Jorge Álvarez Máynez remembers that he was not an ordinary child. He was very little when he exchanged the spinning top, the yo-yo and the bicycle for newspapers and political and economic magazines. He was what he had at home being the son of Felipe Álvarez, businessman, founder of the Communist Party in Zacatecas and municipal president of Guadalupe [2001- 2004], a town in the State. It was impossible for that child not to become a politician.
Máynez, a football fan, went from being the best ““signer” of Movimiento Ciudadano (MC) and campaign coordinator of the presidential candidate Samuel García, governor of Nuevo León, for presidential candidate. His name was the emergency solution to the failure of Samuel García, who had to renounce his aspirations due to pressure from the opposition. His first challenge was to overcome internal reluctance. MC heavyweights, such as Enrique Alfaro, governor of Jalisco, did not see sufficient credentials to be the party’s first presidential bet.
Máynez was born in a golden cradle, through a cesarean section that was scheduled for Gabriela Máynez, his mother, on July 8, 1985 so as not to interfere in the election that was held a day before. Her family suffered some of the economic crises that Mexico has gone through. Like that of 1989, the result of the most controversial presidential election – a year earlier – in the country’s political history, that of Carlos Salinas de Gortari, stained by the fall of the electoral count when he lost to the left represented by Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas.
The bad streak led his father to sacrifice the family home to save the fledgling paint factory that served as a support. Without neighbors to play with, nor many hobbies to pursue in the facilities of a company and two older brothers, Máynez read newspapers and magazines about politics and economics at the age of four. His circle of relationships were his father’s friends, members of the Unified Socialist Party of Mexico (PSUM). Among them was Amalia García, governor of Zacatecas for the PRD and today a federal deputy for MC, whom she considers an aunt.
“The PRI invented this phrase that in politics friends are lies and enemies are real ones. In the tradition of the comrades we had a permanent coexistence, I learned a lot from them,” recalls Máynez. Everything is concatenated in its history as a preview of a political destiny. In high school he founded a student organization that brought him closer to Gilberto Rincón Gallardo, presidential candidate of the Social Democracy Party (PDS) in 2000.
In 2003, a speech by the Frenchman Dominique de Villepin before the United Nations Security Council, in which he launched a message against the war in Iraq, defined his academic choice. Máynez graduated as an internationalist from the Western Institute of Technology and Higher Studies (ITESO), Jalisco campus, one of the most prestigious private universities in the country. She will later pursue two master’s degrees: one in public administration and another in international studies at the Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey.
Máynez’s political career goes through several color ranges. He starts with the yellow of the PRD, a party that leads him to govern the Zacatecas city council (2004-2007). Later he moved to the PRI tricolor, allied with the turquoise of Nueva Alianza, with which he repeated the position of councilor, but in the town of Guadalupe (2007-2010), where his father had governed three years ago; With the PRI he occupied a seat in the Zacatecan Congress between 2010 and 2013. It is in Jalisco where he makes the leap towards the orange of Movimiento Ciudadano (MC), supported by his professor Mario López Ramírez in 2013. Two years later, he occupies a multi-member seat in the Chamber of Deputies
In the midst of the political whirlwind, Maynez met Karina Gidi in 2015, a renowned Mexican actress 13 years older. The couple got married after a year of dating and divorced seven months later, in July 2016. What happened during the relationship? “Not one year. Seven months. Hellish”, the actress published on her social networks on April 17, without naming the candidate. After this failed experience, Sara Aguilar, daughter of Rubén Aguilar, spokesperson for former President Vicente Fox, came into Máynez’s life. The couple had two children: Luciano in 2018 and Constanza in 2023. The candidate keeps his private life as far away as possible from the bell.
His two children and Sara Aguilar are the center of his life, according to his closest circle. That the dirty war of an electoral campaign would affect them is the candidate’s main concern, as he himself said in an interview with this newspaper.
“Jorge [
Máynez]is the scorer at the moment and Dante [Delgado] He is the owner,” says Senator Clemente Castañeda. In retrospect, within the deck of options that MC had to choose a presidential replacement against the clock, Máynez was the best profile, although the legislator acknowledges that he did not see many possibilities for him. Today, with third place in the polls, he not only attributes her an outstanding performance, but also the best campaign of the race. The Zacatecan fell silent. “I confess that I thought that at some point he was going to overcome that fever that characterizes him,” reveals the senator. It was not like that, his strategy was stronger than the viscera, he acknowledges. Castañeda has known him for a long time, since 2012, when they both arrived at the game. The member of the Jalisco Group—one of the most important because it was the first State that MC won with Alfaro—agreed to draw part of this profile.
