Manuel Espino Barrientos (born 29 November 1959) is a Mexican politician affiliated to Movimiento Ciudadano. He is a federal deputy to the LXIII Legislature of the Mexican Congress from the fifth electoral region. Espino also was a federal deputy in the LVIII Legislature and from 2005 to 2007 served as the national president of the PAN.
Life
Education and career in Chihuahua
In 1979, Espino received his degree as an electrical technician from the Regional Technological Institute of Durango; a year before, he had joined the PAN. He was a frequent representative of the party in electoral matters, as well as a Scout and an instructor teaching business training courses in Ciudad Juárez and Durango; additionally, between 1978 and 1985, he was a middle and high school teacher at various educational institutions in Durango and Ciudad Juárez, as well as an administrator of an accounting and administration company. Between 1983 and 1985, Espino acted as an intervening administrator at Zapatería Bernini, a Ciudad Juárez company. From 1983 and 1988, Espino worked in the General Directorate of Public Security of Ciudad Juárez, first heading the department of Unit Control and later moving to Archives and Statistics; his final year in the agency was spent as a systems director.
1984 also saw Espino get involved in the founding of the Center of Hispanic-American Studies in El Paso, Texas, while the next year, he began a three-year term as president of the Mexican Scouts Association. In 1987, after five years of study, Espino graduated from the Universidad del Noroeste with a degree in business administration; the next year, he began a short stint as a production supervisor at Honeywell Optoelectronics in Ciudad Juárez.
Espino's political career continued to center around the PAN in Ciudad Juárez and Chihuahua. Between 1987 and 1989, he was the secretary of the Civil Resistance organization in the party; he served as a municipal-level general secretary from 1989–91 (which ended when he was tapped to be the interim president of the PAN in Ciudad Juárez), a state councilor between 1990 and 1993, ran for federal deputy in 1991, and served again in the Chihuahua PAN from 1991–92. Also during this time, he was a founding member and vice president of the Foundation for the Cultural Diffusion of America's Half Millennium, between 1989 and 1992.
In 1994, he served as a coordinator of the PAN's federal electoral campaign in Ciudad Juárez, and at the same time, he ran as a proportional representation deputy from the second electoral region. He was the PAN's Security Coordinator and served as a secretary on the National Defense Commission; simultaneously, he served on the national PAN's Secretariat of National Relations, in the department that managed relations with the armed forces.
Shift to Sonora
In 1996, Espino became the head of the PAN in Sonora and served on its state executive council from 1999 to 2002. Additionally, he served as the municipal comptroller of Hermosillo between 1998 and 2000.
In 2000, he returned to the Chamber of Deputies in its LVIII Legislature. He presided over the Special Commission on Public Security and also served on the Energy Commission. During this time, he simultaneously served as the travel coordinator for President Vicente Fox, as a national councilor for the PAN, and from 2002 to 2005, as the secretary general of the national PAN organization and a consultant to Grupo Industrial Fuentes.
Presidency of the PAN and expulsion
In 2005, Manuel Espino succeeded Luis Felipe Bravo and became the 18th president of the National Action Party, a position he held for two years. On November 11, 2006, he was elected president of the Christian Democrat Organization of America, a post he held until July 30, 2010, and between 2006 and 2009, he also was the vice president of Centrist Democrat International. However, during this time, a rift began to grow between Espino and the PAN president, Felipe Calderón Hinojosa; he also disagreed with the federal government's security strategy, calling it "one of the bloodiest". The end of Espino's presidency in 2007 and his replacement with Germán Martínez Cázares, identified as close to Calderón, came months after Espino and those associated with the highly conservative group Desarrollo Humano Integral, A.C., lost national party positions to supporters of Calderón.