Porfirio Muñoz Ledo

Porfirio Alejandro Muñoz Ledo y Lazo de la Vega (23 July 1933 – 9 July 2023) was a Mexican politician. He was one of the founders of the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), and served as Ambassador to Cuba from January 2022 until his death.

Biography Born in Mexico City, 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.

Muñoz Ledo served as a member of the cabinets of Presidents Luis Echeverría as Secretary of Labor (1972–1975) and José López 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 Mexico's Permanent Representative to the United Nations from 1978 to 1985, where he presided over 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. On 5 May 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 over Congress in the post-revolutionary period as President of the Chamber of Deputies in 1997. 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 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.

In 2009 until 2012, he again served in the Chamber of Deputies as a deputy for the PT.

On 27 August 2018, the parliamentary group of the National Regeneration Movement (MORENA) proposed him as president of the Chamber of Deputies and therefore of the Congress of the Union for the first year of the LXIV Legislature.

In late 2020, he ran for president of the MORENA party, but came in second place. In January 2022, he was appointed Ambassador to Cuba.

Muñoz Ledo died on 9 July 2023, at the age of 89. The cause of his death was not immediately announced.