This is how the system ‘fell’ in 1988; The current director of CFE, Manuel Bartlett, was in charge

In the 1988 presidential elections, the official party that was in power, which was the PRI, had the electoral processes centralized because at that time there was no impartial and autonomous body in charge of elections, as is now the National Electoral Institute ( INE). In 1988 the electoral processes were organized by the Federal Electoral Commission, which depended on the Ministry of the Interior, which in turn is part of the federal government.

Who presided over the Federal Electoral Commission and the Ministry of the Interior? Manuel Bartlett, whose name was heard loudly in the PRI to be the candidate for president of the PRI a year before. In August 1987, the PRI uncovered Carlos Salinas de Gortari as its candidate after an internal selection process in which Alfredo del Mazo, Ramón Aguirre, Miguel González Avelar, Sergio García Ramírez and Manuel Bartlett, who is currently the director, participated. of the Federal Electricity Commission in the government emanating from Morena and called the Fourth Transformation chaired by Andrés Manuel López Obrador.

On the night of July 6, 1988, the computer system used to count the votes had a problem, a “crash” while the vote counting was taking place. It was around eight thirty at night when all the computers assigned to the representatives of the political parties “went off”, who had been offered (for the first time in history) that they could follow the flow of the news step by step. electoral information.

The preliminary count, until before the fall of the system, then gave the advantage to the leftist candidate (a coalition known as the National Democratic Front made up of the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), the Labor Party (PT), and lame members of the PRI) Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas. The other candidate was Manuel Clouthier, from the National Action Party (PAN).

The fall of the system was announced by the then Secretary of the Interior and president of the Federal Electoral Commission, Manuel Bartlett Díaz (who was appointed by López Obrador as director of the Federal Electricity Commission in the current six-year term).

After the fall of the system, it was announced that the results declared Carlos Salinas de Gortari as the winner of the 1988 presidential elections. His legitimacy was questioned then and by posterity. The official figures of the electoral results were released several days after the election: Salinas de Gortari 9,687,929 votes (50.7%); Cardenas 5,929,585 (31.1%); Clouthier 3,208,584 (16.79%); Magaña 190,891 (0.99%) and Ibarra de Piedra 74,857 (0.39%). The annulled votes were not counted and the abundance of polling stations with 100% votes in favor of the PRI in rural areas caused suspicion.

On September 10, after the election, the Chamber of Deputies, established as the Electoral College, declared the elections valid and Salinas de Gortari was elected president by the vote of 263 deputies, of which 260 were PRI members, there were 83 votes against and absence of 150 opposition deputies. During one of the sessions of this College, the then federal deputy (and later president of the Republic) Vicente Fox, placed the electoral ballots of the fraud as mouse ears to ridicule Carlos Salinas de Gortari.

The PAN member Manuel Clouthier called for civil resistance, organized a hunger strike and appointed a parallel cabinet but in the end the PAN publicly recognized Salinas de Gortari as president and even together with the PRI supported the non-opening of the electoral packages.

Carlos Salinas concluded his six-year term but popular discontent gave rise to reforms in the Mexican electoral system such as the creation of the Federal Electoral Institute (IFE), the predecessor of the INE, thanks to a reform in 1990 and in subsequent decades there were reforms that allowed the regulation of the electoral system. financing of political parties, the supervision of campaigns, and the participation of observers of the process to legitimize them without the clear intervention of the federal government through this autonomous body.

Years later, the former president of Mexico, Miguel de la Madrid, Salinas de Gortari’s predecessor in the Presidency, confessed in the book about his management in the Presidency that after the calculations were made in 30 thousand boxes, the breakdown of the information of another 25 thousand, of which only aggregate results were given by district”. Thus, De la Madrid confessed in his book that the votes from 25 thousand polling stations, 45.5% of the total, were not counted, or that they were counted but not made official and those that were presented as such were only those aggregated by district.

Already in 2021, Manuel Bartlett, being director of the Federal Electricity Commission (CFE), in the government of Andrés Manuel López Obrador, told the Chamber of Deputies that the 1988 fraud was an “amasiato” between Salinas de Gortari and the PAN. : “Look, the fall of the system was a mix-up between the PAN and Salinas de Gortari. That’s how it went! An amass between the PAN and Salinas de Gortari! “He explained during an appearance before the legislative commissions of Energy and Infrastructure.

*Bartlett and the blackouts*

At the beginning of May of this 2024, the Employers’ Confederation of the Mexican Republic (Coparmex) emphasized that the electricity blackouts in 21 states of the country are not due to the increase in energy demand, but rather because the Federal Electricity Commission (CFE ) failed to fulfill its task of expanding and modernizing the energy network, as it only carried out 3.8% of the projects instructed by the Ministry of Energy. According to the National Electrical System Development Program (Prodesen), of the 232 projects instructed by the Ministry of Energy (Sener), the CFE has only carried out 9. The 8,858 megawatt (MW) generation project that is developing the CFE should be ready this year but it is estimated that it will take at least 4 years.