Manuel Clouthier

Manuel de Jesús Clouthier del Rincón (Culiacán, Sinaloa; June 13, 1934 – October 1, 1989), also known as "Maquío", was a politician (governor of the state of Sinaloa, 1986; candidate for the presidency for the National Action Party, 1988), agronomist, union leader and businessman (president of the Employers' Confederation of the Mexican Republic, 1978-1980) Mexican who stood out as a business leader and fighter in favor of agriculture.

Beginnings

He completed his professional studies at the Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey, where he graduated as Fitotecnista Agronomist Engineer in 1957. His career began as an entrepreneur, later presiding over various business bodies nationwide among them the Culicán River Farmers Association (AARC), the Employers' Confederation of the Mexican Republic (COPARMEX) and the Business Coordinating Council (CCE).

On June 13, 1959, he married Leticia Carrillo Cázares, from Navolato Sinaloa, with whom he had 11 children. Leticia María, Manuel, Eric, Rebeca, Tatiana, Cid, Juan Pablo, Lorena, Lucía, Irene and Ricardo, some of them have ventured into politics.

Election in Sinaloa

Motivated after experiencing closely the candidacy for the municipal presidency of Culiacán of his uncle Jorge del Rincón Bernal and seeing the irregularities of the electoral process, in addition to experiencing and seeing the abuses that occurred in the countryside and the state's agricultural sector during decades, Clouthier contested for the PAN in the Sinaloa gubernatorial election on October 26, 1986. According to official results, he was defeated by the PRI's Francisco Labastida Ochoa in a contested election, with many Sinaloans dissatisfied with the results. Clouthier denounced the existence of electoral fraud with his book The Crusade for the Salvation of Mexico.

1988 Presidential Candidacy in Mexico

On November 22, 1987, Clouthier managed to win the PAN's candidacy for the presidency of the Republic in the first round in a massive historic internal election in the National Action Party.

After the election of July 6, 1988 and a highly controversial and questioned electoral process with what is commonly known as "the fall of the system", the official results gave victory to the PRI candidate, Carlos Gortari Salt Flats. Clouthier was placed in third place, with 17% of the vote, behind the candidate of the National Democratic Front, Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas Solórzano.

The next day, Clouthier stated that the reason "the computer system crashed was that the representatives of the opposition parties in the computer system discovered a data bank already with results, just two hours later after the official conclusion of electoral day". Therefore, he denounced the breach of legality and announced the start of civil resistance.

To demand the repetition of the elections, Clouthier carried out a post-campaign around the country, with a series of acts that called for peaceful resistance with acts of civil disobedience: from the "caravan of the insurgents"—a series of silent marches, whose participants wore masks with the phrase "Let Mexico speak," the campaign phrase of his opponent Salinas de Gortari—until they appeared to appear in committees of the Chamber of Deputies. Assuming his risks, he even struggled with security elements of President Miguel de la Madrid during an official act in front of the Palacio de Bellas Artes, in which some soldiers prepared their weapons in front of him, to which an officer violently opposed the raise the weapon of his subordinates and reprimand them. He attended this act with a delegation in a peaceful manner only to remind the then president to keep his word, and he took out a poster that said just that while they were shooting at him.

In September 1988, when the classification of the presidential election was being debated in the Chamber of Deputies, Clouthier sued the legislators to annul the voting, not only because of the allegations of irregularities committed on election day, but also because of the complaints of manipulation of the results in favor of Salinas. In addition, he requested the opening of the electoral packages: & # 34; The resounding refusal of the [electoral] college to open the packages demonstrates two great truths: on the one hand, the uselessness of guarding and custody of it; and on the other, that the government itself knows well that the content of the tally sheets does not coincide with the correct computation of the real votes that are inside the packages that are as jealously guarded as they are in vain". He offered the content of the electoral packages as evidence of the general challenge to the process, and concluded: "Will it be worth refusing to review the packages at the cost of the legitimacy and moral authority of the next government?".^{[citation required]}

After the ratification of the official results in favor of Salinas, Clouthier continued his political fight, now in pursuit of a "truly democratizing" electoral reform, with a post-electoral alliance for this fight with Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas and Rosario Ibarra de Piedra, both also presidential candidates; this was the first multi-party alliance on record in the country's modern history. They asked for a reform of the electoral law, the separation of the Electoral Institute from the PRI-Government and its creation as an independent and citizen body, the revision and cleaning of the electoral roll, and the issuance of a voting card with photography to have a better control of voters registered in the register.

He also held a fast, from December 15 to 22, 1988, at the monument to the Angel of Independence in Mexico City, in protest against the denunciations of fraud made in Jalisco, Guanajuato, San Luis Potosí and Zacatecas. Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas went to visit him and agreed with him on some actions in favor of democracy.

Civil resistance that carried out "Machio"

The alternative cabinet

On February 12, 1989, he presented his alternative cabinet (an English-style "shadow cabinet" to monitor government actions in important areas) in which Diego Fernández de Cevallos, Jesús González Schmal, Fernando Canales Clariond, Francisco Villarreal Torres, Rogelio Sada Zambrano, María Elena Álvarez Bernal, Moisés Canale Rodríguez, Vicente Fox, Carlos Castillo Peraza and Luis Felipe Bravo Mena. Clouthier was the coordinator of the cabinet until his death.

Death

On October 1, 1989, Clouthier died in a car accident, in the company of deputy Javier Calvo Manrrique, crushed by a heavy cargo trailer, according to the official report, at kilometer 158 of the Mexico-Nogales highway (Carretera Federal México 15), near Cruz de Elota. Clouthier was going to Mazatlán, Sinaloa, the place where he would go to close Humberto Rice's campaign.^{[citation required]}

Many people questioned the accident and the official versions of it, giving rise to several theories about an attack by his opponents and the government of Carlos Salinas de Gortari. He was buried in the Jardines de Humaya cemetery in Culiacán, next to his son, El Cid.