On the night of July 6, 1988, the vote count of Mexico’s presidential election stopped. Manuel Bartlett Díaz, the official in charge of supervising the election, announced that the system had failed. The night entered Mexican memory as se cayó el sistema, “the system fell.”
In 2023, Bartlett said in an interview with the journalist Ciro Gómez Leyva: “Yo no dije que se cayó el sistema” (I did not say that the system fell). He called it a phrase that was used “to put the result of the electoral fraud on me.”