Enrique Peña Nieto

Enrique Peña Nieto (born July 20, 1966, Atlacomulco, Mexico) is a Mexican politician of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (Partido Revolucionario Institucional; PRI) who served as the president of Mexico (2012–18). Prior to becoming president, he served as governor of the state of México (2005–11).

Peña Nieto was born in México state and was the eldest of four children. His mother was a schoolteacher, and his father was an engineer with the national electric company. Peña Nieto earned a bachelor’s degree from Universidad Panamericana, Mexico City, and an M.B.A. from Monterrey Technological Institute. From 1988 to 1990 he served as a university professor. In 1994 Peña Nieto married Mónica Pretelini Sáenz, with whom he had three children; she died in 2007. In 2010 he married Angélica Rivera, a soap opera star on Televisa, Mexico’s largest TV network.

Peña Nieto joined the PRI, Mexico’s longtime ruling party, in 1984. He quickly advanced within the party and became active in México state politics, holding such positions as the secretary of administration (2000–02) and state congressman (2003–04). He successfully ran for the post of México state governor in 2005 and held it until 2011.

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As governor, Peña Nieto based his agenda on more than 600 compromisos—public commitments or pledges—that he made to his constituents. He continued this practice while campaigning for the presidency, touting more than 250 compromisos that he would deliver if he became president. Like his opponents, Andrés Manuel López Obrador of the Party of the Democratic Revolution (Partido de la Revolución Democrática; PRD), and Josefina Vázquez Mota of the National Action Party (Partido Acción Nacional; PAN), he pledged to improve the country’s economy and promised to combat the widespread drug-related violent crime, issues that resonated with voters. His youthful good looks and frequent association with celebrities served to increase his popular appeal. He was, however, dogged by claims that Mexico’s primary television stations, in particular Televisa, were biased in their coverage of him.

When voters went to the polls on July 1, 2012, it appeared that Peña Nieto’s message and appeal were enough to overcome the PRI’s legacy of authoritarian rule and corruption. Preliminary results indicated that Peña Nieto had been victorious, having won more than 38 percent of the vote, ahead of his nearest challenger, López Obrador, who received almost 32 percent. His apparent victory was clouded, however, amid accusations of widespread irregularities and allegations that the PRI had engaged in vote-buying practices. Evidence of inconsistencies in vote tallies led to a recount of more than half the votes; the results of the recount upheld Peña Nieto’s victory. Still, López Obrador refused to concede, and on July 12 he filed a legal challenge calling for the election results to be invalidated because of the vote-buying allegations and alleged campaign spending violations by Peña Nieto and the PRI. The presidential election results could not be ratified until López Obrador’s complaint was ruled on by Mexico’s Electoral Tribunal. In August it ruled against López Obrador’s complaint and upheld the election results.

As president-elect, Peña Nieto pledged that there would be transparency in his government and promised to appoint an anticorruption commission. He reiterated his campaign promises of working toward improving the economy as well as focusing resources to reign in the organized crime syndicates that terrorized Mexican citizens. In light of the PRI’s history of allegedly making deals with drug cartels, Peña Nieto explicitly promised not to do the same. Given that the PRI did not win an outright majority in the legislature, it remained to be seen just how easily he would be able to implement his plans. Peña Nieto was inaugurated on December 1, 2012.

Shortly after his inauguration, Peña Nieto announced a “Pact for Mexico” that joined the PRI, the PAN, and the PRD in support of a 95-point agenda of policy reform. Many members of the PAN and the PRD were less than happy about their leaders’ decision to collaborate with the PRI; however, the agreement led to congressional approval for a series of major initiatives affecting fiscal policy, public education, and the energy and telecommunications sectors. Most notably, Peña Nieto’s administration sought to attract investment from foreign oil companies to revitalize the country’s declining oil and gas industry, and in December 2013 the Congress amended those articles of the constitution that gave Pemex, the national oil company, exclusive control over the exploration, production, refining, storage, and distribution of oil, natural gas, and basic petrochemicals.

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In February 2014 the Mexican navy’s marines made good on Peña Nieto’s promise to aggressively combat organized crime when they captured Joaquín (“El Chapo”) Guzmán Loera—the head of the Sinaloa drug cartel, the country’s largest—in Mazatlán. Nevertheless, murders, forced disappearances, kidnappings for ransom, and extortion remained serious problems. Indeed, in late September 43 students from a rural teachers college in Ayotzinapa, Guerrero, disappeared after being seized by police and then turned over to a local drug gang, who allegedly murdered them, sparking international outrage and creating the most-severe political crisis yet to confront the Peña Nieto administration.

