Background
Miguel Alemán Valdés was born on 29 September, 1900 in Sayula, Mexico. Alemán’s father had been a Revolutionary general and later a deputy in the federal Congress.
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Miguel Alemán Valdés was born on 29 September, 1900 in Sayula, Mexico. Alemán’s father had been a Revolutionary general and later a deputy in the federal Congress.
Alemán went to school in Orizaba and then to the National Preparatory School in Mexico City. He received his law degree from the National Autonomous University in 1928, writing a thesis on labor law. He began to climb the political ladder in 1928 when he became legal adviser to the minister of agriculture.
He began the era of civilian government. From the beginning of the Revolution in 1910, most Mexican leaders and every president from 1920 on, with the exception of two interim presidents under the tutelage of General Plutarco Elias Calles, had been army generals. Beginning with Alemán, every president has been an attorney by training except for Adolfo Ruiz Cortines (1952-1958), who was an economist.
In 1930 Alemán became a member of the Federal Board of Conciliation and Arbitration, gaining a national reputation as a negotiator in labor management talks. He carried on his father’s tradition of supporting the moderates within the Revolutionary establishment and opposing the leftists. He was a member of the Superior Tribunal of the Federal District during 1930-1935, governor of his native state of Veracruz during 1936-1939, and minister of internal affairs (Gobernación) in the presidential cabinet during 1940-1946. His presidential term ran from December 1946 to December 1952, a period in which the government built hydroelectric dams to bring full-scale irrigated farming to Mexico’s arid regions plus surplus electric power to fuel the new growth of industries.
Within the Institutional Revolutionary Party, the followers of former President Lázaro Cárdenas became the left-wingers, and the followers of Alemán became the right-wingers during Alemán’s administration and well into the 1960s, when those personalistic descriptions began to fade from popular usage.