Ismael Hernández

Ismael Alfredo Hernández Deras (born Victoria de Durango, February 20, 1964) is a Mexican politician affiliated to the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) who served as Governor of the State of Durango from September 15, 2004 to September 14, 2010. Hernández has previously served as municipal president (mayor) and senator.

He studied at the ESIMA (Escuela Secundaria Ignacio Manuel Altamirano) in the capital, Durango. He is an accountant with a title from the Universidad Juárez del Estado de Durango, where he was a student leader. From 1989 until 1992, he was president of the Revolutionary Juvenile Front in Durango, and at the same time a local member of the Chamber of Deputies.

Between 1992 and 1995 he was an elected into the Chamber of Deputies for the state of Durango, and during the time between 1992 and 1994, he was state president of the PRI.

In 1994, he was elected Federal Deputy for Durango, ending in 1997. From 1995 until 1998 he was Secretary General of the "Confederación Nacional de Organizaciones Populares en Durango" and was elected a state senator between 1997 and 2000.

He was elected mayor of Durango in 1998. In 2000 he was elected senator.In 2003 he was elected governor of the state of Durango. He ended his tenure when he became governor of the state on the 15th of September 2004 until 2010.

The now former governor of Durango has been linked directly to organized crime repeatedly. First for having links with the Pacific cartel since 2004,^[1][2] as well as for being behind the kidnapping of Jose Morales Cervantes, entrepreneur in Huixquilucan, in Estado de Mexico, in June 2011. Morales Cervantes was taken violently to the state of Durango by some individuals allegedly sent by Hernándes Deras and subsequently put in State Penitentiary without an arrest warrant. Apparently a district association "Mescaleros del Mezquital" – of which Hernandez Deras and his family are partners and to which Morales Cervantes had produced and delivered machinery for distillation – had filed a criminal complaint for fraud without notifying the Morales Cervantes through legal channels. Instead, they proceeded to the kidnapping calling and asking the Cervantes family to deliver 13 million pesos. The sum was not paid because the relatives of Morales Cervantes found his whereabouts and could get him out of prison. Trial is ongoing between the parties whereby the Cervantes family has received death threats.^[3][4]

Ismael Hernandez Deras was elected senator in the recent elections of 2012.^[5]

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