Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas Quintana Roo 1988 presidential campaign, Digi Mart USA News (Quintana Roo, Mexico): According to a report by Javier Ugalde published by El Heraldo de México, Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas Solórzano surprised observers with his results in Quintana Roo in his first presidential run in 1988. He won 22,682 votes, or 24.05 percent of the total ballots cast in that election.
Although that figure was nearly 40,000 votes fewer than the winner, PRI candidate Carlos Salinas de Gortari received, it was enough to secure second place in the state, ahead of PAN candidate Manuel Clouthier. Clouthier received 9,138 votes, or 9.69 percent of the nearly 98,000 ballots cast, from an estimated registry of 188,000 citizens.
Cárdenas ran in 1988 as the candidate of the Frente Democrático Nacional, a coalition formed hastily from several small opposition parties. Some of those parties were described as satellites of the PRI, while others came from the emerging Mexican left, including the PMS.
Cárdenas sought to defeat the PRI, the party he had left shortly before along with other figures such as Porfirio Muñoz Ledo and Ifigenia Martínez, citing what they saw as the evident loss of the party’s revolutionary and social justice principles.
The report says Cárdenas drew on the legacy his father, General Lázaro Cárdenas, had left in the then Territory of Quintana Roo in the mid-1930s. His campaign filled the Explanada de la Bandera in Chetumal when it reached the state.
The influence of Lázaro Cárdenas was notable in southern Quintana Roo, particularly along the Ribera del Río Hondo, where Maya farmers and settlers from northern Mexico were grateful to the general. The article notes accounts that, amid suspicions of electoral fraud, some residents of the region were willing to take action to defend what they considered Cárdenas’s victory.
Cárdenas, however, restrained those impulses, which spread through many parts of the country, and chose the peaceful, electoral route by founding the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD). With that party he became the first head of government of Mexico City and later ran for the presidency two more times.
In those two later campaigns, Cárdenas fell well short of his 1988 result in Quintana Roo. The report says he nonetheless planted a seed in the state, which Andrés Manuel López Obrador later exploited; López Obrador, who also ran three times for the presidency, won Quintana Roo in all three of his campaigns.
The article concludes with a tribute: rest in peace, Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas Solórzano.
