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Engineer Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, a three-time candidate for the presidency of Mexico, son of a legendary president, and an undisputed pillar of the Mexican left, died on Wednesday at age 92, confirmed the current president, Claudia Sheinbaum.
Respected by both allies and critics, Cárdenas played a fundamental role in the democratization of Mexico starting with his first attempt to reach the presidency in 1988, which ended in defeat. The new president was Carlos Salinas de Gortari of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), the institution that governed the country for more than 70 years. The election was widely considered a major electoral fraud.
He was the first mayor of Mexico City elected by popular vote in 1997, and he was so consistent with his ideas that in 2014 he resigned from the party he founded in the late 1980s, the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), because it was the party governing the state of Guerrero when 43 students disappeared.
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He also distanced himself from his long-time ally, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, when the latter became president in 2018. Nevertheless, López Obrador asserted that Cárdenas was a transformer, without whom today's Mexico would not be possible.
He was "a man of firm principles," said Sheinbaum on her account on the social network X, who transformed the political life of Mexico by championing "a peaceful democratic movement that channeled the yearning for change of millions of Mexican men and women."
"That historic election day, in which he should have been recognized as president, marked the beginning of the democratic transformation," she added. "His dignity and republican conviction remain an essential reference for our nation."
Cárdenas was the son of a very popular president and never stopped being involved in politics.
Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, a civil engineer by training, is the son of General Lázaro Cárdenas, the popular president who in 1938 nationalized the oil industry—a historic moment in Mexico—and who opened the country's doors to refugees from the Spanish Civil War.
He began his political career more than 50 years ago with the PRI, where he served as a senator and later as governor of the western state of Michoacán. In the late 1980s, he began to lead a democratic current within that party, from which he eventually departed entirely.
Together with other politicians, he founded the PRD in 1989, for which he was a presidential candidate in 1994 and 2000, the year in which an opposition president, Vicente Fox of the National Action Party, won for the first time.
"We were political adversaries, but we were united by something greater: the conviction that Mexico deserves a full democracy, freedoms, and a future of greater opportunities," declared Fox in a statement upon learning of Cárdenas's passing.
He had three children with his wife, Celeste Batel, who is now deceased. One of them is Lázaro Cárdenas Batel, also a politician.
[Publicidad]