New Broom?

Most of Mexico’s 62 million people breathed a sigh of relief on December 1, 1976, when Jose Lopez Portillo was sworn in as 52nd president of the republic.

The widely disliked and mistrusted government of Luis Echeverria Alvarez had run its elected term, and Echeverria stepped reluctantly (and temporarily?) out of the limelight in which, his critics say, he had basked continuously, as close to 24 hours a day as he could make it, for nearly seven years.