Porfirio Muñoz Ledo

Porfirio Alejandro Muñoz Ledo y Lazo de la Vega (b. July 23, 1933 in Mexico City) is a Mexican politician. He is one of the founders of the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD).

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.

He 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 Mexican Ambassador to the United Nations (1978-1985), where he presided 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. The following year (May 5, 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 Congress in the post-revolutionary period. 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.