20th century Founding , founder of the PAN in 1939 The National Action Party was founded in 1939 by
Manuel Gómez Morín, who had held a number of important government posts in the 1920s and 1930s. He saw the need for the creation of a permanent political party rather than an ephemeral organization to oppose the expansion of power by the post-revolutionary Mexican state. When Gómez Morín was rector of
UNAM between 1933 and 1935, the government attempted to impose socialist education. In defending academic freedom, Gómez Morín forged connections with individuals and groups that later came together in the foundation of the PAN in September 1939. The
Jesuit student organization, Unión Nacional de Estudiantes Católicos (UNEC), provided a well-organized network of adherents who successfully fought the imposition of a particular ideological view by the state. Gómez Morín was not himself a militant Catholic, but he was a devout believer who rejected liberalism and individualism. In 1939, Gómez Morín and a significant number of UNEC's leadership came together to found the PAN. The PAN's first executive committee and committees on political action and doctrine also had former Catholic student activists, including
Luis Calderón Vega, the father of
Felipe Calderón, who became President of Mexico in 2006. The PAN's "Doctrine of National Action" was strongly influenced by Catholic social doctrine articulated in
Rerum novarum (1891) and
Quadragesimo anno (1931) and rejected
Marxist models of
class warfare. The PAN originally brought together the Mexican socio-economic elite opposed to President
Lázaro Cárdenas' reforms. In particular, it opposed his plan for free secular education, the nationalization of oil and land reform. The party, which at the time included personalities sympathetic to
fascism, campaigned for Mexico's neutrality during the
Second World War. Efraín González Luna, a former member of the Mexican Catholic Student Union (Unión Nacional de Estudiantes Católicos) (UNEC), a long-time militant Catholic and practicing lawyer from Guadalajara, helped broker the party's informal alliance with the Catholic Church. However, the relationship between the PAN and the Catholic Church was not without tension. The party's founder Gómez Morín was leery of clerical oversight of the party, although its members were mainly urban Catholic professionals and businessmen. For its part, the Church hierarchy did not want to identify itself with a particular political party, since the
Constitution of 1917 forbade it. In the 1950s, the PAN, which had been seen to be Catholic in its makeup, became more ideologically secular. A split in the PAN occurred in 1977, with the pro-Catholic faction and the more secular wing splitting. The PAN had updated its positions following the
Second Vatican Council, toward a greater affinity for the poor; however, more traditional Catholics were critical of that stance and nonreligious groups were also in opposition, since they wanted the party to be less explicitly Catholic and draw in more urban professionals and business groups, who would vote for a nonreligious opposition party. The conflict came to a head, and in 1977 the progressive Catholic wing left the party. The PAN had strength in Northern Mexico and its candidates had won elections earlier on, but these victories were small in comparison to those of the
Institutional Revolutionary Party. In 1946, PAN members
Miguel Ramírez Munguía (
Tacámbaro,
Michoacán),
Juan Gutiérrez Lascurain (
Federal District), Antonio L. Rodríguez (
Nuevo León) and Aquiles Elorduy García (
Aguascalientes) became the first four federal deputies from the opposition in post-revolutionary Mexico. The following year, Manuel Torres Serranía from
Quiroga, Michoacán became the party's first
municipal president and Alfonso Hernández Sánchez (from
Zamora, Michoacán) its first state deputy. In 1962, Rosario Alcalá (Aguascalientes) became the first female candidate for state governor and two years later
Florentina Villalobos Chaparro (
Parral,
Chihuahua) became the first female federal deputy. In 1967, Norma Villarreal de Zambrano (
San Pedro Garza García,
Nuevo León) became the first female municipal president. Until the 1980s, the PAN was a weak opposition party that was considered pro-Catholic and pro-business, but never garnered many votes. Its strength, however, was that it was pro-democracy and pro-rule of law, so that its political profile was in contrast to the dominant Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) that was widely and increasingly seen as corrupt. The PAN came to be viewed as viable opposition party for a wider range of voters as it became more secular and as Mexicans increasingly moved to cities. As the PAN increasingly called for end of fraud in Mexican elections, it appealed to a wider range of people. In 1988, the newly created
Assembly of Representatives of the Federal District had, for the first time, members of the PAN. In 1989,
Ernesto Ruffo Appel (Baja California) became the first opposition governor. Two years later, his future successor in the Baja California government,
Héctor Terán Terán, became the first federal senator from the PAN. From 1992 to 2000, PAN candidates won the elections for governorships in
Guanajuato,
Chihuahua,
Jalisco,
Querétaro,
Nuevo León,
Aguascalientes,
Yucatán and
Morelos. ==Ideology==