Thursday, June 5, 2014

Factions Band Together to “Rescue” Mexico’s Main Left Party

6/5/2014


MEXICO CITY – Members of several different currents within Mexico’s largest leftist formation (PRD) announced the creation of a Broad Left Front ahead of the party leadership election in September.

The initiative springs from “the need to rescue the party to transform it and make it again into a genuine left opposition, an instrument at the service of the country and the interests of the people,” the organizers said in a statement.

The Front’s agenda includes pushing for a referendum on the center-right government’s opening of the energy sector to private firms, the statement said.

The policies of current PRD chair Jesus Zambrano are exhausted and do not serve the party, Agustin Guerrero said at a press conference to introduce the Front.

Also present was PRD Secretary-General Alejandro Sanchez, who said the Front has not ruled out the idea of promoting party founder Cuauhtemoc Cardenas as the successor to Zambrano.

Cardenas, who was the party’s presidential candidate in three successive elections, last month issued an appeal for unity as the PRD prepares to elect a new leader.

Even so, he offered a thinly veiled critique of Zambrano, who has pursued dialogue with the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) administration of President Enrique Peña Nieto.

“A docile left is useless to the country,” Cardenas said. “What is useful is a left that is firm in its principles, respectful of those who think differently, with ethics and capable of setting an example in its internal life of what it wants for the country.”

Cuauhtemoc Cardenas – the son of President Lazaro Cardenas, who nationalized Mexico’s oil industry in 1938 – is a fierce opponent of Peña Nieto’s energy overhaul.

The younger Cardenas spent 25 years in the PRI, which governed Mexico without interruption from 1929-2000, but left the party in the late 1980s to form the PRD.

He is widely thought to have been robbed of victory in the 1988 presidential election.

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