1952 Mexican general election

President Miguel Alemán Valdés appointed his Minister of the Interior, Adolfo Ruiz Cortines, as the PRI's presidential candidate. The coordinator of Ruiz Cortines' campaign was Adolfo López Mateos, who would later succeed him as President.[3]

Miguel Henríquez Guzmán, a former priísta who left the party in 1951, was nominated as the candidate of the Federation of the Mexican People's Parties. The National Action Party (PAN) nominated Efraín González Luna as their first-ever presidential candidate. Finally, the well-known union leader Vicente Lombardo Toledano ran as the Popular Socialist Party's candidate.

The 1952 campaign season saw the model of political advertising aimed at praising the virtues of a party's candidate adopted. It was also the first time in Mexican history that market research was used in a political campaign.

Among the opposition candidates, Henríquez Guzmán became particularly popular. His campaign used a mariachi tune composed for him by Manuel Ramos Trujillo to promote his candidacy. Though this use of campaign jingles was condemned by critics who saw it as taking away the seriousness of politics, the success of the song throughout many regions of the country led to widespread adoption of this and other marketing techniques in future campaigns.

The alleged role of the family of former President Lázaro Cárdenas regarding this election has been widely commented: Amalia Solórzano and Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas -respectively the wife and son of the former President- reportedly supported Henríquez Guzmán's candidacy, while Dámaso Cárdenas (brother of Lázaro and then-governor of Michoacán) emphatically campaigned in favour of Ruiz Cortines; Lázaro himself was rumoured to be a sympathizer of Henríquez Guzmán, although officially he supported Ruiz Cortines -albeit in a rather discreet manner-.[4]

The former governor of Baja California Sur, Francisco José Múgica (by then estranged from the PRI) made some statements during the campaign accusing Ruiz Cortines of having collaborated with the Americans during the 1914 US occupation of Veracruz. Ruiz Cortines denied the accusations and claimed that at the time he was in Mexico City in service of the Revolution under the command of Alfredo Robles Domínguez and Heriberto Jara Corona. Later in the campaign, during a visit to Veracruz on 7 June, the Municipality of Xalapa honoured him with a parchment denying the accusations and naming him a "Patriot and Illustrious Son of Veracruz".[5]

In the official election count, Ruiz Cortines won with more than 74 percent of the popular vote, followed by Henríquez Guzmán with 16 percent. These results set off a wave of protests in several states by Henríquez supporters, which were violently suppressed by the administration of Miguel Alemán Valdés. Among those calling for justice were the former Mexican ambassador to Honduras, José Muñoz Cota Ibáñez, and Alicia Pérez Salazar.

Some military chiefs, sympathizers of Henríquez Guzmán and aligned with former president Lázaro Cárdenas, seized the opportunity and proposed to carry out a Coup d'état so that Henríquez would become president. However, it was Henríquez himself who rejected the plan, and instead he asked his supporters to stop the violent protests.[6] Despite the intensity of the protests, the results stood, and as a result Henríquez Guzmán then retired from public life.

Many years after the election, Ruiz Cortines revealed that only five weeks before he was scheduled to take office, he underwent a surgery to get rid of a hernia; to keep the surgery as a secret from the media, an operating room was temporally installed in Ruiz Cortines' Mexico City residence.[7][8] After the successful surgery, Ruiz Cortines took office as scheduled on 1 December.