Institutional Revolutionary Party

I

Introduction

Institutional Revolutionary Party, political party that dominated Mexican politics at the local, state, and national levels from 1929 to the late 1990s. Despite losing control of the presidency and the legislature in 2000, the party remained a significant force in Mexican politics as Mexico entered the 21st century. Known as the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) in Spanish, it long maintained control of the political system through a combination of methods: providing government jobs to its supporters; recruiting into the PRI the leaders of the party’s limited opposition; and repressing opposition forces, sometimes by violence.

II

Emergence of the PRI

The PRI emerged after the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920). It grew out of a political crisis following the assassination in 1928 of President-elect Álvaro Obregón. The outgoing president, Plutarco Elías Calles, was confronted with civil war, dissent within the army, tensions among revolutionary factions, and suspicion that he was involved in Obregón’s death. Calles sought a political organization that would bring together all those favoring reform and promote political stability throughout the country.

One of the key factors in the establishment of the PRI was the creation of a peaceful method of presidential succession. The years 1920, 1924, and 1928 had been marked by disputes over the transfer of presidential power. After the PRI was created, it allowed the president to influence the nomination of candidates for political positions at all levels of government. After 1928 the outgoing president appointed a candidate to run for president at the last moment. This practice reduced competition among potential successors and also maintained the power of the outgoing president.

Both the PRI and the government have extensive, highly centralized bureaucracies that often made it difficult to distinguish between the actions of the party and the actions of the government. For example, the Mexican Workers Confederation (Confederación de Trabajadores de Mexico, or CTM) is a government-sponsored federation of labor unions. The CTM operates throughout the country and is dominated by PRI members; the secretary general of the CTM sits on the Central Executive Committee of the PRI. Rather than providing an independent voice for workers, the CTM has historically served as a mechanism for the government, the PRI, and Mexican corporations to influence labor policy in the country. The close relationship between the PRI and government-backed organizations such as the CTM greatly influenced elections, which typically were not contests for political power but rather a way to gauge popular support for the policies being pursued by the PRI and the government.

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The PRI has gone through a series of name changes and reorganizations over the years. Its original name was the Partido Nacional Revolucionario, or National Revolutionary Party, a group that sought to impose discipline on various political factions in the wake of the Mexican Revolution. In 1938 President Lázaro Cárdenas reorganized and renamed the party, calling it the Partido de la Revolución Mexicana, or the Party of the Mexican Revolution. The reorganized party reflected the growing importance of labor and peasant farmer organizations. It was composed of four sectors: workers (the CTM), peasants, the military, and so-called popular organizations. The latter included trade and business organizations that represented doctors, lawyers, teachers, and other professionals, as well as social organizations representing women and students. In the early 1940s, the military sector was dissolved, leaving the party with the three sectors it has retained up to the present day.

In 1946 the party adopted its current name, which reflected the changing nature of its political priorities and economic policies during the post-World War II (1939-1945) era. Leaders of the party wanted to “institutionalize” the political changes that had followed the revolution. They were, for the most part, no longer interested in revolutionary political or social reform and instead focused on industrializing the country and attracting foreign investment.

III

Postwar Crises and Growth of Opposition Parties

Mexico’s strong economy after World War II gave way to a series of economic and financial crises from the 1970s to the present. These economic problems severely undermined popular support for the PRI and encouraged the growth of opposition political parties. The PRI committed itself to major economic and political reforms in the 1980s. However, economic reform happened more quickly than political reform, which many within the PRI opposed.

Since the late 1970s, a growing conflict has developed within the PRI between the politicos (those who have risen through the party organization and have held political office) and the técnicos (those who have risen through the government bureaucracy and have little party experience). Since 1976 several técnicos with little PRI background have occupied the Mexican presidency.

In 1988 opposition candidates and parties seriously contested the presidential elections for the first time in Mexican history. The opposition candidate for president, Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas Solórzano, was defeated by the PRI candidate Carlos Salinas de Gortari, but many election observers believe that Cárdenas actually won the election and that the PRI stayed in power only through electoral fraud. Political and financial scandals surrounded the Salinas administration (1988-1994) and further undermined the status of the PRI.

The Zapatista rebellion that broke out in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas in January 1994 increased pressure on the PRI. The Zapatista National Liberation Army demanded that the Mexican government institute numerous political reforms, including granting autonomy to communities of indigenous people in Chiapas.

