MEXICO CITY ? Secretary of the Interior Francisco Blake Mora was the point man in Mexico's deadly war on organized crime, seen by many as the embodiment of the government's determination to battle the narcotics trade despite a soaring death toll.
Blake Mora died at 45 on Friday with seven other officials in a helicopter crash on the way to a prosecutors' meeting.
He made his name cracking down on drug cartel violence in his home state of Baja California by forging close cooperation between military and civilian law-enforcement officials.
He tirelessly promoted the same strategy as President Felipe Calderon's No. 2, the top policy official in Mexico's all-out push against drug traffickers and corruption.
Blake Mora also led the push to clean up Mexico's notoriously corrupt state and local police forces.
"We're trying to establish a justice system that both prevents criminal impunity and responds to the needs of society and its demands for social justice," he said at a meeting of government officials this year.
The secretary of the interior is second only to the president in authority and coordinates domestic policy, including security, human rights, migration and the president's relation with the legislature and opposition parties.
Blake Mora frequently traveled to violence-torn cities for meetings with besieged state and local security officials, promising to step up the presence of troops and federal police in violent areas, and not leave until drug gang members there were caught.
"Organized crime, in its desperation, resorts to committing atrocities that we can't and shouldn't tolerate as a government and as a society," Blake Mora said after investigators found more than 100 bodies in pits near the U.S. border.
He later announced a five-point initiative to investigate the crimes and to increase security, including the federal monitoring of buses such as those used by the migrant victims.
Blake Mora also oversaw the government's response to natural disasters like the massive oil pipeline disaster that laid waste to parts of the central city of San Martin Texmelucan last year, killing at least 28 people.
He led the creation of a new national identity card for youths under 18, with modern features including digitalized fingerprints and iris images, to prevent criminals from using false IDs.
Trained as a lawyer, Blake Mora started his political career in the mid-1990s as an official in his native Tijuana. He served as a federal congressman for Calderon's National Action Party from 2000 to 2003, and as a local legislator in the northern state of Baja California from 2004 to 2007.
In November 2007, he was named interior secretary for Baja California, rising in July 2010 to the national position he held until his death. Calderon lost another interior secretary, Juan Camilo Mourino, in a plane crash in Mexico City in November 2008.
Blake Mora's last posting on Twitter Friday remembered Mourino as "a person who was working to build a better Mexico."
Government officials said Calderon was with Blake Mora's widow Gloria Cosio and children on Friday.
"This is very unfortunate," said Sinaloa Congressman Manuel Clouthier, whose own father, a popular politician in the National Action Party, died in a still-unexplained highway accident in 1989. "There are many coincidences because now we have two interior ministers (lost) in one presidential term ... Who knows if we'll ever really know what happened."
Blake Mora's funeral was scheduled for Saturday.
(This version CORRECTS of Blake Mora's role, did not run day-to-day government)
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