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Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, a three-time presidential candidate and
son of former president Lazaro Cardenas, said in a letter to the
leadership of the opposition Party of the Democratic Revolution
(PRD) that his decision was irreversible and follows calls he
made last week for party leaders to step down.
PRD leaders did not resign but instead held talks with Cardenas
earlier on Tuesday aimed at defusing the political crisis.
The PRD, which Cardenas helped found in 1989, has been under
fire over the abduction in late September of 43 students by
police in the southern state of Guerrero, where both the mayor
and state governor at the time were PRD members.
The government says the students, who attended a radical leftist
teachers college, were seen as a threat by the mayor, who was in
league with a drug gang.
Guerrero police handed over the students to the gang, which
apparently murdered them and then burned their bodies, according
to the attorney general.
Cardenas, 80, is the not the first high-profile PRD leader to
distance himself from the party.
Leftist firebrand Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, the PRD's
standard-bearer in the last two presidential elections, resigned
from the party in 2012.
Lopez Obrador, who nearly won the 2006 election, has since
founded a rival leftist party.
Despite the blow the crisis in Guerrero has delivered to
President Enrique Pena Nieto's ruling Institutional
Revolutionary Party, the PRD and the conservative National
Action Party have both suffered major divisions over the past
couple of years.
(Reporting by David Alire Garcia; Editing by Paul Tait)
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Elder
statesman of Mexico's main leftist party resigns
