By Dave Graham
MEXICO CITY, Oct 28 (Reuters) - Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, an icon of the Mexican left who took up the banner of the disenfranchised in the 1980s to force changes in the political system despite never winning the presidency himself, has died at 92, the government said on Wednesday.
The first elected mayor of Mexico City, and the son of President Lazaro Cardenas, Cuauhtemoc Cardenas shook Mexico's ruling establishment to its foundations when he ran for the top job in 1988 before losing a hotly disputed election.
That election pitted Cardenas against young technocrat Carlos Salinas, candidate of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, which had dominated Mexico since 1929.
With the two running neck-and-neck on election night, the government suddenly announced the system counting the votes had crashed.
After it came back online, Salinas was declared the winner, although many analysts and Cardenas himself believed the PRI had rigged the vote to retain its hold on power.
The contest was a watershed in Mexico, leading to political reform that strengthened the opposition. Two presidential elections later, in 2000, the PRI was finally ousted.
"His role in Mexico's contemporary history is fundamental," said President Claudia Sheinbaum, hailing Cardenas' impact on Mexican politics.
"In 1988, he led a peaceful democratic movement that channeled the desire for change of millions of Mexicans," she said on social media, alluding to his supporters' belief that he was the rightful winner of the disputed presidential election.
"That historic election, in which he should have been recognized as president, marked the beginning of the democratic transformation."
Cardenas ran unsuccessfully for president twice more, fronting a leftist ticket for the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), which he helped found after breaking with the PRI in 1987. He finished third in 1994 and 2000.
Between those bids, the tall, soft-spoken Cardenas became mayor of Mexico City in 1997, beginning a long run for the PRD at the helm of the capital.
The PRD’s power waned after Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, who followed in Cardenas’ footsteps as Mexico City mayor, split from it to found his own Morena party, which became the main force of the Mexican left and propelled him to the presidency.
But Cardenas' early backing of the PRD marked a turning point in Mexican politics following decades of PRI domination.
It was Cardenas who finally galvanised leftist opposition to the PRI, said historian Lorenzo Meyer, adding, "And he had the capacity to mobilise."
Cardenas paved the way for subsequent leftist challenges to the highest office, campaigning in remote villages never before visited by presidential candidates.
In later years, he emerged as an occasional critic of Lopez Obrador, a polarizing, often abrasive figure who succeeded him as the standard-bearer of the left and captured the top job in 2018.
Lopez Obrador raised huge protests when he too was denied victory in a bitterly contested presidential election in 2006, and again cried foul six years later. But the dignified Cardenas remained the left's spiritual leader for many Mexicans.
Cardenas believed free market economics would not save Mexico from economic malaise, favoring a more state-centric model, similar to that later embraced by Lopez Obrador.
COALITION BUILDER
Cardenas was born in Mexico City on May 1, 1934, the first year of his father's six-year term. A champion of land reform who nationalized the oil industry in 1938, Lazaro Cardenas was one of the most popular presidents in Mexican history.
Ironically, the late president's success helped fortify the PRI, whose legitimacy his son later challenged.
Cardenas earned an engineering degree in 1957, then spent two years in France, West Germany and Italy on a fellowship.
After returning to Mexico, he began a career as a planner and hydraulic engineer, and entered politics in 1976 as a senator for his home state of Michoacan.
As PRI governor for Michoacan from 1980 to 1986, Cardenas was seen by some as too aloof to be a compelling administrator, but his reputation for honesty stood apart from the party’s growing association with graft in the minds of many Mexicans.
Michoacan became a bastion of the PRD, and Cardenas' son, called Lazaro like his grandfather, also served as governor.
The younger Lazaro later took up senior roles under Lopez Obrador and Sheinbaum, preserving the Mexican left’s historic ties with the family.
The challenge to the PRI by Cardenas began in late 1986 when he helped form the Democratic Current within the party.
The Current led calls for the PRI to adopt a more democratic means of selecting its presidential candidate, but these were ignored and leading members left the party in 1987.
"The PRI leadership has stopped our campaign for more open procedures within the party, but we will continue the struggle for true democracy in Mexico," Cardenas said at the time.
Impressed by his coalition-building skills, newspaper El Financiero once described Cardenas as the sole candidate "who can gather leftist militants, neoliberals, and even ecologists."
(Reporting by Dave Graham and David Alire Garcia; Editing by Rosalba O'Brien and Clarence Fernandez)
