The PRI loses power
Vicente Fox of the opposition PAN wins the presidency, peacefully ending 71 years of rule by the PRI and its predecessors.
- Opening Mexico: The Making of a Democracy — Julia Preston and Samuel Dillon, Farrar, Straus and Giroux (2004)
- Mexico: Biography of Power. A History of Modern Mexico, 1810–1996 — Enrique Krauze, HarperCollins (1997)
After the 1988 fraud, reforms created an independent electoral institute (IFE, now INE) with photo voter IDs that Mexicans still use as their main identity card. On 2 July 2000 Vicente Fox, a tall, cowboy-booted former Coca-Cola executive of the centre-right National Action Party (PAN), won, and President Ernesto Zedillo went on television that night to accept the result.
- Opening Mexico: The Making of a Democracy — Julia Preston and Samuel Dillon, Farrar, Straus and Giroux (2004)
- Mexico — Encyclopaedia Britannica
Why it matters today
2000 proved Mexican votes could change governments. Since then power has passed among three parties, the PAN, the PRI and Morena, and in 2024 Claudia Sheinbaum became the first woman president. Many Mexicans remain wary, though, of new parties drifting toward old habits.