ABSTRACT
In 1988, the year before the revolutionaries of Eastern Europe laid waste to the Berlin Wall, the first hammer blows were being struck against Mexico’s ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI).1 When ex-priísta Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas left the party fold to challenge the authoritarian system, few gave him much chance of success. Yet within a few months he had constructed a left-wing alliance that took the PRI to the brink of electoral defeat and shook it from its hegemonic complacency. Only that most sturdy of Mexican political practices, electoral fraud, saved the day. The PRI would prove to be made of sterner stuff than the Berlin Wall, however, and it was another twelve years before it succumbed to the cumulative democratic pressures that had built within the country. On 2 July 2000, a remarkable chapter in Latin American political history was closed when the PRI lost a presidential election for the first time. After seventy-one years in which the personnel, policies and symbols of party, state and nation were fundamentally fused, Mexicans determined on a new political trajectory.
