The Guadalajara Reporter

Can the ‘old-guard’ PRI  avoid the dinosauric habits that plagued almost all of its 71 years of previous rule under 46-year-old Peña Nieto 

The name of Carlos Salinas de Gortari began showing up in political discussions and news reports even before the social media and mainstream news outlets here confirmed vote purchasing by the once dominant — still powerful — Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) for its candidate, Enrique Peña Nieto. Peña Nieto won the July 1 presidential election with 38.21 percent of the vote, followed by leftist Democratic Revolutionary Part candidate Manuel Lopez Obrador with 31.59 percent.  But many voters, even citizens who sold their votes to the PRI,  have been protesting Peña Nieto’s “imposed” presidency.

In the 1988 presidential election, Salinas de Gortari, the PRI candidate, won the presidency with what analysts, historians and journalists here knew was a vast fraudulent vote. Yet, the PRI’s infamous dark side blunted some early reports of what, internally, top priistas were calling a “patriotic fraud.” At the time, the first results arriving at the Ministry of Interior were so alarmingly negative for the PRI that an undefined “computer failure” occurred. Panicked top PRI officials of the outgoing administration of Miguel de la Madrid, overseeing the election, alerted priista electoral operatives across the Republic to begin the task of altering ballots and reports of voting results to reflect a Salinas win-in-the-making.

Salinas seemed for the most part to be deep into the task of staffing and organizing his new government. Much like Enrique Peña Nieto today, he was a president-elect who gives the impression he knows nothing of the millions of votes bought by the PRI to produce his “triumph.”

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