Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, who founded Mexico’s PRD, dies at 92
The former Michoacán governor, three-time presidential candidate and first elected head of government of Mexico City died on Wednesday. President Claudia Sheinbaum recalled the 1988 election he lost amid fraud claims. No cause of death has been given.
Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas Solórzano, one of the defining figures of the Mexican left, died on Wednesday, 28 October, aged 92. President Claudia Sheinbaum paid tribute on X, calling him “a man of firm principles”. The family has not given a cause of death.
The son of President Lázaro Cárdenas, who nationalised Mexico’s oil in 1938, he trained as a civil engineer. He spent the first half of his career inside the PRI, the party that ran Mexico for seven decades, serving as a senator and then, from 1980 to 1986, as governor of Michoacán.
The 1988 election
The break came in the late 1980s. Cárdenas left the PRI, pulled together a coalition of left-wing groups as the National Democratic Front and ran for president in 1988. He lost to Carlos Salinas de Gortari in a count remembered for the “system crash”, the computer failure that halted the release of results. He maintained for the rest of his life that the election had been stolen. Sheinbaum wrote that it should have ended with him recognised as president.
A year later he founded the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), running for it again in 1994 and 2000 and losing to Ernesto Zedillo and Vicente Fox. In between, in 1997, he became the first head of government Mexico City residents ever chose for themselves, after decades of presidential appointees.
Con profundo pesar lamentamos el fallecimiento del ingeniero Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas Solórzano, un hombre de principios firmes, que transformó la vida política de nuestro país.
— Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo (@Claudiashein) October 29, 2026
Su papel en la historia contemporánea de México es fundamental. En 1988 abanderó un movimiento democrático…
Active to the end
In later years his relationship with Morena, the party that grew out of a PRD split and took power under Andrés Manuel López Obrador, swung between support and open criticism. In April he accepted an honorary seat on Pemex’s Petroleum Advisory Commission, at the oil company his father had created.
López Obrador wrote that he had been a force for transformation. Even the PRI, the party he walked out of, sent condolences. It caps a week in which the Latin American left had been in the headlines for other reasons, with Lula winning a fourth term in Brazil.
Image: Dorotea Kraatz / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)
