Ernesto Zedillo
Ernesto Zedillo was president of Mexico from 1994 to 2000, the Yale economist whom Salinas named when Colosio was shot, because the constitution barred anyone who had held office in the previous six months and the campaign manager had not. Three weeks after taking office he devalued the peso he had inherited overvalued and set off the tequila crisis. The peso halved, the economy shrank seven per cent in 1995, a million jobs went, and the banks failed. They were rescued at a cost of a fifth of a year's output that the country is still paying. Clinton's fifty-billion-dollar loan, made over Congress's head, was repaid early and in full. The recovery that followed, on NAFTA's exports and the maquiladoras, was the fastest in the country's history. He spent it on the opposite of what his predecessors had done, giving the electoral institute its independence in 1996. He let the PRI lose the congress in 1997 and the capital to Cárdenas. He refused to choose his successor and held the party's first primary instead. On the night of 2 July 2000 going on television before his own party's candidate had conceded he said that Vicente Fox had won, which ended seventy-one years of PRI rule with a sentence. He was born in Mexico City in 1951 and grew up in Mexicali on the border, where his father was an electrician, studied economics at the National Polytechnic and took a doctorate at Yale on Mexico's foreign debt. He worked at the central bank and was Salinas's budget minister and then education minister, a man of the spreadsheet whom the party never took for one of its own. The term also had the Acteal massacre of forty-five Tzotzil villagers by paramilitaries in Chiapas in December 1997, the army's occupation of the Zapatista zone, the arrest of Raúl Salinas. There was the Fobaproa bank rescue that the opposition called the bankers' bailout and that the courts have kept sealed. He left office with sixty per cent approval and went to Yale, where he ran the centre for the study of globalisation for twenty years. He sat on the boards of Citigroup and Procter and Gamble, and chaired the global commission on drug policy that called for decriminalisation. He is the PRI's last president and the man who let it lose.
- Lived: 1951 CE – ?
- Nationality: Mexican
- Roles: president, economist, politician
