Cuauhtemoc Cardenas should have been remembered as one of the great presidents of Mexico, which he certainly would have been. He ran for president three times, in 1988, 1994, and 2000, and each time the old political system used fraud to deny him victory. In 1988, it was the most obvious, as he was leading in the count when the counting computers suddenly “went down.” When they went back up the next morning, Raul Salinas, the most corrupt president in modern Mexican history, had miraculously won.
Yet despite robbed elections, Cardenas and the left coalition he helped forge broke up the old corporatist system. Although never president, he became the first elected mayor of Mexico City, the second most politically powerful office in Mexico. Starting with his first election battle, the left united and eventually organized a new political party (the Party of the Democratic Revolution). When it later became corrupted, Cardenas’ successor as mayor, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, organized another (MORENA, the Movement for National Regeneration). After even more fraudulent elections, AMLO finally defeated the old order decisively and became president. Now Claudia Sheinbaum, another former mayor, is president. She has become the inheritor of that legacy.
MORENA may have its limitations, but the old order is definitively gone, and Cardenas deserves credit for starting the fight that ended it. Many people fought throughout those years, but he was the point of the spear, beginning as part of the old system and then helping to break it apart and transform Mexico.
(photo by David Bacon)
Mexicans never forgot that Cuauhtemoc was the son of General Lazaro Cardenas, who as president in the late 1930s nationalized the U.S.-owned oil wells and refineries. People with no money somehow found centavos in their pockets to contribute to buying out the norteamericano oil barons and making them leave.
In 1987, as Cuauhtemoc’s campaign was getting hot, friends took me to a Mexico City movie house where a controversial film celebrated the nationalization. It was made by the oil workers union, part of the old corrupt apparatus, but ones who worried that Salinas would privatize the industry. By publicizing the victory of Lazaro Cardenas, the movie was a way to campaign under the table for the general’s son. La Quina, head of the union, paid for this political crime when the newly-elected Salinas threw him in prison.
I first took Cardenas’ photograph as he spoke in the headquarters of the short-lived Mexican Socialist Party, just after the 1988 dirty election. Then he came to California to support the fight for the right of millions of Mexicans living north of the border to vote in Mexican elections. My compañero from the Molders Union, Ignacio De La Fuente, helped welcome him to Berkeley.
Irma Serrano (David Bacon)
In the next election in 1994, I went with three Mexican worker organizers to Chiapas, just a few months after the Zapatista uprising. Typical of Cardenas’ courage, when he was attacked for supporting the “terrorists” of the EZLN (Zapatista National Liberation Army), he chose Chiapas for his campaign’s closing rallies. On stage with him was Irma Serrano, La Tigressa, the spitfire singer of rancheras and corridos, who won her campaign for Senate on Cardenas’ party ticket that year.
I watched from a rooftop as endless waves of indigenous campesinos marched behind the banners of the radical socialists of Chiapas’ lowlands, into the main square of Tapachula, to hear Cardenas speak. It felt like the beginning of un otro mundo—another world.
¡Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, Presente!