alternatehistory.com

...After decades of one-party rule, Mexico held its first free elections in decades in 1994, although suspicions were not ended by the narrow victory of incumbent Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio. Colosio's term was racked with some of the most difficult challenges Mexico had faced in decades: the conflict with Zapatista rebels in Chiapas that almost threatened to become a full-blown rebellion in the state, the economic crisis caused by decades of poor economic management that resulted in the peso's devaluation, and frosty relations with two consecutive American administrations over American proposals to that countries' immigration system that most Mexicans felt unfairly targeted their countrymen who had immigrated (legally or not) to the United States.

While the situation in Chiapas managed to resolve itself with a minimum of bloodshed, the economic slump continued until 2000 and Colosio was barely able to exercise the traditional PRI incumbent's prerogative in naming his successor as the PRI nominee, in this case, former Secretary of the Interior Emilio Chuayffet. Chuayffet faced former Guanajuato governor Vincente Fox of the conservative National Action Party (PAN) and liberal Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, son of Lázaro Cárdenas, one of Mexico's most beloved presidents of the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD).



Fox's charisma and frustration with PRI corruption, economic mismanagement and the perception that the PRI was willing to let the United States spite Mexico and its citizens with impunity led to the first opposition victory since the Mexican Revolution, the symbol of the start of a new democratic era in Mexico...