Juan Camilo Mouriño, was a rising star in Mexican politics, and a key figure in the government’s war on organised crime. He was a close friend of President Felipe Calderón, and his death will be a severe blow to the government’s campaign to break the growing power of ruthless drug-trafficking gangs.

Mouriño died in an aircraft crash earlier this month that also claimed the life of the former chief prosecutor José Luis Santiago Vasconcelos. Continuing investigations have found no evidence that a bomb was responsible for the crash of the government-owned Learjet in the centre of Mexico City during rush hour. But Mouriño would have been an obvious target for assassins. As Interior Minister he had been co-ordinating the Government’s frontal assault on the drug cartels that have been responsible for thousands of deaths in Mexico this year.

Juan Camilo Mouriño was born in Spain in 1971, the youngest of three children of a Galician father, a successful businessman, and Mexican mother. The family emigrated to Mexico in 1978, and Juan Camilo chose to become a Mexican citizen at the age of 18.

He read economics at the University of Tampa in Florida, returning to Mexico to pursue a postgraduate degree in finance at the University of Campeche, in the tropical southeast. There he was elected first to the state legislature in 1997, when he was 26, and later to the Federal Congress in Mexico City for the conservative National Action Party (PAN).

He established a close working relationship with Felipe Calderón, who was PAN floor leader in the lower house in 2000, and when Calderón was appointed Energy Minister, Mouriño became his under-secretary. He later managed Calderón’s successful presidential campaign in 2006, and then headed the transition team, before serving as President Calderón’s chief of staff.

He was appointed to the Interior Ministry, the second-most-powerful post in the country, in January this year, to lead the campaign against the criminal organisations that control much of the supply of cocaine and heroin to the US market, earning an estimated $100 billion (£67 billion) in the process. Despite throwing more than 30,000 troops and special police units into the fray, the Government has still not been able to get on top of the situation.

Mouriño was a controversial figure, and not just because of his Spanish birth in a country where attitudes towards the former colonial masters are still very ambivalent. He was accused by the left-wing opposition leader, Andrés Manuel López Obrador — whom Calderón had defeated in the 2006 presidential election — of using his official position to procure government contracts for his family’s fuel distribution business.

He was cleared by a congressional commission of inquiry in March this year, but López Obrador rejected the commission’s report.

Juan Camilo Mouriño Terrazo, Mexican politician, was born on August 1, 1971. He died in a plane crash on November 4, 2008, aged 37