Politics in Mexico

Report Outline
The Presidential Election of 1940
Mexican Revolutions from 1810 to 1917
Mexico Under the 1917 Constitution
Candidates in the 1940 Election

The Presidential Election of 1940

Citizens of Mexico will go to the polls July 7 to elect a president for a six-year term beginning the first of next December. Leading candidates are General Manuel Avila Camacho, liberal, supported by the present administration and by the Mexican Revolutionary Party (P. R. M.), and General Juan Andreu Almazan, who is more conservative, and has the backing of most business men and wealthy landowners. A third candidate, Rafael Sanchez Tapia, is not considered a serious contender.

Mexico has only one permanently organized political party, the P. R. M., formerly the National Revolutionary Party; since it controls the election machinery, “only a miracle” can prevent the election of its candidate. No presidential candidate in the history of Mexico has ever been elected without the support of the administration in power at the time of the election. In 1934, Lazaro Cardenas, the administration candidate and present incumbent, polled 2,268,567 votes to 24,690 for his nearest rival. Cardenas made an active campaign, but as his biographers put it:

Even if he had never left Mexico City, the Michoacan general would have rolled up magnificent majorities. Government employees would vote en masse for the official candidate; the members of the proadministration trade unions and peasant leagues would be herded behind his standard, and should anything go amiss in the outlying districts, zealous party and Gobernacion officials would rectify the voters' error.