Carlos Salinas de Gortari
Carlos Salinas de Gortari (; born 3 April 1948) is a Mexican economist and politician affiliated with the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) who served as President of Mexico from 1988 to 1994. He is widely regarded as the most influential politician in Mexico over the last 30 years. Earlier in his career he worked in the Budget Secretariat eventually becoming Secretary. He was the PRI presidential candidate in 1988, and was declared elected on 6 July 1988 after a controversial electoral process and accusations of electoral fraud.
Indigenismo in Mexico
While the first decade of revolutionary presidencies of Venustiano Carranza (1917–1920), Adolfo de la Huerta (1920), Álvaro Obregón (1920–1924), and Plutarco Elías Calles (1924–1928) saw the start of change in terms of improving education and land reform these administrations still saw indigenous populations as an obstacle to progress and their policies were geared towards modernizing and improving indigenous populations to fit into civilized national culture. All of the presidents in the immediate aftermath of the Revolution were from northern Mexico; Carranza, Nuevo León; De la Huerta, Obregón, and Calles, Sonora), a region very different from central and southern Mexico (Mesoamerica), where great civilizations had arisen before the arrival of the Europeans. The revolutionary general most associated with Mexico's indigenous population in central Mexico was peasant leader Emiliano Zapata of Morelos, who was murdered by an agent of Carranza in 1919. Obregón and Calles both distributed land under the tenets of Article 27 of the Mexican Constitution of 1917, allowing the Mexican state to expropriate property. Calles distributed 3,045,802 hectares to over 300,000 people living in rural areas, many of them indigenous. However, much of this land was not well suited for agriculture or even non-arable. It is debated whether Calles's land redistribution was done for concern for the well-being of rural citizens or used as a tool to gain political support from rural areas. When Lázaro Cárdenas of the southern Mexican state of Michoacan became president in 1934, land reform in Mexico again became a high priority.