Francisco Arellano-Belloc

Francisco Arellano-Belloc (June 2, 1940 – January 19, 1994) was an influential Mexican politician. He served as Secretary of Press. On May 5, 1989, he and other leading center-left and leftist politicians formally founded the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD). He was politically aligned with Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas Solórzano, the son of President Lázaro Cárdenas.

His daughter, Alejandra Arellano-Belloc (Alexa Thurman) is a banker with Wall Street Mortgage Bankers in California. His daughter Claudia Arellano-Belloc is a radio and television personality in Mexico City where his son Francisco Arellano-Belloc Jimenez also lives.

In 1987, he and other politicians from the PRI announced the creation of the Corriente Democrática (Democratic Current) within the party to discuss a change in the process traditionally used to nominate the PRI's candidate for the presidency (there was an extralegal rule called el dedazo as the "right" by which the incumbent president picked his successor. The expression is a reference to the action of pointing with a finger to the successor). Some left the Current and the supporters of Cárdenas were ostracized and expelled from the PRI.

On July 6, 1988, the day of the elections, a system shutdown that the government was using to count the votes occurred, presumably by accident. The government stated that the system crashed ("se cayó el sistema"). When the system was finally restored, Carlos Salinas was declared the official winner. Even though the elections were extremely controversial, and some declare that Salinas won legally, the expression "se cayó el sistema" became a colloquial euphemism for electoral fraud. It was the first time in 59 years, from the creation of PRI to that point (1929-1988), that the winning of the presidency by that party was in doubt, and the citizens of Mexico realized that PRI could lose.