Mexican Revolution
The PRI, or Institutional Revolutionary Party is one of the major lasting legacies of the Mexican Revolution; its first iteration was the Partido Nacional Revolucionario founded in 1929 under Northern revolutionary general and president of Mexico (1924–1928) Plutarco Elías Calles, following the assassination of president-elect (and former president) Álvaro Obregón in 1928. The establishment of the party created an enduring structure that managed not only presidential succession but also groups with competing interests. Initially, Calles remained the power behind the presidency during a period known as the Maximato, but his hand-picked presidential candidate, Lázaro Cárdenas, won a power struggle with Calles, expelling him from the country. Cárdenas reorganized the party that Calles founded, creating formal sectors for interest groups, including one for the Mexican military. The reorganized party was named Party of the Mexican Revolution. In 1946, the party again changed its name to the Institutional Revolutionary Party. The party under its various names held the presidency uninterruptedly from 1929 to 2000, and again from 2012 to 2018 under President Enrique Peña Nieto.
Institutional Revolutionary Party
Mexico increased its international presence during López Portillo: in addition to becoming the world's fourth oil exporter, Mexico restarted relations with the post Franco-Spain in 1977, allowed Pope John Paul II to visit Mexico, welcomed American president Jimmy Carter and broke relations with Somoza and supported the Sandinista National Liberation Front in its rebellion against the United States supported government. López Portillo also proposed the Plan Mundial de Energéticos in 1979 and summoned a North-South World Summit in Cancún in 1981 to seek solutions to social problems. In 1979, the PRI founded the COPPPAL, the Permanent Conference of Political Parties of Latin America and the Caribbean, an organization created "to defend democracy and all lawful political institutions and to support their development and improvement to strengthen the principle of self determination of the peoples of Latin America and the Caribbean".