
Porfirio Munoz Ledo
'Porfirio Alejandro Muñoz Ledo y Lazo de la Vega' (b.
July 23,
1933 in
Mexico City) is a
Mexican politician. He is one of the founders of the
Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD).
Muñoz Ledo studied
law at the
National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) from
1951 to
1955 and later pursued graduate studies at the
University of Paris.
He served as a member of the cabinets of presidents
Luis Echeverría as
Secretary of Labor (1972-1975); and
Jose Lopez Portillo as
Secretary of Education (1976-1977). He was President of the
Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) during the presidential campaign of 1975-1976.
Muñoz Ledo was Mexican Ambassador to the
United Nations (1978-1985), where he presided the UN
Security Council, the
Group of 77 and the negotiations of the Global Economic Agreements.
In
1988 he broke with the PRI and won a seat in the
Senate running as a candidate for the leftist
Frente Democrático Nacional (FDN) coalition. The following year (
May 5,
1989), Muñoz Ledo,
Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas and other leading center-left and leftist politicians formally founded the
Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD).
Muñoz Ledo served in the
Chamber of Deputies from
1997 to
1999. He was the first member of an opposition party to preside Congress in the post-revolutionary period. He ran for the presidency in 2000 as the
Authentic Party of the Mexican Revolution candidate but before the elections he gave his support to the
National Action Party candidate
Vicente Fox Quesada who later designated Muñoz Ledo ambassador to the
European Union (
2001-
2004).
In
2005 he returned to the PRD to join
Andrés Manuel López Obrador in his presidential campaign.