Vice President Joe Biden will lead the US delegation at the inauguration of Enrique Pena Nieto as Mexico’s new president, the White House said yesterday. Pena Nieto, a member of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), takes office on Saturday, replacing Felipe Calderon from the conservative National Action Party (PAN), exactly five months after his election victory. The US delegation to the inauguration includes labour secretary Hilda Solis and John Brennan, the White House’s top counterterrorism adviser. The announcement comes as Pena Nieto is set to arrive in Washington for a White House visit with President Barack Obama, scheduled for today. The youthful 46-year-old’s victory in July marks the return of the centrist PRI after a 12-year hiatus from national power. The PRI governed Mexico between 1929 and 2000. Obama and Pena Nieto plan to discuss a raft of bilateral, regional and global issues, likely to include the drug war raging along their shared border of more than 1,800 miles, the White House said earlier. Calderon deployed tens of thousands of troops in late 2006 in a US-supported effort to crack down on the powerful drug cartels but violence escalated during his presidency, and the death toll — much of it in fighting between drug gangs — rose to more than 60,000. Pena Nieto has vowed to shift the focus to reducing the wave of murders, kidnappings and extortion that is tormenting Mexicans.