Miguel Alemán Valdés
Miguel Alemán Valdés was president of Mexico from 1946 to 1952, the first civilian since the revolution and the first of the lawyers and economists who ran the country for the next fifty years, the forty-six-year-old who turned the revolutionary party into the Institutional Revolutionary Party, the PRI, in his election year. He gave it the character it kept. Growth came first, the unions and the peasants inside the party and obedient, the press paid, the elections won by whatever margin was needed, and the president's friends were rich. The six years were the Mexican miracle's beginning. There were the highways, the dams, the irrigation districts of the north-west that made the Sonoran wheat, the university city in the south of the capital, the tourism at Acapulco that his own companies developed, the import-substitution tariffs, the industry that grew at eight per cent a year, and the Mexico City that doubled. There was a corruption that the country called Alemanismo and that made him one of the richest men in it. He was born in Sayula in Veracruz in 1900, the son of a revolutionary general who shot himself in 1929 rather than surrender after a failed rising, studied law at the national university, and defended miners in silicosis cases. He was a senator and governor of Veracruz, and ran Ávila Camacho's campaign in 1940 and his interior ministry through the war, in which he kept order and the Axis agents watched. The election of 1946 was against a former foreign minister who won a fifth of the vote. The administration's first act was to purge the Communists from the railway and oil unions and install the charros, the bought leaders, who ran organised labour for the rest of the century. The devaluation of 1948-49, from 4.85 to 8.65 pesos to the dollar, and the attempt by his friends to prolong his term or nominate him again, which the old generals and Cárdenas blocked, were the term's end. He chose Ruiz Cortines, who campaigned against corruption, as his successor. He ran the national tourism council for the rest of his life, built Acapulco's hotels, and owned television and newspapers. He died in Mexico City in May 1983. His son was governor of Veracruz, and his grandson runs the airline Interjet's remains.
- Lived: 1900 CE – 1983 CE
- Nationality: Mexican
- Roles: president, politician
