The president-elect of Mexico, Enrique Peña Nieto, will be inaugurated this Saturday with new cabinet members to be revealed today.
As of Thursday, evening two appointments have been confirmed. The current executive secretary of the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), Alicia Bárcena Ibarra, will head the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores-SRE), replacing Patricia Espinosa Cantellano. And Eduardo Medina Mora Thomas, former head of the Center for Investigation and National Security (Centro de Investigación y Seguridad Nacional -Cisen) and the Attorney General’s Office (Procuraduría General de la República-PGR) and current Ambassador of Mexico to the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, will occupy the Mexican embassy in Washington.
Currently, Mexico’s congress does not have a dominant political party, so Peña Nieto and the Institutional Revolutionary Party (Partido Revolucionario Institucional—PRI) will have to seek consensus after gaining power for the first time in 12 years. A source close to Peña Nieto said that while addressing violence, kidnappings and extortion are demanding issues, the country faces other pressing concerns.
Mexico’s incoming president will need to address the alarming unemployment figure of 8 million young adults that are out of the work, despite the fact that Mexico is the second-strongest economy in Latin America, behind Brazil. The pursuit of free-trade agreements between Mexico and the BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) has been discussed for decades, but these initiatives have been stagnant. Mexico is the seventh-largest producer of crude oil in the world, but the country needs more private investors to take advantage of the Mexican economy’s projected 3 to 4 percent growth. Although it is fundamental to create incentives for private investors for the exploration and production of crude oil, there are limits, since most of the resources are state-owned.
Updated (November 30, 4:30p.m.): Enrique Peña Nieto’s cabinet was introduced. Here is a complete list of the names with their government posts.
