She needed to win a majority of 50 percent plus one vote, or at least 37 percent with 5 percent difference to number two.
She did: With 55 percent to Cordero's 38.1, Vázquez Mota will be the presidential candidate for the Partido Acción Nacional (PAN) in 2012 (with around 90 percent counted).
Former interior secretary Santiago Creel, who was the first to declare his candidacy, had earlier conceded.
Now let's wait and see if Cordero does the same, or whether he will protest the outcome.
(While a national primary, PAN's strength and the brunt of its militants are found in 10 states: Veracruz, Estado de México, Jalisco, Mexico City, Puebla, Michoacán, Oaxaca, Yucatán, Sonora and Guanajuato.)
This was a remarkably dirty campaign, with very nasty labels hurled around (Cordero's description of JVM as "intolerant and anti-democratic" perhaps the most offensive of these.)
Now the question is, to be sure, who she will pull votes from. It seems to me that Enrique Peña Nieto will be the loser here; I bet a bottle of Mexico's finest that he would have preferred Cordero.
This is truly historic: For the first time, one of Mexico's major party will have a women candidate. Good for them!
