Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas (Mexican Politician), three-time presidential candidate and Mexico City's first elected mayor, dies at 92

Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas was a founder of Mexico's modern left who ran for president three times and became the first elected leader of Mexico City, helping push the country toward real multiparty democracy.  He died Oct. 28 at age 92, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum announced on social media.  No official cause of death was given.

Cárdenas was born May 1, 1934, in Mexico City, the only son of President Lázaro Cárdenas, who took over Mexico's oil industry in 1938, and Amalia Solórzano.  He studied civil engineering at the National Autonomous University of Mexico.  He joined the long-ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, known as the PRI, in 1954, and represented the state of Michoacán in the Senate before serving as its governor from 1980 to 1986.

In 1987 he helped lead a reform group inside the PRI that pushed for more open choice of candidates.  When the party picked Carlos Salinas de Gortari instead, Cárdenas left and ran against him in 1988 with the backing of a coalition of small leftist parties.  The official vote count stalled when the counting system went down, and Salinas was declared the winner in a result many Mexicans saw as stolen.  In 1989 Cárdenas helped found the Party of the Democratic Revolution, or PRD, and became its first president.  He ran for president again in 1994 and 2000 but lost both times.

In 1997 he won Mexico City's first election for head of government, a post that presidents had filled by appointment until then.  He left the job in 1999 to make his third run for president.  He quit the PRD in 2014 after 43 students disappeared in Guerrero, a state the party governed, and he later kept his distance from his onetime ally Andrés Manuel López Obrador.  Sheinbaum said his 1988 campaign marked the start of Mexico's democratic change.

His wife, Celeste Batel, whom he married in 1963, died in 2021.  Cárdenas is survived by their three children, Lázaro Cárdenas Batel, Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas Batel and Camila Cárdenas Batel.