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.

As the victory by Enrique Peña Nieto, presidential candidate of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), seemed a much surer thing that it turned out to be, many of Mexico’s political analysts, scholars, former office-holders and veteran news hawks began murmuring the name of former president (1988-1994) Carlos Salinas de Gortari.

“Tu me conoces” – “You know me” – was what Enrique Peña Nieto kept saying to voters throughout his campaign as presidential candidate for the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). But despite the thousands of times he said that, out of the thousands of speeches he’s given, Mexicans don’t know him. They became so familiar with the opaque script his handlers and PRI’s dinosauric elders put together for him, that they could repeat it before he did. Even when he changed the simple sequence of the same words.

Micaela (“Mica”) Garcia Martinez voted for a candidate whose party she loathed: Josefina Vazquez Mota. She was the first female to run as a presidential candidate for a major Mexican political party. Yet, Mica detests Vazquez Mota’s party, the presently ruling pro-church, pro-business National Action Party (PAN). That’s because she judged the last two local PAN presidentes de municipales to be worse than the normal run of thieves and liars, but, she said bitterly, because they were responsible for deaths of people she knew well. As for the party that “won” last Sunday, the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), she lived too much of her life under its corrupt and brutal rule, she declared, and wanted nothing to do with that “vile armada”.