Editing Mexican Revolution (section)

===Institutional Revolutionary Party===
{{main|Institutional Revolutionary Party}}
[[File:PRI logo (Mexico).svg|thumb|right|upright|Logo of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, which incorporates the colors of the Mexican flag]]

The creation of the [[Institutional Revolutionary Party]] (PRI) emerged as a way to manage political power and succession without resorting to violence. It was established in 1929 by President Calles, in the wake of the assassination of President-elect Obregón and two rebellions by disgruntled revolutionary generals with presidential ambitions. Initially, Calles remained the power behind the presidency, during a period known as the [[Maximato]], but his hand-picked presidential candidate, Lázaro Cárdenas, won a power struggle with Calles, expelling him from the country. Cárdenas reorganized the party that Calles founded, creating formal sectors for interest groups, including one for the Mexican military. The reorganized party was named Party of the Mexican Revolution. In 1946, the party again changed its name to the Institutional Revolutionary Party. The party under its various names held the presidency uninterruptedly from 1929 to 2000, and again from 2012 to 2018 under President [[Enrique Peña Nieto]]. In 1988, [[Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas]], son of president Lázaro Cárdenas, broke with the PRI, forming an independent leftist party, the [[Party of the Democratic Revolution]], or PRD. It is not by chance that the party used the word "Revolution" in its name, challenging the Institutional Revolutionary Party's appropriation of the Mexican Revolution.

The PRI was built as a big-tent corporatist party, to bring many political factions and interest groups (peasantry, labor, urban professionals) together, while excluding conservatives and Catholics, who eventually formed the opposition [[National Action Party (Mexico)|National Action Party]] in 1939. To incorporate the populace into the party, Presidents Calles and Cárdenas created an institutional structure to bring in popular, agrarian, labor, and popular sectors. Cárdenas reorganized the party in 1938, controversially bringing in the military as a sector. His successor President Avila Camacho reorganized the party into its final form, removing the military. This channeled both political patronage and limited political options of those sectors. This structure strengthened the power of the PRI and the government. Union and peasant leaders themselves gained power of patronage, and the discontent of the membership was channeled through them. If organizational leaders could not resolve a situation or gain benefits for their members, it was they who were blamed for being ineffective brokers. There was the appearance of union and peasant leagues' power, but the effective power was in the hands of the PRI. Under PRI leadership before the 2000 elections which saw the conservative National Action Party elected most power came from a Central Executive Committee, which budgeted all government projects. This in effect turned the legislature into a rubber stamp for the PRI's leadership. The Party's name is aimed at expressing the Mexican state's incorporation of the idea of revolution, and especially a continuous, nationalist, anti-imperialist, Mexican revolution, into political discourse, and its legitimization as a popular, revolutionary party.<ref name="Monthly Review Press">{{cite book|last=Cockcroft|first=James|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=iie4AAAAIAAJ|title=Mexico: Class Formation, Capital Accumulation, & the State|publisher=Monthly Review Press|year=1992|isbn=978-0-85345-560-8}}</ref> According to historian Alan Knight, the memory of the revolution became a sort of "secular religion" that justified the Party's rule.<ref>Knight, Alan "The Myth of the Mexican Revolution" pp. 223–273 from ''Past & Present'', No. 209, November 2010 pp. 226–227.</ref>