Manuel Espino Barrientos

Manuel Espino Barrientos (born 29 November 1959) is a Mexican politician affiliated to Movimiento Ciudadano. He is a federal deputy to the LXIII Legislature of the Mexican Congress from the fifth electoral region. Espino also was a federal deputy in the LVIII Legislature and from 2005 to 2007 served as the national president of the PAN.

Life

Education and career in Chihuahua In 1979, Espino received his degree as an electrical technician from the Regional Technological Institute of Durango; a year before, he had joined the PAN. He was a frequent representative of the party in electoral matters, as well as a Scout and an instructor teaching business training courses in Ciudad Juárez and Durango; additionally, between 1978 and 1985, he was a middle and high school teacher at various educational institutions in Durango and Ciudad Juárez, as well as an administrator of an accounting and administration company. In 1987, after five years of study, Espino graduated from the Universidad del Noroeste with a degree in business administration; However, during this time, a rift began to grow between Espino and the PAN president, Felipe Calderón Hinojosa; he also disagreed with the federal government's security strategy, calling it "one of the bloodiest". came months after Espino and those associated with the highly conservative group Desarrollo Humano Integral, A.C., lost national party positions to supporters of Calderón.

In 2010, he founded the (National Start Over Movement). That year, the national PAN voted to begin the process of expelling Espino from the party, with only one member voting against the measure; this would culminate in his expulsion from the party after 33 years in May 2011; When he met with Enrique Peña Nieto, who at the time was seeking election from the Institutional Revolutionary Party, he promised Peña Nieto that he would promote the "useful vote" for Peña Nieto among the 941,000 members of Volver a Empezar, which in turn prompted then-PAN leader Gustavo Madero Muñoz to note that one of the reasons for Espino's expulsion from the party was his previous support for PRI candidates.

His business activities continued throughout this period; in 2010, he opened a restaurant in Durango, known as El Esquilón. He also owned a parking facility and administered the company Negocios Maryam. and Jorge Carlos Díaz Cuervo. While it promised to be a "party that was not ideological", it was derided as being a "Frankenstein" group. However, in its attempts to become a political party, it ran into obstacles; in Puebla, it failed to get 3,000 people to attend its first meeting, as was required, and in the states where it did meet the numbers, it did so using infrastructure of state-level political parties. When he traveled to an event in Cuernavaca, organizers had to remove dozens of empty chairs from the venue. Ultimately, Espino decided not to form a political party.

On December 6, 2014, Espino officially joined the Movimiento Ciudadano political party. The next year, MC placed Espino on its list for proportional representation deputies from the fifth district, winning him a seat in the Chamber of Deputies for the LXIII Legislature. He is a secretary on the National Defense and Public Security Committees and also holds a seat on the Commission for the Strengthening of Federalism. and on the national level while it worked with the Peninsular Party of the Californias in Baja California and with Alternativa Veracruzana in Veracruz.

Books Espino has written various books, including Señal de Alerta (2008), which warned that Manlio Fabio Beltrones might run for president in 2012; Volver a Empezar (Start Over, 2010); La guerra injusta de Ciudad Juárez (The Unjust War of Ciudad Juárez, 2010), in which he called the drug war started by Calderón "the bloodiest conflict on Mexican soil since the Revolution"; El Poder del Águila (The Power of the Eagle, 2012); and Mexicanos al Grito de Paz (2015).