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 Mexicoportal |
General elections were held in Mexico on 7 July 1952. [1] The presidential elections were won by Adolfo Ruiz Cortines, who received 74.3% of the vote. In the Chamber of Deputies election, the Institutional Revolutionary Party won 151 of the 161 seats. [2] These were the last presidential elections in Mexico in which women were not allowed to vote.
President Miguel Alemán Valdés appointed his Minister of the Interior, Adolfo Ruiz Cortines, as the PRI's presidential candidate. The coordinator of Ruiz Cortines' campaign was Adolfo López Mateos, who would later succeed him as President. [3]
Miguel Henríquez Guzmán, a former priísta who left the party in 1951, was nominated as the candidate of the Federation of the Mexican People's Parties. The National Action Party (PAN) nominated Efraín González Luna as their first-ever presidential candidate. Finally, the well-known union leader Vicente Lombardo Toledano ran as the Popular Socialist Party's candidate.
The 1952 campaign season saw the model of political advertising aimed at praising the virtues of a party's candidate adopted. It was also the first time in Mexican history that market research was used in a political campaign.
Among the opposition candidates, Henríquez Guzmán became particularly popular. His campaign used a mariachi tune composed for him by Manuel Ramos Trujillo to promote his candidacy. Though this use of campaign jingles was condemned by critics who saw it as taking away the seriousness of politics, the success of the song throughout many regions of the country led to widespread adoption of this and other marketing techniques in future campaigns.
The alleged role of the family of former President Lázaro Cárdenas regarding this election has been widely commented: Amalia Solórzano and Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas -respectively the wife and son of the former President- reportedly supported Henríquez Guzmán's candidacy, while Dámaso Cárdenas (brother of Lázaro and then-governor of Michoacán) emphatically campaigned in favour of Ruiz Cortines; Lázaro himself was rumoured to be a sympathizer of Henríquez Guzmán, although officially he supported Ruiz Cortines -albeit in a rather discreet manner-. [4]
The former governor of Baja California Sur, Francisco José Múgica (by then estranged from the PRI) made some statements during the campaign accusing Ruiz Cortines of having collaborated with the Americans during the 1914 US occupation of Veracruz. Ruiz Cortines denied the accusations and claimed that at the time he was in Mexico City in service of the Revolution under the command of Alfredo Robles Domínguez and Heriberto Jara Corona. Later in the campaign, during a visit to Veracruz on 7 June, the Municipality of Xalapa honoured him with a parchment denying the accusations and naming him a "Patriot and Illustrious Son of Veracruz". [5]
| Candidate | Party | Votes | % | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Adolfo Ruiz Cortines | Institutional Revolutionary Party | 2,713,419 | 74.31 | |
| Miguel Henríquez Guzmán | Federation of Parties of the Mexican People | 579,745 | 15.88 | |
| Efraín González Luna | National Action Party | 285,555 | 7.82 | |
| Vicente Lombardo Toledano | Popular Socialist Party | 72,482 | 1.99 | |
| Other candidates | 282 | 0.01 | ||
| Total | 3,651,483 | 100.00 | ||
| Registered voters/turnout | 4,924,293 | – | ||
| Source: Nohlen | ||||
| Party | Votes | % | Seats | +/– | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Institutional Revolutionary Party | 2,713,419 | 74.31 | 151 | +9 | |
| Federation of the Mexican People's Parties | 579,745 | 15.88 | 2 | New | |
| National Action Party | 301,986 | 8.27 | 5 | +1 | |
| Popular Socialist Party | 32,194 | 0.88 | 2 | +1 | |
| Mexican Nationalist Party | 24,139 | 0.66 | 1 | New | |
| Total | 3,651,483 | 100.00 | 161 | +14 | |
| Registered voters/turnout | 4,924,293 | – | |||
| Source: Nohlen, UNAM | |||||
In the official election count, Ruiz Cortines won with more than 74 percent of the popular vote, followed by Henríquez Guzmán with 16 percent. These results set off a wave of protests in several states by Henríquez supporters, which were violently suppressed by the administration of Miguel Alemán Valdés. Among those calling for justice were the former Mexican ambassador to Honduras, José Muñoz Cota Ibáñez, and Alicia Pérez Salazar.
Some military chiefs, sympathizers of Henríquez Guzmán and aligned with former president Lázaro Cárdenas, seized the opportunity and proposed to carry out a Coup d'état so that Henríquez would become president. However, it was Henríquez himself who rejected the plan, and instead he asked his supporters to stop the violent protests. [6] Despite the intensity of the protests, the results stood, and as a result Henríquez Guzmán then retired from public life.
