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The National Action Party (Spanish: Partido Acción Nacional), known by the acronym PAN, is a Conservative Party and one of the main political parties in Mexico.
Mexican catholics were the founders of this party, and were looking for a peaceful way to bring change in the country, and have a political representation, after the years of chaos and violence wich followed the mexican revolution. It was founded in by mexican catholics and other conservatives in 1939 after the Cristeros lost the cristero war. The turning point in this war was when the catholic church reached an agreement with the PRI turning a blind eye to the lack of democracy in the country and stopped suporting the catholic insurgency, threathening its members with excommunion if they disobeyed the government.
It spent the years from its foundation in 1939 in opposition, since all presidents since the end of the 1910-21 Mexican Revolution were from the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) or its variously named predecessors. This changed on July 2, 2000, when Vicente Fox Quesada of the PAN won the presidential election.
The PAN occupies the right of Mexico's political spectrum, advocating free enterprise, reduced taxes and government leadership , and reform of the welfare state: it is much like the United States Republican Party, many of its members are also great advocators of Catholicism. Most members of the PAN call for restrictions on abortion, homosexuality, and – in the most extreme cases – miniskirts and the public use of profanity. It is not uncommon for an ultraconservative Catholic PAN member to destroy pieces of art simply because he considers the art "immoral".
The party is led by Luis Felipe Bravo Mena (2003).
On July 4, 2004, the PAN lost several important state elections, including governorship elections in the states of Zacatecas, Chihuahua, and Durango, to candidates from the PRI and PRD. Coupled with defeats in other gubernatorial elections in 2003, this development was considered by some political analysts to be a significant repudiation of the PAN in advance of the 2006 presidential election. The defeat was considered especially severe in Chihuahua because that state was where PAN won its first electoral victories in 1983, when PAN mayoral candidates won in the cities of Ciudad Juárez and Chihuahua. (See: 2004 Mexican elections for results.)
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