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Son of the popular former president Lazaro Cardenas, PRD leader Cuauhtemoc Cardenas is making his third dash for the presidency.Will he finally follow in his father's footsteps?
Cuauhtemoc Cardenas Solorzano, 65, left the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) 12 years ago while fighting for democracy at a time when the PRI wasn't ready for it. He now prepares for his third, and most likely last, presidential campaign, under the banner of the centerleft Democratic Revolution Party (PRb), which he founded in 1989.
In 1988 he lost his first presidential race, against Carlos Salinas, in what has come to be regarded as historic electoral fraud. The computer system crashed when Cardenas was well ahead on preliminary results. Two hours later, computers went back on but the outcome had been reversed. Later, congressmen from the PRI and the centerright National Action Party (PAN) agreed to bum the hard evidence from the election, thus covering up accountability in that key chapter of Mexico's recent history.
Cardenas ran against current president Ernesto Zedillo in 1994 in elections that, while cleaner, Zedillo himself later categorized as unfair.,
In 1997, Cardenas won the first Mexico City mayoral race with 48 percent of the vote, inaugurating the first opposition government in the troubled megalopolis. But despite his political persistence, many challenges...