Baltazar Hinojosa Ochoa

Political career

Hinojosa joined the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) in 1981 and was a member of its National Political Council and Permanent Politics Commission. He also was a member of the PRI’s Political State Council in Tamaulipas and Municipal Political Counselor of the same party in Matamoros.

He was also the General Director of the Trust for the League of Revolutionary Economists of the Mexican Republic (LER), as well as its finance secretary and its subsecretary of regional coordination for northern Mexico.

In Mexico City, after receiving his degree, in his first public service position, he was a counselor of the General Office of Documentation, Analysis, and Evaluation of the Secretariat of Programming and Budget There, he served as counselor and speaker for the Undersecretary of Development Planning's Political Economy Information Program, where he also served as chief of department in the Office of Planning Coordination.

In 1985 he gave a course in macroeconomics and taught a seminar titled "Mexico’s Economic, Political, and Social Problems" at the Universidad Anáhuac.

Later, he was chief of the Department of Budgets and Income in the office of the president of the National Institute of Statistics and Geography (INEGI). He was also its deputy budget director and a private secretary to the president of the INEGI.

In 1988, Hinojosa coordinated advisors to the Presidency of the Programming and Budget Commission for the first period session of the LIV Legislature of the Mexican Congress. Later, in the DICONSA-CONASUPO, he served as a submanager of Commercial Modernization.

From 1994 to 1996, he was a Federal Delegate of the SEDESOL in Coahuila, during which he also served as Technical Secretary of the State Committee for Development Planning (COPLADEC). In 1997, he went on to take the position of Subsecretary of Expenses in the Coahuila state finance secretariat, where he remained until 1999. During these years, he was also a member of the Banobras Council in Coahuila.

He served as Secretary of Social Development for the Government of Tamaulipas from April to December 2000, and in 2001, he rejoined the state cabinet as Secretary of Education, Culture, and Sport, a post he held until February 2003. In between, he worked at PEMEX.

Federal deputy

He was chosen as a federal deputy for the Fourth Federal Electoral District of Tamaulipas for the LIX (2003-2004) and LXI (2009-2011) Legislatures, he became the recipient of a special award on behalf of the then-Secretary of Public Education, Dr. Reyes Tamez Guerra, during the VIII National Meeting of Educational Authorities carried out in April 2003, in San Luis Potosi.

In the LIX Legislature, Hinojosa sat on the Budget and Public Account Commission, as well as the Finances and Public Credit Commission and the Special Commission for the Cuenca de Burgos Region. He participated actively in the integration of the Federation Spending Budget decrees, which included important measures to encourage greater transparency and efficiency in public spending, greater austerity in government spending, and federalism. During his term, more resources were allocated to the fishing and agriculture sector and to roads and highways. In April 2004, he formulated and presented before Congress the initiative for a new Federal Budget Law, which served as base for an enactment of the current Budget and Hacendaria Responsibility Federal Law.

In the LXI Legislature, he sat on the same commissions as in the LIX Legislature, adding a post on the Committee for the Center for the Study of Public Finances. He also served as president of the Mexico-UK and Mexico-Cuba Friendship Groups of the Chamber of Deputies and as the head of the PRI's Tamaulipas delegation.

Reform to the Third Constitutional Article and the Obligation of Medium-Superior Education

In April 2010, he presented an initiative for reform to the Constitutional Articule 3 of the Magna Carta, to make Medium-Superior Education obligatory nationwide, which was approved by both chambers of Congress in a unanimous vote and enacted in February 2012.

Municipal president of Matamoros

In late 2004, Hinojosa was elected as the municipal president of Matamoros, Tamaulipas from 2005 to 2007; the campaign was marked by eligibility concerns, as dueling birth certificates circulated: one showed Hinojosa as being born across the border in Brownsville, Texas, which would have made him ineligible for the position, while the other listed him as being born in Matamoros. His administration focused on strengthening urban infrastructure and sustainable development, improving the image of the city, consolidating cultural institutions, supporting education, and fostering economic development.

During his administration, he received from the President Vicente Fox the Habitat Award for 2006 for the design and operation of the Regional Sanitary Landfill for Matamoros, which was evaluated by the Center of Economic Investigation and Teaching (CIDE).

Likewise, in 2007, the public municipal debt was paid off, leaving the next administration debt-free. That year, he was named, along with the mayor of Brownsville, Texas, as a Distinguished Border Leader, an award received from Nancy Pelosi in Washington.

Director in Chief of ASERCA

On December 10, 2012, he was named Director in Chief of the Service Agency for the Commercializing and Development of the Fishing and Agricultural Markets (ASERCA), a decentralized subsidiary of SAGARPA (Secretariat of Agriculture, Livestock, Rural Development, Fisheries and Food) by Enrique Martínez y Martínez, under the instruction of President Enrique Pena Nieto. Hinojosa Ochoa left ASERCA on February 28, 2015.

PRI CEN Organization Secretary

On April 23, 2015, he was named Secretary of Organization for the National Executive Committee of the Institutional Revolutionary Party.

Return to the Chamber of Deputies

The PRI placed Hinojosa Ochoa on its list of proportional representation deputies from the second electoral region, sending him back to the Chamber of Deputies, this time in the LXIII Legislature, for a third term. Between September 2015 and January 2016, he was the president of the Budget and Public Accounts Commission and also served on the Finances and Public Credit Commission.

During his tenure, along all of his fellow disputes from the PRI, Baltazar voted against the "Ley 3 de 3 (Law 3 of 3)". A law that would have obligated every politician to declare three things: make an obligatory public patrimonial declaration, interests declaration, and fiscal. The purpose of such annual declarations, would have made corruption harder to hide. A light version of the law was accepted but it doesn't require politicians to declare on any of the instances stated above. While it was completely legal for Baltazar and the other deputies from the PRI, to vote against such law, some news media outlets interpreted the votes against the promulgation of such law as the political party protecting itself from the findings that could surface if such declarations were to be made.

2016 gubernatorial campaign

Effective January 27, 2016, Hinojosa Ochoa took leave from the Chamber of Deputies in order to pursue the governorship of Tamaulipas as the PRI candidate. He lost to Francisco Javier García Cabeza de Vaca of the PAN, who obtained a majority and became the first non-PRI governor of Tamaulipas in 86 years. Hinojosa Ochoa picked up 36 percent of the vote.

Accusations

On January 23, 2012, a DEA protected witness singled out Baltazar Hinojosa as one in five Mexican mayors from different cities in northern Tamaulipas who would have accepted bribes from the Cartel del Golfo in order to let it operate with impunity when smuggling drugs across the border with Texas. When this accusations were made public, Hinojosa immediately denied any wrongdoing.

Health

Baltazar Hinojosa is afflicted with Guillain–Barré syndrome, an autoimmune disease which has forced him on at least one occasion to be hospitalized in Texas.