Alejandro Murat Hinojosa

Alejandro Ismael Murat Hinojosa (born August 4, 1975) is a Mexican politician affiliated with the Institutional Revolutionary Party. He was elected Governor of Oaxaca in 2016 and took office on December 1, 2016.

Murat Hinojosa was born on August 4, 1975 in the State of Mexico; his father, José Murat Casab, was also a PRI politician who served as governor of Oaxaca from 1998 to 2004. In 2001, he obtained his law degree from the ITAM.[1] He later received a master’s degree in law from Columbia University.

He served as an alternate deputy to the LIX Legislature of the Mexican Congress for the Federal District, and on October 28, 2004, he took the place of Jorge Ortiz Alvarado when he asked to resign. In his two years in San Lázaro, he presided over the Special Commission for Competitiveness and Regional Development and also served on the Communications Commission.[1]

From 2007 to 2009, he was the director general of the Institute of Registral Functions of the State of Mexico, which oversees real estate and land transactions; from 2009 to 2011, he directed the Sistema de Radio y Televisión Mexiquense.[2] He served as housing coordinator for Enrique Peña Nieto’s presidential campaign[3] and headed INFONAVIT from December 11, 2012 to December 1, 2015; during his leadership, reforms were made to the management of mortgages at the workers’ housing agency.[2]

Murat resigned from INFONAVIT in order to run as the PRI candidate for governor of Oaxaca. There were several questions about whether Murat qualified for the office, given that Article 23 of the Oaxaca state constitution says that only citizens of the state can run for its elected offices.[4] The case was taken to the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation, which unanimously ruled that Murat was eligible because both of his parents were born in that state, and the state constitution defines any child of a parent from Oaxaca as a citizen of that state.[5] He ran under a PRI-PVEM-Nueva Alianza coalition and won on June 5, 2016.[3]

Murat was on board the helicopter which crashed in February 2018 while surveying the damage done by the recent earthquake. 15 people were killed in the crash, but Murat and fellow politician Alfonso Navarrete Prida escaped with comparatively minor injuries.[6]