In 2014 the Peña Nieto administration pushed through far-reaching political and electoral reform in advance of 2015’s midterm election. The elections—which were seen widely as a referendum on Peña Nieto’s presidency—came with the Mexican economy struggling (GDP growth in 2013–14 declined to less than 2 percent from 4 percent in 2011–12) and the president still facing criticism over the deaths of the 43 students as well as embroiled in a corruption scandal related to accusations of his purchase of a home from government contractors. In the June 2015 election, support for the PRI fell from the levels it had achieved in the 2009 election (dropping to about 29 percent with some nine-tenths of the vote counted, compared with 37 percent in 2009); however, the party’s ally, the Mexican Green Ecologist Party (Partido Verde Ecologista de México; PVEM), made up the difference and positioned the ruling coalition to command a solid majority in the 500-seat chamber of Deputies.

Peña Nieto’s administration received a major blow on the night of July 11, 2015, when Guzmán escaped from the maximum-security Altiplano prison near Toluca through a shaft beneath the shower in his cell and a more than 1-mile- (1.6-km-) long tunnel. The dramatic escape was all the more damaging for Peña Nieto because on television in 2014 he had said that if Guzmán were to escape again, “it would be unforgivable.” Moreover, Peña Nieto ran the risk of incurring the wrath of the U.S. government, whose request for Guzmán’s extradition he had refused. On January 8, 2016, however, Peña Nieto was able to tweet “Mission Accomplished: we have him” when Guzmán was recaptured after a raid by marines on a house in Los Mochis, Sinaloa, following a massive manhunt.

Nonetheless, by midyear Peña Nieto’s approval rating had dropped to levels not experienced by a Mexican president since the 1990s. Many Mexicans blamed him for the country’s struggling economy and a resurgence of violence. There also were widespread accusations of corruption and suspicion that the government was colluding with drug dealers. Criticism of the president had intensified in April after an international commission looking into the disappearance of the 43 students curtailed its work, claiming that the government had obstructed its investigation. In August Peña Nieto faced claims that he had plagiarized portions of his law school thesis. More nay-saying followed Peña Nieto’s meeting in late August 2016 with U.S. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, who had called illegal Mexican immigrants to the United States rapists and promised to build a wall on the U.S.-Mexican border that he said would be paid for by Mexico. Many Mexicans could not understand what the president thought he would gain from inviting Trump to visit Mexico City, but among the explanations offered for issuing the invitation was an earlier desire to invite Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton to visit and the belief that it was necessary to invite both candidates to avoid the appearance of partiality.

Still more corruption scandals tarnished Peña Nieto’s presidency as it wound to a close. One involved a luxury home in Mexico City that had been sold to Peña Nieto’s wife by a company that was awarded a large government contract, provoking accusations of conflict of interest that prompted an apology from Peña Nieto, even though an official investigation had cleared him of any wrongdoing. His administration also was accused of having used sophisticated cell phone-invading software to spy on journalists, anti-corruption groups, and human rights activists. Finally, spiking drug-related violence resulted in more homicides being committed in 2017 in Mexico than in any other single year in some two decades. Morever, more than 130 politicians, activists, and political operatives were killed in violence associated with the 2018 elections, with most of the deaths occurring in districts in which drug gangs were suspected of trying to prevent the election of candidates hostile to their illegal operations. The elections themselves proved to be disastrous for the PRI, which saw its representation in both the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate plummet, while its presidential candidate, José Antonio Meade Kuribreña, finished a distant third to the winner, López Obrador.

In the final months of Peña Nieto’s presidency, Mexico continued to participate in negotiations aimed at restructuring NAFTA. Having won the U.S. presidential election, Trump came into office promising to pull the U.S. out of NAFTA if Canada and Mexico did not renegotiate the agreement, and representatives from the three countries began formal discussions in August 2017 on revamping the historic deal. Roughly a year later, at the end of August 2018, it was announced that Mexico and the United States had reached an agreement on a new accord that preserved much of NAFTA but also introduced a number of significant changes. In September Canada joined the agreement, which was dubbed the United States–Mexico–Canada Agreement (USMCA). On November 30, Peña Nieto’s final day in office, he joined Trump and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in signing the USMCA at a ceremony during the Group of 20 (G20) summit meeting in Argentina. The agreement still required legislative approval in all three countries.