Ramsey Muñiz

Ramsey was released on compassionate grounds under federal supervision on December 10, 2018. He died on October 2, 2022 from complications of myasthenia gravis.

After his release, Muñiz worked as a legal assistant to several attorneys. In 1982, he pled no contest to a possession of cocaine charge and served two years. In 1994, he was arrested by the Drug Enforcement Administration in a rental car with 90 pounds of cocaine. He was serving a life sentence at the United States Penitentiary, Leavenworth, Kansas, without the possibility of parole.

In 1976, the U.S. government brought felony drug charges against Muñiz for allegedly attempting to smuggle 6,500 pounds of marijuana into the U.S. from Mexico. He pleaded guilty to one count and served five years in a federal penitentiary. This effectively killed the Raza Unida Party. Its 1978 gubernatorial candidate, Mario Cura Compean, polled only 14,213 (barely one-half of 1 percent), as Republican Bill Clements became his state's first Republican governor in 105 years.

Muñiz ran again for governor in 1974 and polled fewer votes but about the same overall percent as he had received in 1972. He hence lost again to Briscoe, who carried all but seven counties in his race against the Republican nominee, Jim Granberry, a former mayor of Lubbock, who carried the backing of U.S. Senator John G. Tower. In that election, Briscoe won the first four-year term for governor in Texas since 1873, when Democrat Richard Coke unseated Republican Edmund J. Davis.

While still twenty-nine and working as an attorney for the Model Cities program in Waco, Muñiz ran as the La Raza gubernatorial candidate after several better known names in the Hispanic community, such as then State Representative Carlos Truan of Corpus Christi, declined to seek the state's highest office. Though the minimum age is thirty to become governor of Texas, Muñiz would have reached that age in time for the 1973 inauguration had he been elected. His campaign focused primarily on issues of importance to Hispanics, as espoused at the first Raza Unida convention held earlier that year in El Paso. Muñiz had a female running mate for lieutenant governor, Alma Canales of Edinburg, who had been a farmworker and journalism student at the University of Texas - Pan American. At twenty-four, Canales did not meet the age qualification for the office but ran to emphasize women's issues. She was defeated by the Democratic nominee Bill Hobby of Houston who won the first of five terms (the first for two years) in the state's second ranking constitutional office.

Muñiz obtained a scholarship to attend Baylor University in Waco, Texas, where he obtained in 1967 his Bachelor of Science degree. In 1971, he procured his Juris Doctor degree from Baylor Law School, having worked as an assistant coach to help finance his studies. While in law school, Muñiz joined the newly established Mexican American Youth Organization, a politically-active organization known as MAYO, which held its only convention in 1969.

Ramiro Muñiz, known as Ramsey Muñiz (December 13, 1942 - October 2, 2022), was an American political activist. Muñiz was a Mexican American who ran for governor of Texas in 1972 and 1974, each time as the nominee of the Raza Unida Party. He lost both elections to the Democrat Dolph Briscoe, a wealthy banker and landowner from Uvalde, Texas. He is the first Hispanic whose name appeared on a Texas gubernatorial general election ballot.