With Mexico's 1988 Fraud, "Neoliberalism Was Imposed Against the Will of the People"
mexicosolidarity.com
Sheinbaum singled out Héctor Aguilar Camín and Enrique Krauze, who she says betrayed the Cárdenas movement and now lecture the country about democracy.

This article by Fernanda Monroy originally appeared in the October 30, 2026 edition of Contralínea, a Mexican investigative journalism magazine.

Neoliberalism in Mexico was imposed against the popular will, through the 1988 electoral fraud that brought Carlos Salinas de Gortari to power, said President Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo. At her morning press conference she called for keeping alive the memory of the election in which Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas Solórzano ran for the Presidency.

“In ’88 there is a great electoral fraud, that is, neoliberalism in Mexico was imposed against the will of the people, particularly with the electoral fraud of 1988,” the President maintained. She also considered that new generations should know the social and political struggles that preceded the transformation of the country.

The President recalled that in 1988 there was a split within the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), when sectors dissatisfied with neoliberalism and in favor of democracy came together around Cárdenas. The movement grew in a few months and brought together political and social forces that questioned the continuity of the PRI regime.

However, the victory that the Cardenista movement claimed was not recognized and the Presidency of the Republic fell into the hands of the PRI member Salinas de Gortari, in an election marked by allegations of fraud and by the controversy surrounding the supposed “crash of the system” during the vote count.

Imagine, the PRI had won every election and there is a split in the PRI against neoliberalism and for democracy. And in a few months that split becomes the majority in the country and Engineer Cárdenas wins and they do not recognize his victory.

President Claudia Sheinbaum

For the President of the Republic, the 1988 electoral process cannot be understood as an isolated episode, but as part of a prolonged struggle for the democratization of the country. For this reason, she insisted on the need for new generations to know the political conditions of the 1980s and 1990s.

“The moment of freedom we live in today did not exist in the ’80s or in the ’90s,” the President noted, recalling that current freedoms are the result of the struggles of the people of Mexico, and she recalled that, under previous governments, radio and television hosts were taken off the air for their criticism of political power.

Claudia Sheinbaum also questioned intellectuals who, after supporting or accompanying the Cardenista movement, distanced themselves from the fraud allegations and later established ties with the government of Salinas de Gortari. Among them she mentioned Héctor Aguilar Camín and Enrique Krauze. “Today they talk about democracy when they betrayed a citizens’ movement that fought to transform Mexico years ago.”

The head of the federal Executive stated that the political rupture of 1988 was one of the antecedents of the movement that brought Andrés Manuel López Obrador to the presidency in 2018, after decades of social mobilization, party organization and opposition to the neoliberal economic model.

“In ’88 it was a rupture and there it became clear who was on one side and who was on the other,” she stated, noting that this political division continued over the following decades, until the transformation movement obtained the majority support of the population at the polls, in 2018.

In this sense, the President described the 2018 victory as the result of a trajectory of resistance against decades of dispossession, repression and antidemocratic practices. In that reading, the Fourth Transformation movement represents the continuity of the social struggles that had one of their decisive moments in the movement led by Engineer Cárdenas. “So, we must remember, so as not to make mistakes,” she concluded.

The post With Mexico’s 1988 Fraud, “Neoliberalism Was Imposed Against the Will of the People” appeared first on Mexico Solidarity Media.

From Mexico Solidarity Media via This RSS Feed.