Francisco Epigmenio Luna Kan was born on 3 December 1925 in the town of in the
municipality of Mérida. (In the early 1920s,
Felipe Carrillo Puerto, who was partly Maya, had been governor.) For centuries the political elite had been
Criollos (Yucatecans of pure
Spanish ancestry). It was widely said that party officials of Mexico's ruling
Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) took the unusual step of selecting a person of Maya descent as their candidate in 1975 because the opposition
National Action Party (PAN) had been getting many votes in Yucatán, and PRI candidates had been getting a poor showing in the state's predominantly Maya towns and villages. It was said that PAN got the majority of votes in the previous governor's race, and the PRI managed to maintain control of the state only through fraud in counting votes. During his governorship, he reopened the
Teatro Peón Contreras. After his term as governor Luna Kan resigned from the PRI and joined the
Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD). He unsuccessfully ran as that party's candidate for
municipal president of Mérida in 1998. They were married until her death in 2022. They had three children: Gloria Luz de Peraza, Francisco, and Juan José Luna Soria. Luna Kan died on 23 November 2023, at the age of 97. His cause of death was not made public. Tributes came from multiple public figures, including former governor
Dulce María Sauri Riancho and the then-gubernatiorial candidate
Joaquín Díaz Mena. ==References==