A man “intense in everything he does”, bold, intelligent, brave, disruptive, millennial and far from the standard of a politician, was what Delgado needed after Marcelo Ebrard, the former foreign minister of Andrés López Obrador, his ideal candidate, rejected the offer to be the orange candidate for the presidency of Mexico.
Máynez meets the image that MC wants to offer: a young, new party, against the old politics. The candidate quickly became known thanks to the most viral song of the race. He Máynez, Máynez, Máynez, president Máynez It was an unimaginable phenomenon that allowed him to add more than 10 points in the polls in just 90 days.
Máynez recruited characters whom he convinced to abandon their origins – in the PAN or the PRI – or who he simply found navigating indecision to convert them to the new, the phospho, phospho. From García to Juan Ignacio Zavala, general secretary of MC, Máynez has been Dante’s talent scout throughout the country. “He has a great ability to forge alliances, he is the main negotiator, he is the great recruiter of Movimiento Ciudadano,” says Martín Vivanco, who also contributes to this profile. Máynez has been able to gain loyalty with his talent of “putting opportunities on the table”, of reading his objectives, of giving them what they are looking for and need.
“Tenacious”, “generous”, “cheerful”, “honest”, “loyal” or “close” are some of the virtues attributed to Máynez by his friends and at the same time collaborators, including Laura Ballesteros, his spokesperson and coordinator. campaign. The young politician, trained in the PAN, found “her pack” in the MC six years ago. She now sees him as an oracle to make political decisions. She has a lot to thank him for, such as the empathy he had from her to place her in the party as agreement secretary, a bureaucratic position that gave her the opportunity to fulfill her dream of being a mother. “Jorge has been there for me many times and for me it was unthinkable to leave him alone in an assignment of this size, in the most important challenge of his life,” says Ballesteros.
Juan Ignacio Zavala, nephew of Margarita Zavala, wife of former President Felipe Calderón, also joined the party for Máynez. His approach was atypical, through social networks, he says. Zavala “was very disillusioned” with the PAN when he had his first approaches to MC, convinced by Máynez. Three years later, he was already general secretary of the party, a position he still holds. “Máynez has an aversion to monotony,” he says. In addition to being “intense in everything he does,” the candidate is a man who protects his bubble of friends, who is loyal, but exploits other virtues that influenced his candidacy due to a lack of commitment.
The Zacatecan does not enjoy the appreciation of everyone in MC, “he is not a gold coin,” warn those who know him. Before him in the race were Senator Patricia Mercado, the governor of Jalisco, Enrique Alfaro, and the mayor of Monterrey, Luis Donaldo Colosio Riojas. But all of them rejected the order.
Máynez, however, has woven stories with most of the party members. With Senator Mercado he is united by admiration and ideas. In 2006, when the woman launched the presidential race for the Social Democratic Party, she campaigned in universities, as did Máynez. “A frank, direct, prepared politician and a good negotiator. “He always carries a book,” says Mercado. It is a brushstroke of Mercado’s definition of the Zacatecan that he met in 2018, although the memories that the candidate has with her are 18 years ago. The senator recognizes him as one of the most important figures in MC, who has contributed to forming the political cadres of the party in the territory. “It was not the last option [como candidato]”, defends the senator. Máynez represented the party because of the attributes that the majority agree on.
“One of the negative things that Jorge has [Máynez] It’s just that it’s obsessively Puma, and it totally annoys me because I’m going to Chivas,” says Senator Castañeda. Beyond the joke, Castañeda warns that the candidate “is a man extremely attached to his ideas and sometimes the lack of flexibility, in specific circumstances, can hinder him from continuing to advance.” And he gives an example. Durin
g his first term in Congress, in 2016, Castañeda instructed Máynez to be measured in his speeches. “It was a highly delicate moment in the relationship between the parliamentary groups, the PRI was the majority. I asked him to take care of the tone of the confrontation and the disagreement we have with the PRI. ‘Don’t worry,’ he told me. Moments later, Máynez took to the stands wearing a T-shirt with the legend “Peña [Nieto] Corrupt”.
MC now puts his faith in Máynez. And his circle considers that he won whatever the outcome of the elections. “He achieved a bridge with a sector of the population, with young people who did not have any political organization, and that, in terms of building a political project, is formidable,” says Castañeda.
Máynez’s campaign will be marked by the tragedy in one of his last rallies in Monterrey, which ended with nine deaths due to the collapse of the stage. The candidate says that this was the “most painful experience of his life.” If this Sunday he receives a new blow, this time at the polls, he clarifies that he will be prepared: “When you set your horizon of happiness on ordinary things, it does not affect you.”
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