Co-Founder of Mexican Opposition Party Quits

Sharp-tongued Mexican opposition leader Porfirio Munoz Ledo said Wednesday that he was quitting the party he helped found a decade ago.

The resignation sets the stage for more infighting on the Mexican left as the nation heads into the 2000 presidential vote.

Munoz Ledo, a former speaker of the lower house of Congress, said he was resigning from the leftist Democratic Revolution Party, or PRD, because of irreconcilable differences with its leaders.

“The break with the party’s leadership is irreversible and definitive,” he said.

The outspoken political maverick in August accepted the presidential nomination of a small centrist party, the Authentic Mexican Revolution Party, or PARM, after it became apparent that the PRD’s nomination was locked up by then-Mexico City Mayor Cuauhtemoc Cardenas.

Munoz Ledo said his resignation from the PRD would become official when he formally registers his candidacy with the PARM early next year.

Munoz Ledo and Cardenas founded the party that was to become the PRD in 1989 after they broke away from the long-ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI.

His relations with Cardenas, who ran unsuccessful presidential bids in 1988 and 1994, soured this year over both men’s presidential ambitions. At one point Munoz Ledo called Cardenas an “authoritarian tyrant.”

While Munoz Ledo does not have the popular support Cardenas enjoys, he will probably be a thorn in the side of the PRD candidate in the campaign ahead of the July 2000 vote.

Cardenas, meanwhile, said Munoz Ledo’s move was sour grapes. Munoz Ledo “tried to reach positions in the PRD that were beyond his reach,” Cardenas said in an interview.