El circo (song)
The lyrics describe two brothers, "Carlos" and "Raúl" (in reference to Carlos Salinas de Gortari, president of Mexico from 1988 and 1994, and his brother Raúl Salinas de Gortari), who form a "circus" (a drug cartel) and get rid of the other "circuses" in the country. After the brothers get wealthy, Raúl makes Carlos' money disappear (a reference to the Mexican peso crisis) and their circus ends. Raúl is jailed, while Carlos leaves the country, and the people are finally at peace, unless another circus arrives and the story repeats itself.
Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas
Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas served as a senator for the state of Michoacán from 1974 to 1980 and as governor of that same state from 1980 to 1986. He won election to these two posts as a member of the then-ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI).
When President Miguel de la Madrid, a centrist who began policy changes in Mexico that liberalized its economy, designated his presidential successor as Carlos Salinas de Gortari, another technocrat with centrist tendencies, leftist elements within the PRI formed a "democratic current." They demanded democracy and a return to a more leftist, populist stance by the PRI. Cárdenas and Porfirio Muñoz Ledo led this current. There was an informal rule within the PRI called '"el dedazo," the incumbent president's unwritten and exclusive right to designate his successor. (The expression was a reference to the action of pointing with a finger to the successor.) With the designation of Salinas as the official candidate, the democratic current were forced out of the PRI. In an interview with historian Enrique Krauze, De la Madrid said "as far as I'm concerned, let them go! Let them form another party." It was too late to form a new party in advance of the July 1988 elections, but a coalition of small left-wing parties, the Frente Democrático Nacional ("National Democratic Front") supported Cárdenas as their candidate.