Leftist Leader Cárdenas Dies at 92 After Three Presidential Runs

Mexico City mourned a familiar figure on Wednesday.

Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, a three-time presidential candidate and former mayor of Mexico City, died at 92, President Claudia Sheinbaum announced. He was the son of Gen. Lázaro Cárdenas, the president who nationalized Mexico's oil industry in 1938 and admitted refugees from the Spanish Civil War. The younger Cárdenas trained as a civil engineer.

Cárdenas began in the Institutional Revolutionary Party, serving as a senator and later governor of Michoacán. In the late 1980s he led a democratic faction inside the PRI and broke with the party after the 1988 presidential election, which was widely viewed as fraudulent. He ran for president again in 1994 and 2000, losing both times. In 1997 he became Mexico City's first popularly elected mayor. He resigned in 2014 from the Democratic Revolution Party, which he had helped found in 1989, after 43 students disappeared while the party governed Guerrero. He also stepped away from Andrés Manuel López Obrador after López Obrador took office in 2018.

Sheinbaum wrote on X that Cárdenas was "a man of firm principles" who led "a peaceful democratic movement that channeled millions of Mexicans' yearning for change." She added: "That historic election day, when he should have been recognized as president, marked the beginning of the democratic transformation."

Former President Vicente Fox, who served from 2000 to 2006, wrote that "we were political adversaries but something bigger united us: the conviction that Mexico deserved complete democracy." López Obrador, president from 2018 to 2024, called him a "pioneer of the democratic movement" and wrote that "without him, the country's political reality would be different."

Cárdenas is survived by three children with his late wife, Celeste Batel. One son, Lázaro Cárdenas Batel, works in politics.

Sheinbaum's announcement of his death came on Wednesday.