I Saw the End of “The Perfect Dictatorship,” and I’ll Guide You Through the Next One

My grandpa went through a lot in Mexico, and I took a lot of notes.

Image via DALL-E artificial intelligence by OpenAI, based on a prompt by the author.

I always spent holidays and school breaks in my ancestral town in northern Mexico. While there, I got to see my paternal grandfather and his children involved in ardent opposition to the ruling party. Those days, the 1980s and 1990s, the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) dominated every aspect of politics in Mexico. The party controlled all three branches of government at almost every level in the country.

Grandpa was a member of the Partido Acción Nacional (PAN), the leading opposition party at the time. Yes, there were other parties, but most coalesced around PRI and PAN. The dominance of PRI was called “The Perfect Dictatorship,” because the party — not one person at the top — ran the country. Every six years, the president in power would appoint his successor, and there was nothing anyone in Mexico could do about it.

That didn’t stop my grandpa.

But let’s take a break and explain this “perfect dictatorship” for those unfamiliar with Mexican politics…

It all begins in 1929, when the PRI party emerged from the tumultuous Mexican Revolution. President Plutarco Elías Calles started…