Leftist Outsider's Campaign Surges in Mexico
JUCHITÁN, Mexico, March 16 — By the time Andrés Manuel López Obrador took the stage here on Thursday afternoon, the plaza was jammed with thousands of working-class people, a colorful crowd festooned with yellow partisan flags and bandannas bearing his picture.

His supporters had hung so many wreaths around his neck that he looked like he wore a yoke of flowers, an apt image for a man who claims to carry the aspirations of Mexico's millions of poor on his shoulders.

In the crowd stood one of those people, Jorge Luis GarcÃ*a, a fisherman from a Pacific coast village who makes about $3 a day hauling red snapper and other fish from the sea. Mr. GarcÃ*a, 68, voted for President Vicente Fox and his conservative National Action Party when he promised to change decades of corrupt rule in 2000. Now, Mr. GarcÃ*a said, he is supporting Mr. López Obrador, an unvarnished leftist, for the same reason.

"Fox promised this and that but delivered nothing," Mr. GarcÃ*a said, echoing the remarks of other people at the rally. "We want change."

With 108 days to go before the election, Mr. López Obrador, 52, leader of the Party of Democratic Revolution, appears to have consolidated his position as the front-runner, and many political strategists now predict he will win unless he stumbles spectacularly. Two polls this week showed him a solid 10 points above the other two candidates in a three-way race, with around 40 percent of the vote.

Perhaps more telling, the results of congressional and local elections in Mexico State, the country's most populous, with 14 million people, showed Mr. López Obrador's enormous personal appeal. He campaigned hard for his party's local candidates, and as a result the party made surprising and significant gains in a region where it has traditionally been in third place.

The strength of Mr. López Obrador's campaign is obvious in towns like this one. Unlike the other two candidates, he does not resort to offers of free food or transportation to fill up plazas for his rallies, an age-old tradition here.

He is plain-spoken and direct, using folksy language and blunt accusations about his opponents, calling them chattering birds, thieves and ruffians, making his supporters cover their mouths and giggle.

"He doesn't speak in the language of politicians," said Manuel Camacho, a former mayor of Mexico City and one of Mr. López Obrador's campaign advisers.

Mr. López Obrador, who left his post as mayor of Mexico City last year to run for president, also possesses an instinct for going for the political jugular. He has expertly tapped into the widespread belief that politicians and their cronies among the business elite have enriched themselves while the average worker has seen little improvement in his or her day-to-day life.

"You can't have a rich government and an impoverished people," he said to crowds on a swing through Oaxaca State this week.

His spiel is simple and he almost never strays from it. He promises to cut the salaries of top government officials and the president himself. He vows to do away with lavish pensions for ex-presidents. He says he will slash wasteful government spending and root out corruption in the government and entities like the state-owned oil monopoly, Pemex.

He says that with the savings that will rack up, he will establish food subsidies for the elderly, monthly stipends for the disabled, free health care, free education through college, and aid for single mothers. He also pledges to cut the costs of electricity, natural gas and gasoline, all of which are relatively expensive in Mexico despite its oil reserves.

He gets big applause when he says he will improve water and sewage systems throughout the country, a sore point for many working-class people, who suffer through frequent water failures and often live in places without sewage systems.

Mr. López Obrador also says he wants to renegotiate the free trade agreement with the United States to protect more farmers and workers in other weak sectors.

"The next president of Mexico will not be a puppet of anyone," he said here on Thursday, a veiled suggestion that Mr. Fox has been too closely allied with Washington. Then he added, "We are going to protect our markets as they do in the rest of the world."

At times his stump speech drifts into revolutionary rhetoric. He vaguely pledges "a real purification of public life" and says that the country needs "a change from top to bottom" and that "Mexico cannot stand more cosmetic changes."

Mr. López Obrador's main opponents, Felipe Calderón of the president's party and Roberto Madrazo of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, say the country cannot afford the social spending he proposes. They say his policies will bankrupt Mexico and return it to the days of huge international debts and closed markets.

They also say he has a tendency to be authoritarian and, at times, seems so suspicious of plots to torpedo his political rise that it borders on paranoia. Mr. Calderón, a free-market conservative, said earlier this week that Mr. López Obrador represented "a real danger" to the country's future. Mr. Madrazo calls him a demagogue and populist who promises things he can never deliver.

Mr. López Obrador, however, models himself on Benito Juárez, the president who kept the republic together during the French invasion in the 19th century. And as he did as mayor of Mexico City, he makes a point of being austere and saving money in his campaign.

He takes commercial flights and runs a no-frills whistle-stop campaign, traveling in vans, rather than private planes and helicopters, like his opponents. "Why do I take commercial flights?" he said in Juchitán, in southeastern Oaxaca. "I don't want to lose contact with the people below."

Mr. López Obrador tightly controls his message. He rarely holds news conferences and regularly denies requests for interviews, as he did for this article. He has rejected a call for four presidential debates, saying he fears an ambush and will do only one, close to election day.

The son of a shopkeeper in Tabasco State, Mr. López Obrador became involved in politics in college under the tutelage of a liberal poet-turned-politician, Carlos Pellicer. He has said his most formative years were spent as a social worker among the Chontal Indians in Tabasco; he moved his wife and baby son into a dirt floor shack there and shared the Indians' poverty for several years.

Later, after returning to politics, he split from the ruling PRI with other leftists and formed the Party of the Democratic Revolution.

He lost a race for governor of Tabasco against Mr. Madrazo in 1994 in an election riddled with irregularities and fraud. Mr. López Obrador mounted several aggressive street protests afterward, earning a reputation as rabble-rouser.

There is a messianic streak in Mr. López Obrador, too, that appears on the stump and in interviews, as in a recent television appearance when he was asked about his religious beliefs. "I am Catholic, and fundamentally Christian," he said, "because the life and work of Jesus fills me with passion. He, too, was persecuted in his time, spied on by the powerful of his era, and they crucified him."

Mr. López Obrador won the mayoral race in Mexico City in July 2000, weathered several corruption scandals and, last year, beat back an effort to knock him off the ballot for president because he had disregarded a court order, a move his enemies say suggests he will not respect the other branches of government if he becomes president.

On the campaign trail, Mr. López Obrador takes great pains to assure his supporters he will not be corrupted by power. He says he will refuse to live in the presidential mansion at Los Pinos and will take less than half the salary Mr. Fox makes.

"I am not going to change my way of thinking or my way of being," he told the rally. "The presidency is not going to go to my head and make me dizzy."