Education
After attending the National Preparatory School, Cuauhtemoc Cardenas earned a degree in civil engineering from the National Autonomous University of Mexico.
Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas
After attending the National Preparatory School, Cuauhtemoc Cardenas earned a degree in civil engineering from the National Autonomous University of Mexico.
Cardenas's first involvement in politics was in 1951 when, as a student, he supported the unsuccessful opposition presidential candidacy of General Miguel Henriquez Guzmán.Guzman. In 1959 he joined with his father to organize the National Liberation Movement (MNL) to pressure the Mexican government for reforms and to support the Cuban Revolution. In 1957 he took a special training course at the Ministry of Reconstruction in Paris, and in 1958 he worked with the Krupp Company in Germany. He then returned to Mexico, where he served as the assistant director of Las Truchas steelworks in his family's home state of Michoacan, and from 1976 to 1980 he was Michoacan's assistant secretary of forest resources and fauna.
Throughout the 1960's, 1970's, and early 1980's CárdenasCardenas was an important figure in the PRI. With the party's backing, he was elected senator from MichoacánMichoacan in 1976 and served as governor of the state from 1980 to 1986. However, during the presidency of Miguel de la Madrid (1982-1988), Cardenas became increasingly dissatisfied with de la Madrid's pro-business and pro-United States orientation and with the undemocratic inner workings of the PRI. In 1986 he joined with Porfirio Munoz Ledo, another leading reformist within the PRI, to organize an opposition faction, the Democratic Current. After Cardenas and the other members of the Democratic Current were expelled from the PRI in 1987, Cardenas formed the National Democratic Front and announced that he would run for president against Carlos Salinas de Gortari, de la Madrid's handpicked successor.
The 1988 presidential election was among the most tumultuous and controversial in Mexican history.Followers of both Cardenas and Clouthier took to the streets in protest, but the Mexican Chamber of Deputies formally certified Salinas as president-elect in September 1988 and he was inaugurated in early December. Cardenas and other leaders of the National Democratic Front then joined with members of the Mexican Socialist Party (PMS) and a number of other small groups to form the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD).
In the years following the 1988 election the PRD suffered serious repression. Dozens of PRD activists were injured or killed. Municipal elections in 1989 and 1990 were marked by charges of widespread fraud, with the PRD claiming that it had been cheated out of victory in several state legislatures. Observers attributed the PRD's disappointing third-place finish in the 1991 midterm elections (behind PRI and PAN) to continuing fraud and to Salinas's growing popularity with Mexico's business community and middle class.
The campaign for the 1994 presidential race began in the shadow of the assassination of Salinas's chosen successor, Luis Donaldo Colosio Murrieta, and an armed uprising in Chiapas state launched by rebels who claimed that they had been excluded from the political process. The rebels indirectly endorsed Cardenas, whose rallies drew huge crowds in both urban and rural settings. This enthusiasm did not translate into votes, however, and in the August elections Cardenas finished a weak third, garnering only 16 percent of the vote, as against 48 percent for the PRI candidate, Ernesto Zedillo Ponce de León,Leon, and 30 percent for Diego Fernandez de Cevallos of the PAN.