As historians, we know that there are historical continuities and contingencies. We study these, debate these, and occasionally we attempt to make a few insights into the present day. This post attempts to perform the latter. So, here we go again with another Mexican presidential election that is rife with continuities and contingencies.
In 2000, the PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party) lost seventy continued years of presidential power. That year, we observed the elections and the massive eruption of street celebrations when it was announced that Vicente Fox had won the election. Twelve years later, 2012 was the PRI’s come back year, and it ran as a deep-pocketed opposition party with a telegenic candidate Enrique Peña Nieto. Of course, the PRI had less support from the middle and educated classes, groups that the party had courted since the 1940s. With the murder of the PRI presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio in 1994, the Zapatista uprising that same year, and the Aguas Blanca massacre of a group of campesinos (Mexican peasants) in 1996, the PRI lost credibility in all levels of the public sphere. The PRI political machine had long created an illusion of respectability and control through sheer force and media manipulation. However, massacres, social upheavals, bank collapses, power politics resembling organized crime syndicates, hyper inflation, and devaluations became more and more difficult for Mexicans to stomach and ignore.