Marcelo Ebrard
Marcelo Luis Ebrard Casaubon (b. October 10, 1959 in Mexico City) is a Mexican politician affiliated to the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) who served as general secretary of the former Mexican Federal District Department, secretary of public security and secretary of social development of the Mexican capital. He is the current PRD candidate to Head of Government of the Mexican Federal District.
Personal life and education
Ebrard is the son of architect Marcelo Ebrard Maure and Marcela Casaubon. He received a bachelor's degree in international relations from El Colegio de México, specialized in public administration and planning at the École nationale d'administration of France. He was married to Francescca Ramos Morgan, but he divorced her and now he will marry former soap-opera actress Mariagna Prats.
Political career
Ebrard became a member of the Revolutionary Institutional Party (PRI) in 1978. After volunteering in the presidential campaigns of 1976 and 1982, serving as an advisor to the general secretary in 1988 and being elected to the Chamber of Deputies, Ebrard Casaubon left the PRI with Manuel Camacho Solís to found the now-extinct Party of the Democratic Center.
He joined the cabinet of Head of Government of the Federal District Andrés Manuel López Obrador as secretary of public security in 2000 and became a member of the Party of the Democratic Revolution on September 12, 2004.
Controversy
When he was chief of police in Mexico City, three undercover federal police officers were lynched by a mob in one of the capital's most impoverished suburbs in Tláhuac. He refused to help them in the hours-long episode (local policemen were taped smoking cigarretes while watching the incident from a safe distance). The federal agents were observed taking photographs as part of his investigation and seized for several hours as child kidnappers despite identifying themselves as federal agents; two of them were finally beaten to death and burnt, the other one barely survived and was rescued. Both federal and local authorities refused to send any kind of reinforcements despite the several hours the incident lasted and the officers' pleas for help in live television. AMLO's posture was that he would never send the police against the crowd for any motive, even if they were holding law enforcement agents, as that would inevitably provoke a massacre, so he gave Ebrard his full support. However, Ebrard was sacked by President Fox. For this incident he is currently under investigation, as well as federal authorities which also didn´t act. He was quickly reinstated as secretary of social development by López Obrador.
2006 Head of Government election
He is currently running for Head of Government of the Mexican Federal District as the PRD candidate for the Mexican Federal District election to be held on July 2, 2006, and most polls indicate that he will win by a large margin.
Wedding
One week after the July 2, 2006 elections Marcelo Ebrard will marry actress Mariagna Pratts. Media exposed that his Wedding registry includes such niceties as an US$8,000 Silverware set; not bad for a government whose motto is First the poor. Palacio de Hierro immediately deleted their registry from their website when this was exposed in the media. For the really well-to-do, Marcelo has also a wedding registry at upscale store Roche-Bobois.
References
- Diccionario biográfico del gobierno mexicano (1992), Ed. Fondo de Cultura Económica, Mexico
External links
- Official site (in Spanish)
- Marcelo Ebrard at esmas.com (in Spanish)
- Recibe el PRD capitalino pruebas de la afiliación de Marcelo Ebrard ("The Federal District PRD chapter received Marcelo Ebrard's proof of membership"), article on La Jornada (in Spanish)