 The party became an extension of the Mexican state.In 1946, the party was transformed into the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), and the army was no longer a sector.In 1988, when Carlos Salinas de Gortari, a Harvard-trained economist, was chosen as the PRI presidential candidate, Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, son of former President Lázaro Cárdenas, broke with the PRI ran as a coalition candidate.