Felipe Calderón Hinojosa

Hello, my name is Felipe Calderón Hinojosa, but you know me better as Calderón. I was former president of Mexico. What most characterized my six-year term was that my presence was marked by the beginning of the War on Drug Trafficking, which began almost immediately after took office, and was considered by many observers as a strategy to gain popular legitimacy for the new president after the complicated elections.

former president of Mexico
Presentation
The six-year term of Felipe Calderón's government, one of the darkest periods in the contemporary history of Mexico, was marked by the State's undeclared war against the drug cartels. This terrifying and unresolved conflict, which recorded no less than 60,000 fatalities between 2006 and 2012, put the North American country in the international spotlight and tended to eclipse the other aspects of a presidency that was by no means single-issue.

Michoacan from Morelia (1962) and lawyer with degrees from the Free School of Law, ITAM and Harvard, Felipe Calderón Hinojosa developed a precocious career in the National Action Party (PAN), of which he was head of youth, federal deputy, general secretary and national president. Under the party's first president, Vicente Fox, he served as director of BANOPRAS and secretary of Energy. In the 2006 federal elections he confronted his image as a cold and calm technocrat who kept his distance from Foxism and claimed the centrist label with the opposition impetuosity and radical leftism of Andrés Manuel López Obrador. The votes, extraordinarily close, had the official outcome of the PAN victory by just half a point, a result that was denounced as fraudulent by the PRD and which pushed López Obrador to proclaim himself president in absentia.