(Bloomberg) -- Mexico’s President-elect Claudia Sheinbaum named a former top adviser to President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador as her chief of staff.
Lazaro Cardenas Batel, a governor of Michoacan between 2002 and 2008, is the grandson of former President Lazaro Cardenas and the son of Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, a prominent left-wing politician who alleged fraud when losing the 1988 presidential race to a candidate from the Institutional Revolutionary Party, which governed the country for more than 70 years.
“He will help me following through on strategic projects and, at the same time, help talking to many sectors of Mexico and other parts of the world,” Sheinbaum said at a press briefing on Thursday, calling him a friend. “He has the ability to talk to businessmen, organizations, and people from any social sector of our country.”
Before joining the ruling Morena party, he was a member of the Party of the Democratic Revolution, a leftist organization founded by his father which saw its support dwindle as some of its key players defected for Lopez Obrador’s party. Cardenas Batel also has ties with the US: He has worked as a researcher at the Washington Office on Latin America and as a scholar at the Wilson Center’s Latin American Program.
He also served in Congress as a senator and was the permanent secretary of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States, known as Celac.
Lazaro Cardenas, the former president who led the nationalization of the oil industry, is one of the figures in Mexican history most praised by Lopez Obrador.
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