The PRI’s 1994 election campaign was marred by tragedy. The party’s presidential candidate, Luis Donaldo Colosio Murrieta, was assassinated in March while campaigning in Tijuana. He was replaced as a candidate by his campaign manager, Ernesto Zedillo Ponce de León, who was elected president with just over 50 percent of the vote. The two leading opposition parties—the National Action Party (PAN) and the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD)—together won nearly half of the vote. The election attracted the highest percentage of registered voters in Mexico’s electoral history and reversed a persistent decline in voter turnout.

Criticism of the PRI increased after Raul Salinas de Gotari, the elder brother of Carlos Salinas, was arrested in March 1995 on charges of having ordered and paid for the 1994 assassination of his brother-in-law and deputy PRI leader José Francisco Ruiz Massieu. Later that month Mexican officials filed additional charges of “illicit enrichment” against Raul Salinas. Although former president Carlos Salinas was not implicated, revelations stemming from the investigation of his brother suggested widespread corruption during the Salinas administration, tarnishing the reputation of the former president. In January 1999 a Mexican court found Raul Salinas guilty of planning and ordering the assassination of Ruiz Massieu and gave him the maximum sentence of 50 years in prison.

In February 1996 Zapatista rebels and the Mexican government signed the first of a series of peace accords. The agreements proposed constitutional amendments that would give indigenous people adequate representation in Mexico’s congress and exempt them from a national law that candidates had to be a member of a political party to run in elections. The PRI had used the law to limit political participation in Chiapas.

The July 1997 elections resulted in major gains for the two opposition political parties. For the first time in its history, the PRI lost its majority in the Chamber of Deputies; however, the PRI retained its majority in the upper house, the Senate. Opposition candidate Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas Solórzano easily won the race for mayor of Mexico City—previously an appointed position. During the 1990s the PRI also lost gubernatorial races in a number of Mexican states.

IV

The PRI in the 21st Century

The congressional and presidential elections of 2000 brought a greater decline in the power of the PRI. The PRI lost the presidency for the first time in its history; the presidential winner was Vicente Fox of the National Action Party (PAN). Fox ran as a candidate for the Alliance for Change, a coalition between the PAN and Mexico’s small Green Party. In the congress, the PAN replaced the PRI as the largest party in the Chamber of Deputies, the lower chamber of Mexico’s congress, while the PRI lost its majority in the Senate. In the 2000 elections the PAN also won the governorships of Guanajuato and Morelos.

Despite predictions of a grim future for the PRI, the party has shown an ability to reinvent itself and to use its extensive organization at all levels of government. Another factor that has helped the PRI is the political division among its major opposition parties. Much of the anti-PRI vote is split between the left-leaning Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) and the conservative PAN. These two groups have been unable to form a working partnership because of their political differences. As a result, the PRI has won some important elections by polling less than 50 percent of the vote.

Even in the face of its defeat in the presidential elections in 2000, the PRI continued to play a pivotal role in national politics. It effectively checked policy initiatives advanced by Fox and his PAN allies in the national legislature. The PRI blocked their efforts in the congress to reform the tax code, the labor code, and national energy policies during the first half of Fox’s mandate. Subsequently, in midterm legislative elections in the summer of 2003, the PRI scored significant gains. In the Chamber of Deputies, it secured the largest number of seats of any party by a wide margin, 224 out of 500, placing it in a dominant position in the chamber. See also Mexico: Government.

Local and state elections across much of Mexico in the late summer of 2004 also testified to the PRI’s ability to remain an important political force. It won tightly contested races for state governorships in its historic strongholds in the south in Oaxaca and Veracruz and scored upset victories in Chihuahua and Nuevo León in northern Mexico where PAN had long held the governor’s office in each state. The PRI also secured upset victories in the mayoral races in Tijuana and Ciudad Juárez, again both longtime PAN strongholds.

Despite its recent electoral successes, the PRI continues to experience significant discord and controversy in its ranks. Party traditionalists, whose populist power base focused on unions and peasant groups, managed to reassert their control of the party after years in which university-educated “technocrats” dominated the party. In addition, efforts by some PRI politicians to work with Fox and PAN legislators in crafting reform legislation created strong divisions in the PRI organization.

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