Mexico’s Original Trump Ambassador Videgaray to Lead MIT Project

(Bloomberg) -- The man who sparked controversy by bringing Donald Trump to Mexico when he was a candidate and later helped negotiate a deal to preserve free trade is taking a new job at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, according to four people with knowledge of his plans.

Luis Videgaray, who served as finance minister and later foreign minister for President Enrique Pena Nieto from 2012-2018, will lead a project on the geopolitics of artificial intelligence at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for the academic year that begins in September, according to the people, who asked not to be identified because the plans haven’t yet been made public. Two of his main responsibilities are organizing a conference for next year and delivering a final report with analysis, one of the people said.

Contacted by phone, Videgaray, 50, confirmed that he is joining MIT. He declined to elaborate on details before the school shares the information within its community. MIT’s press office declined to comment. The former official earned his doctorate in economics at MIT two decades ago with a thesis on how oil price changes have shocked governments reliant on crude.

Videgaray was the master strategist behind Pena Nieto, who left office at the end of November. As an investment banker at Protego, founded by Pedro Aspe, he helped restructure the debt of the State of Mexico, and he became the state’s finance minister in 2005, with Pena Nieto as governor. Videgaray managed Pena Nieto’s successful 2012 presidential campaign and served as finance minister for the first three and a half years of his presidency.

In August 2016, he worked with Trump son-in-law and adviser Jared Kushner to arrange Trump’s visit to Mexico City after he became the Republican presidential nominee. Videgaray resigned days later after a public backlash, with Trump calling him a “wonderful man” on his departure. He returned to the cabinet four months later as foreign minister following Trump’s victory.

Videgaray played a key role in the U.S. Mexico Canada Agreement, an update of the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement reached last September following Trump’s threats to withdraw from Nafta, managing the negotiations for Mexico along with Economy Minister Ildefonso Guajardo and Jesus Seade, the representative from then President-elect Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, known as AMLO.

The USMCA deal was passed in Mexico’s Senate last month and now awaits legislative votes in Canada and the U.S.

Videgaray also worked to design and push through Congress sweeping fiscal and banking-industry overhauls passed during Pena Nieto’s first year in office. He also helped craft constitutional changes that opened the nation’s oil industry after 75 years of state monopoly, a change that was opposed by AMLO and politicians from the Mexican left. The new government, which took office in December, has questioned the results of the overhaul and suspended the award of new contracts.

To contact the reporter on this story: Eric Martin in Mexico City at emartin21@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Juan Pablo Spinetto at jspinetto@bloomberg.net, Robert Jameson

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