José Antonio Meade, the versatile PRI

José Antonio Meade is a survivor. At least it was in 2012 during the change of government of Felipe Calderón, of the PAN, Enrique Peña Nieto, of the PRI. It is rare in Mexico for a political party to retain its opponents in key positions of the federal administration. Meade then left the Secretary of the Treasury and, with the mandate of the Tricolor party, jumped to foreign relations. In five years, he would pass through two more portfolios until he came back to the Treasury. This morning he was no longer a member of the Cabinet for the first time in seven years. From today it will draw a way to return to National Palace in 2018. No longer as a collaborator of someone else but as President of the Republic. Meade was born in Mexico City in 1969. Financial issues have been inherited by both parts of their families. His maternal grandfather, José Kuribreña, was a lawyer for Bancomer, the bank that was later bought by the Spanish BBVA. His father, Dionisio Meade, was also a civil servant specializing in financial institutions in the six-term Ernesto Zedillo (1994-2000). This influence caused Meade to enter to study economics at the Autonomous Technological Institute of Mexico (ITAM). That university functions as a hotbed of the elite of Mexican civil servants. That's where she met Juana Cuevas, her wife and mother of the couple's three children. Cuevas is a painter interested in Mexican folk art. Later, José Antonio went abroad to study a PhD, also in economics, at Yale. His first steps as a public official were given in the government of Vicente Fox. The former governor of Guanajuato took the PRI of Los Pinos in the year 2000. Meade was responsible for sanitizing the finances of a state-owned bank to grant loans to peasants. The operation, which would cost more than two billion dollars, required intensive negotiation with legislators. It was since that Meade began to forge the reputation of skillful political operator always open to dialogue with the opposition. In January 2011, Felipe Calderón made him secretary of energy. Months later he moved him to the National Palace, where he dispatched the Secretary of the Treasury. With the return of the PRI to the Meade pines, he was appointed Secretary of Foreign affairs. Peña Nieto thanked this Monday for defending the Mexicans in that position. In August 2015, he became the operator of social programs and the head of the fight against poverty from the secretariat of Social Development. In September 2016 Meade again took over the reins of the Mexican economy, which leaves with a discrete growth between 1.8% and 2.3%. That Sunday, Meade could become the first PRI presidential aspirant who is not a militant of the tricolor.