Many years after the election, Ruiz Cortines revealed that only five weeks before he was scheduled to take office, he underwent a surgery to get rid of a hernia; to keep the surgery as a secret from the media, an operating room was temporally installed in Ruiz Cortines' Mexico City residence. [7] [8] After the successful surgery, Ruiz Cortines took office as scheduled on 1 December.
The Institutional Revolutionary Party is a political party in Mexico that was founded in 1929 as the National Revolutionary Party, then as the Party of the Mexican Revolution and finally as the PRI beginning in 1946. The party held uninterrupted power in the country and controlled the presidency twice: the first one was for 71 years, from 1929 to 2000, the second was for six years, from 2012 to 2018.
Lázaro Cárdenas del Río was a Mexican army officer and politician who served as president of Mexico from 1934 to 1940. Previously, he served as a general in the Constitutional Army during the Mexican Revolution and as Governor of Michoacán and President of the Institutional Revolutionary Party. He later served as the Secretary of National Defence. During his presidency, which is considered the end of the Maximato, he implemented massive land reform programs, led the expropriation of the country's oil industry, and implemented many key social reforms.
Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas Solórzano is a Mexican politician and civil engineer. A prominent social-democrat and the son of 51st president of Mexico Lázaro Cárdenas, he is a former Head of Government of Mexico City and a founder of the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD). He ran for the presidency of Mexico three times, and his loss in the 1988 Mexican general election to Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) candidate Carlos Salinas de Gortari had long been considered the result of electoral fraud perpetrated by the ruling PRI, later acknowledged by Miguel de la Madrid, the incumbent president at the time of the election. He previously served as a Senator, having been elected in 1976 to represent the state of Michoacán and also as the Governor of Michoacán from 1980 to 1986.
Gustavo Díaz Ordaz Bolaños was a Mexican politician and member of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). He served as the President of Mexico from 1964 to 1970. Previously, he served as a member of the Chamber of Deputies for Puebla's 1st district, a senator of the Congress of the Union for Puebla, and Secretary of the Interior.
Adolfo López Mateos was a Mexican politician who served as President of Mexico from 1958 to 1964. Previously, he served as Secretary of Labor and Social Welfare from 1952 to 1957 and a Senator from the State of Mexico from 1946 to 1952.
Adolfo Tomás Ruiz Cortines was a Mexican politician who served as President of Mexico from 1952 to 1958. A member of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), he previously served as Governor of Veracruz and Secretary of the Interior. During his presidency, which constituted the Mexican Miracle, women gained the right to vote, and he instigated numerous public health, education, infrastructure, and works projects.
Manuel Ávila Camacho was a Mexican politician and military leader who served as the President of Mexico from 1940 to 1946. Despite participating in the Mexican Revolution and achieving a high rank, he came to the presidency of Mexico because of his direct connection to General Lázaro Cárdenas and served him as a right-hand man as his Chief of his General Staff during the Mexican Revolution and afterwards. He was called affectionately by Mexicans "The Gentleman President". As president, he pursued "national policies of unity, adjustment, and moderation." His administration completed the transition from military to civilian leadership, ended confrontational anticlericalism, reversed the push for socialist education, and restored a working relationship with the US during World War II.
Miguel Alemán Valdés was a Mexican politician who served a full term as the President of Mexico from 1946 to 1952, the first civilian president after a string of revolutionary generals.
The Authentic Party of the Mexican Revolution was a Mexican political party that existed from 1954 to 2000. For most of its existence, the PARM was generally considered a satellite party of the governing Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI).
Events in the year 1934 in Mexico.
Pascual Ortiz Rubio served as President of Mexico from 1930 to 1932. He was one of three presidents to serve out the six-year term (1928–1934) of assassinated president-elect Álvaro Obregón, while former president Plutarco Elías Calles retained power in a period known as the Maximato. Calles was so blatantly in control of the government that Ortiz Rubio resigned the presidency in protest in September 1932.
The Federation of Parties of the Mexican People was a federation of socialist political parties that existed from 1945 to 1954.
The Mexican miracle is a term used to refer to the country's inward-looking development strategy that produced sustained economic growth. It is considered to be a golden age in Mexico's economy in which the Mexican economy grew 6.8% each year. It was a stabilizing economic plan which caused an average growth of 6.8% and industrial production to increase by 8% with inflation staying at only 2.5%. Beginning roughly in the 1940s, the Mexican government would begin to roll out the economic plan that they would call "the Mexican miracle," which would spark an economic boom beginning in 1954 spanning some 15 years and would last until 1970. In Mexico, the Spanish economic term used is "Desarrollo estabilizador" or "Stabilizing Development."
Miguel Henríquez Guzmán was a Mexican politician and military officer.
Events in the year 1950 in Mexico.
Events in the year 1952 in Mexico.
Events in the year 1954 in Mexico.
Events in the year 1955 in Mexico.
Events in the year 1956 in Mexico.
