On March 29, 1994, Mexico's ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) named Ernesto Zedillo Ponce de Leon (born 1951) as its candidate for president after the party's original nominee, Luis Donaldo Colosio Murrieta, was assassinated. Zedillo was elected president of Mexico on August 21, 1994.

The selection of Colosio's successor sparked dissent within the PRI, which had governed the country since 1929. Old-guard activists, the so-called "dinosaurs" who inhabited the party's labor and peasant sectors, voiced dismay over the professorial Zedillo, 42, who had earned M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in economics from Yale and enjoyed a meteoric rise in his nation's financial bureaucracy. Rather than a cosmopolitan "egg-head," PRI's traditional bosses wanted as their candidate a back-slapping, savvy operative in tune with grassroots politics. After two Ivy League-educated chief executives, they longed for someone who appreciated patronage and payola more than econometric models and floating exchange rates. Their favorite was party chairman Fernando Ortiz...