By MARC LACEY
Miguel de la Madrid, a former president of Mexico whose derided handling of the earthquake that devastated Mexico City in 1985 was the beginning of the end for the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, died Sunday morning in Mexico City. He was 77 .
His death was confirmed by his office. No cause was specified, but Mr. de la Madrid had been hospitalized with emphysema for the past three months, said his private secretary, Delia Gonzalez.
A Harvard-educated technocrat, Mr. de la Madrid was elected in 1982 and presided over one of the most difficult six-year terms of any Mexican leader. He inherited an economy in crisis. After Mexico borrowed against oil revenues, it defaulted on its foreign debt. As inflation roared past 100 percent and unemployment reached 25 percent, the country struggled to apply free-market principles to what had been a closed economy.
To deal with the foreign debt emergency, Mr. de la Madrid imposed austerity measures that were widely unpopular. But he is credited with setting Mexico on a path toward a free-market economy, which culminated in the country’s entering into the North American Free Trade Agreement with the United States and Canada in 1994.
The most memorable event of his time in office was the magnitude 8.1 earthquake that leveled buildings across the capital on the morning of Sept. 19, 1985, and left an estimated 10,000 people dead. Mr. de la Madrid was seemingly absent for the first day and a half after the quake, and he initially refused international aid and played down damage that was obvious to all. When Mexicans saw that their government was failing to act, they cleared debris and searched for survivors on their own, giving rise to citizens’ groups that would later challenge Mexico’s authoritarian politics.
A beneficiary of the system known in Mexico as el dedazo, the finger tap, Mr. de la Madrid was the anointed successor of President José López Portillo. Mr. de la Madrid would also handpick the next president, Carlos Salinas de Gortari, but that transition would not go smoothly.
A fierce critic of Mr. de la Madrid’s rule, Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, joined with other reformers in the P.R.I., as the Institutional Revolutionary Party is known, to call for a more transparent selection process for presidential candidates. Such internal criticism was considered treasonous by party hard-liners, and Mr. de la Madrid said: “As far as I’m concerned, let them go. Let them form another party.”
They did, and although Mr. Cárdenas failed to defeat Mr. Salinas, the 1988 election would be marred by irregularities, including the crash of the government computer used to count votes. It was the first time in generations that the ruling party’s victory was not a foregone conclusion.
Twelve years later, when Vicente Fox won the presidency representing the opposition National Action Party, the P.R.I. would finally lose its grip on Mexico.
Calling him a “gray president,” Lorenzo Meyer, a historian, said Mr. de la Madrid had been unlucky to inherit such a grave economic crisis and proved unable to extract the country from it. Mr. de la Madrid, Mr. Meyer said, was the father of Mexico’s political opposition, since it was his stubbornness that gave rise to it.
Future presidents learned from Mr. de la Madrid’s missteps. During the 2009 outbreak of swine flu in Mexico, President Felipe Calderón took to the airwaves and made public appearances to let the population know he was on top of the crisis. Commentators praised him for not following in the footsteps of Mr. de la Madrid.
After his term ended, Mr. de la Madrid became the director of the state-owned publishing company and remained largely out of the public eye. He did resurface in 2009 in a radio interview in which he expressed regret for choosing Mr. Salinas, who is widely reviled because of an economic collapse shortly after he left office and revelations of an unexplained fortune amassed by his brother.
Born in Colima, on Mexico’s Pacific coast, on Dec. 12, 1934, Mr. de la Madrid graduated from the National Autonomous University of Mexico and later received a master’s degree from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. He began his career in government with a series of bureaucratic positions in Mexico’s central bank, at the state-owned oil company and in the finance ministry. In 1976 he became secretary of budget and planning under President López Portillo.
Mr. de la Madrid is survived by his wife, Paloma Cordero; his sons, Miguel, Enrique, Federico and Gerardo de la Madrid Cordero; a daughter, Margarita de la Madrid Cordero; and several grandchildren.
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