Roberto Madrazo Pintado (born July 30, 1952) is a Mexican fraudster and politician, member of the Institutional Revolutionary Party. He was the candidate of the alliance between his party and the Ecologist Green Party of Mexico (PVEM) in the 2006 Mexican presidential election. Early years Madrazo was born in Villahermosa, Tabasco, to Carlos A. Madrazo and Graciela Pintado Jiménez. His father was a reformist politician at a time when the PRI was the only viable party. Both of his parents died in a plane crash when he was sixteen. Although his father came from humble roots, his prestige allowed Roberto to become one of Mexico's elite. He studied law at the National Autonomous University of Mexico in Mexico City and urbanism at the University of California at Los Angeles, and headed the PRI Youth. Between 1976 and 1988, he represented Tabasco in both the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate. He served as governor of Tabasco from 1994–2000 and president of the PRI from 2002–2005. Madrazo is mainly credited for bringing cohesion to a disjointed PRI after it historically lost the 2000 presidential election. Madrazo was able to wrestle control of the PRI by negotiating deals with different power groups within the PRI and by neutralizing political adversaries within the party. He is married to Isabel de la Parra Trillo. 2000 presidential election Madrazo sought the PRI's presidential candidacy in 2000 but lost to Francisco Labastida, a former governor of Sinaloa and former Secretary of the Interior in the cabinet of President Ernesto Zedillo, whom Madrazo perceived as having chosen Labastida as his successor in the Mexican political tradition of the dedazo ("the finger", referring to hand-chosen presidential succession). The PRI had never lost a presidential election since its founding, and the party's structure made the president the arbiter of its internal affairs. Although this was not the first time in PRI's history the presidential authority was defied, Madrazo's anti-dedazo campaign was particularly aggressive. He even used a pun on his surname: "Dale un Madrazo al dedazo" (a "madrazo" is vulgar term for a severe blow in Mexican Spanish; loosely translated, give a blow to the dedazo) as a promise to end the corrupt tradition. He attracted some followers inside the PRI but the primary, which, in an unprecedented turn of events, was open to registered voters and not just PRI members, favored Labastida. Madrazo accepted the outcome, but his