MEXICO CITY, Oct 29 — Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, a three-time presidential candidate and one of Mexico's most important modern political voices, died on Wednesday at the age of 92, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum announced, the Associated Press reported. An undisputed leader of the Mexican left, he was respected by allies and critics alike, and played a pivotal role in the country's democratisation.
Source: Associated Press
Cárdenas was the son of Gen. Lázaro Cárdenas, one of Mexico's most popular presidents, who nationalised the oil industry in 1938. A civil engineer by training, the younger Cárdenas rose through the long-ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) as a senator and governor of Michoacán before breaking with it to lead a democratic movement from within — and then against — the party that had governed Mexico for decades.
His first presidential bid in 1988 ended in a defeat widely regarded as the result of massive electoral fraud, after the official count abruptly stopped and his opponent Carlos Salinas de Gortari was declared the winner. The disputed election is widely seen as the beginning of Mexico's democratic transformation. Cárdenas went on to found the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) in 1989 and ran for president again in 1994 and 2000.
In 1997 he became Mexico City's first popularly elected mayor — the first time the capital's residents had been allowed to choose their own government. So steadfast was he in his principles, AP reported, that in 2014 he resigned from the PRD he had founded, because the party governed the state of Guerrero when 43 students disappeared there. He also distanced himself from his longtime ally Andrés Manuel López Obrador after López Obrador became president in 2018.
Sheinbaum, whose movement traces its roots to the democratic struggle Cárdenas led, paid tribute to him on X. Cárdenas was “a man of firm principles”, she said, who transformed Mexico's political life by leading “a peaceful democratic movement that channeled millions of Mexicans' yearning for change”. “That historic election day, when he should have been recognized as president, marked the beginning of the democratic transformation. His dignity and republican convictions remain an essential reference point for our nation,” she added, in remarks also carried by LaPresse.
Source: LaPresse / AP
No cause of death was announced. Cárdenas' career — from the disputed count of 1988 to the elected mayoralty of the capital nine years later — mapped the path by which Mexico's opposition moved from protest to power, a transition later completed by the left he founded.