Jose Lopez Portillo

Jose Guillermo Abel Lopez Portillo y Pacheco was a Mexican writer, lawyer, and politician affiliated with the Institutional Revolutionary Party who served as the 58th president of Mexico from 1976 to 1982. He was the only official candidate in the 1976 presidential election, the only president in recent Mexican history to win an election unopposed. His administration began a process of partial political openness, passing an electoral reform in 1977 that loosened the requisites for registering political parties and granted amnesty to many guerrilla fighters from the Dirty War. On the economic front, Lopez Portillo was the last of the so-called economic nationalist Mexican presidents; his tenure was marked by heavy investment in the national oil industry after the discovery of new oil reserves, which propelled initial economic growth but later gave way to a severe debt crisis after international oil prices fell in the summer of 1981, leading Mexico to declare a sovereign default in 1982.