Luis Donaldo Colosio Murrieta proposed the reform of power, which was going through adjusting the presidential powers to what the law strictly allowed, but also to achieve legitimate, reliable elections.
On March 5, 1994, before an esplanade of the monument to the revolution full of militants he said: “We know that the origin of many of our ills is in the excessive concentration of power.”
Indeed, the urgency of the democratic transformation was present in the discussions, in the workers and student mobilizations, in the demand of a politicized and active citizenship.
But, above all, it was the old Machinery of the dominant party that no longer worked, for its ties, almost unbreakable with the holders of the Executive Power, and because political plurality was a fact, which had to take course in competed elections.
The PRI, in that transit, had to become one more party, whose force came from the polls.
Hence, Colosio Murrieta announced the “commitment to reform the power to democratize it and end any vestige of authoritarianism.”
The candidate for the Presidency of the Republic listed the initiatives that the PRI promoted and supported at the start of that complex year: debates of candidates, agreements with other parties, review of the electoral list, national and international observers of the electoral process and timely results.
Each of those pieces engaged in achieving reliability, certainty, regularity and cleaning in the contests.
All this was also framed in the agreement for peace, justice and democracy that had been signed on January 24 as one of the responses to the emergence of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation.
Colosio Murrieta was killed 18 days after the speech of the monument to the revolution that, successfully, is qualified as one of the most relevant, for his opportunity, but also for his prospective.
The attack on Taurin Lomas, at the hands of a lonely shooter, moved the structures of the Mexican political system. The dilemma in those dramatic hours were diverse, where spokesmen of the most archaic asked to opt for hardness, deal with the emergency that came from the magnicide and even the Zapatista rebellion with the tools they used in the sixties and seventies.
And there was the other aspect, which was the one that President Carlos Salinas de Gortari imposed and promoted, to open the channels when deepening the political reform, on the one hand, and to promote dialogue and negotiation in Chiapas.
Hence, one of the most transcendent legacies of Colosio Murrieta is precisely democratization. He proposed it as a candidate for the Presidency of the Republic, but promised it since he was the National PRI leader.
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