Jaime Calderon

Education

Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León.

Career

He will serve as governor until 2021. Jaime Heliodoro Rodríguez Calderón was born on December 28, 1957, in Pablillo Ejido, a municipality of Galeana, Nuevo Leon. He was the fourth of ten children born to Lichita Calderon and Rodolfo Rodríguez.

Rodríguez attended primary school at Squadron 201 in Ejido Pablillo.

He attended secondary school at Miguel Hidalgo in Galeana. Rodríguez majored in Agricultural Engineering in the Autonomous University of Nuevo Leon and graduated in 1982.

According to Jaime, this was made possible by Don Protacio Rodriguez, owner of Transportes Tamaulipas (now Senda Group). Don Protacio gave Rodríguez a card that allowed him to travel to Monterrey for his studies.

Toward the end of his studies he performed a symbolic strike at the university, calling on governor Alfonso Martínez Domínguez to increase support for public transportation.

After the strike, and with the support of the governor, he established a scholarship for poor students struggling to pay for their education. Upon graduation, he joined the Institutional Revolutionary Party and worked for Governor Domínguez. During his term as mayor of García, Rodríguez was the target of violent attacks.

The 2013 El Bronco sin Miedo ("The Bronco Without Fear") recounted the attacks.

In the 2015 election, Rodríguez ran against Ivonne Alvarez (Institutional Revolutionary Party) and Felipe Cantu (Personal Area Networks). He first expressed an interest in running as an independent candidate on 3 December 2014.

By the second week of January his supporters collected 150,000 signatures, exceeding the 103,000 required to meet the 3% of the population minimum for independent candidates to get on the ballot. By February he had more than 334,000 signatures.

Election authorities officially added his name on 2 March.

Achievements

• He is the first independent candidate to have won a governorship in Mexico. Rodríguez won the 2015 race for Governor as an independent candidate on June 7, 2015, winning half the vote for the election compared to his traditional party competitors, who split the remainder of the votes.

Membership

He served as mayor of García, Nuevo León (2009–2012) as a member of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (Institutional Revolutionary Party), and was best known for his hard-line stance against organized crime. Rodríguez was a member of the Institutional Revolutionary Party for 33 years and served as a federal deputy in 1992, local Member of Parliament in 1997, and Mayor of García.