Mexican Leftist Leader Resigns Over Party Credibilty

Mexican politician, and leftist moral authority, Cuauhtemoc Cardenas has resigned from the party he founded, due to recentscandals involving some of it's members, the Ayotzinapa case, and majordifferenceswith the partypresident.

Cardenas resigned from his Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD) hours after a meeting with party leader Carlos Navarrete. 

The well-respected politician’s public resignation letter said that for years there had been irreconcilable differences between him and the new leaders of the party, but that recently they had become too big to ignore.

"We maintain profound differences regarding our views on how to face the internal crisis affecting the party,” said Cardenas after meeting with Navarrete.

Cardenas called for Navarrete’s resignation Nov. 17, saying this was a necessary step in order to regain the party’s credibility.

The moral authority of the party, according to Cardenas, has been damaged partly due to the case of the 43 Ayotzinapa students, who went missing two months ago in Guerrero state, where PRD ran the local government.

The PRD also sided with President Enrique Peña Nieto’s PRI party in its push for structural reforms that were fast-tracked through Congress, including the highly controversial energy reform.

The founder of the PRD also noted the party was going through a very profound crisis of decomposition that could ultimately lead to the disappearance of the leftist political institution.

“I want to tell you that before sharing responsibilities in decisions taken with short-sightedness, opportunism or self-satisfaction, in which there have been no self-critic, I have preferred to take the risk of being criticized, and I have taken a decision based on the principles that always have guided my public and private behavior,” he wrote.

Cardenas is considered in Mexico as the moral authority of the left. In 1989, he left Mexico's oldest party PRI (Revolutionary Institutional Party) and founded the PRD aiming to create a truthful left-wing party that opposed the neo-liberal measures that the were affecting the country's economy.

Cardenas was three-times presidential candidate in 1988, 1994, and 2000, but he lost in all occasions, although in 1988 massive fraud was denounced by various political leaders and observers.

In 2011, Cardenas was awarded with the Belisario Dominguez Medal, the highest award that the Mexican Senate can give a citizen.

Cardenas was also a tough opponent of the Energy Reform proposed by Peña Nieto that mainly contemplates privatization of the Mexican oil and gas production, which were nationalized by Cardenas' father, former President Lazaro Cardenas in 1938.

In the last two months, PRD has being criticized for to the responsibility of some of it's members in the disappearance of the 43 Mexican students in the city of Iguala, in the souther state of Guerrero.

Jose Luis Abarca, who was Iguala's mayor and member of the PRD, allegedly ordered local police and a criminal gang to attack buses Ayotzinapa students were traveling on the night of Sept. 26. And last month, Guerrero's PRD Governor Angel Aguirre was forced to resigned by the circumstances surrounding the case of the 43 missing students.