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Andrés Manuél López Obrador (b. 1953) has been the Head of Government ("Jefe de Gobierno", with a status somewhere between a city mayor and a state governor) of Mexico's Federal District (Mexico City) since the year 2000. López Obrador was previously the president of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) in his home state of Tabasco and the president of the Partido de la Revolución Democrática (PRD) at the state and national levels.
Born in the small town of Tepetitán, Macuspana municipality, in Tabasco state, López Obrador became interested in politics at an early age. He studied political science and public administration at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) before officially joining the PRI and collaborating actively in Carlos Pellicer's campaign for the governorship of Tabasco.
In 1977 he was selected to head the Instituto Indigenista (Indian Institute) of his state, where he promoted the publication of Native American literature. In 1984 he relocated to Mexico City to work at the Instituto Nacional del Consumidor (National Institute for the Consumer), a government agency.
Although he worked for a time for Tabasco governor Enrique González Pedrero, Obrador resigned over political differences to join the new dissenting wing of the PRI led by Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, which would later be transformed into an independent party, the PRD. He ran for office in Tabasco in 1988 under this new banner.
After losing that election, López Obrador served as PRD president in Tabasco until 1994, when, after losing a bid for the Tabasco state house (to the PRI, in a highly disputed election) he launched a run for the head office of his party. Obrador led the PRD from the 2 August 1996 until 10 April 1999. On 29 March 2000, he entered the Federal District's jefe de gobierno race, which he won by a wide margin.
López Obrador has become one of the most recognizable and popular politicians in Mexico, although he is widely criticized both for his populism and for his inability to solve Mexico City's crime problems. He is widely seen as the PRD's de facto candidate for the 2006 elections, although he has publicly denied having made up his mind as yet regarding a presidential bid.
In the media, López Obrador is frecuently referred to as AMLO and el Peje an abreviation of pejelagarto, a species of fish from the Lepisosteidae family, found in Tabasco.
Publications
- Los Primeros Pasos (First Steps)
- Del Esplendor a la Sombra (From Splendor to Darkness)
- Tabasco, Víctima de un Fraude (Tabasco, Victim of Fraud)
- Entre la Historia y la Esperanza (Between History and Hope)