media democratization and denouncing his ties to the major media. Mass marches were organized throughout the country. Despite these protests and the challenges raised by PRD candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador before the Electoral Tribunal, Peña Nieto was declared the winner with 38.02% of the vote, defeating López Obrador, who received 31.07%, and PAN candidate Josefina Vázquez Mota. This victory returned the PRI to federal government after twelve years of PAN rule.
His presidency is marked by the advancement of neoliberal reforms, particularly the Educational Reform, which sparked resistance through large protests organized by the Coordinadora Nacional de Trabajadores de la Educación (CNTE), and the Energy Reform. While it did not succeed in dismantling PEMEX, it broke the state monopoly on oil exploration, which had lasted for over 80 years, and moved towards privatization, opening the door for foreign investment in the country’s most strategic sector. The same reform was applied to the electricity sector.
His government also faced growing discontent due to reduced economic growth and the increasing perception of rising violence, including the creation of popular self-defense groups. The worst crisis to date is related to the disappearance of the 43 Ayotzinapa students, allegedly perpetrated by the Guerrero Unidos drug cartel in collusion with police forces and the then-mayor of Iguala, José Luis Abarca Velázquez. The protests that initially demanded the students’ return evolved into mass demonstrations of thousands of people against police and drug cartel violence, directly targeting Peña Nieto and calling for his resignation.
Peña Nieto’s image as president suffered further damage starting in November 2014 due to a series of corruption allegations. Journalists from Aristegui Noticias reported that the president’s family, represented by the first lady, owned a $7 million mansion in Las Lomas, registered under the name of Ingeniería Inmobiliaria del Centro, a company linked to businessman Juan Armando Hinojosa Cantú. Hinojosa had won contracts from Peña Nieto when he was governor of the State of Mexico. During his presidency, one of Hinojosa’s companies was part of the consortium, led by Chinese firms, that won the bid to build the Mexico-Querétaro high-speed rail line, which was canceled even before the allegations were made public in November, amid suspicions about the bidding process. In December 2014, The Wall Street Journal reported that Peña Nieto’s close ally, Secretary of Finance Luis Videgaray, had purchased a $500,000 house from the same businessman just weeks before taking office. In January 2015, the same newspaper revealed that Peña Nieto, shortly after becoming governor in 2005, had purchased a house in a golf club in Ixtapan de la Sal from Roberto San Román Widerkehr, the owner of the construction company that had won $100 million in contracts from the State of Mexico between 2005 and 2011, as well as 11 federal contracts worth $40 million since Peña Nieto became president. Until then, San Román’s company had never had federal contracts. The ties between the San Román family and the president went beyond business: Roberto San Román Dunne, son of San Román Widerkehr, was the godfather of Peña Nieto’s daughter, Paulina Peña Petrelini. Earlier scandals involving PRI governors, such as Andrés Granier of Tabasco, who was accused of embezzling public funds, had also tarnished the president’s image, despite his promise to renew the party.
