González Luna had been an important leader of the Unión Nacional de Estudiantes Católicos (UNEC), a Jesuit-founded student group that had effectively opposed socialist education at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) in the early 1930s.
Leaders of UNEC, along with the rector of UNAM, Manuel Gómez Morín who had opposed socialist education went on to found the National Action Party in 1939.
It had a unique democratic system to vote for party officials and leaders, as well as choosing who was considered the right candidates for general and midterm elections.
[citation needed] In 1995, the party was described in the New York Times as a great challenge in Jalisco to the rule of President Ernesto Zedillo Ponce de León.
[4] After few years of finally gaining the main post of the state of Jalisco, the Governorship to Alberto Cárdenas in 1995,[5] the party began to lose some of its democratic credentials.