 The 1988 Mexican general election was extremely important in Mexican history.The PRI's candidate, Carlos Salinas de Gortari, an economist who was educated at Harvard, had never held an elected office, and who was a technocrat with no direct link to the legacy of the Mexican Revolution even through his family.Rather than toe the party line, Cuauhtemoc Cárdenas, the son of former President Lázaro Cárdenas, broke with the PRI and ran as a candidate of the Democratic Current, later forming into the Party of Democratic Revolution (PRD).