Mexico: Mexicans are asking is their frontrunner for the presidency a visionary reformer or irresponsible populist, writes Hector Tobar
The candidate has a certain sex appeal. Imagine a mestizo Bill Clinton: cappuccino-coloured skin, a full head of white hair and a charismatic stage presence. Sometimes, his arrival at a campaign stop will provoke a scream from a woman who, a second later, realises she's too old to be acting that way.
Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador is the candidate of the common man (and, clearly, of the common woman) in this year's presidential campaign. His critics call him an irresponsible populist who will ruin Mexico's precarious economic stability, but to millions of others, the 52-year-old standard-bearer for the leftist Democratic Revolution Party is hope incarnate, a warrior and father figure rolled into one.
He fought off impeachment as mayor of Mexico City, took care of the capital's "little grandmothers" with a monthly subsidy check and launched the most ambitious transportation projects in the traffic-choked capital in a generation. Now he's on a crusade to bring the most ambitious social and economic reforms Mexico has seen in decades.
As mayor, he drove a white Nissan Tsuru, the kind of unassuming vehicle favoured here by penny-pinching office workers. Today, while his opponents charter jets, Lopez Obrador criss-crosses the country on commercial flights and in a caravan of white SUVs.
From the Indian villages near the Guatemalan border to the barrios of Tijuana, he revels in oddities of local protocol. They give him silly belts to wear in Jalisco and crowns of pink roses in Chiapas, and he never hesitates to put them on. Very often, women float near the front of his rallies wearing yellow T-shirts emblazoned with the catch phrase, "Andres Manuel, you are my rooster!"
In the quaint town of San Martin de Hidalgo near Guadalajara, Lopez Obrador launches into his standard stump speech. His is an undeniably populist vision of Mexico's problems. He makes the crowd laugh and hiss as he strikes out at favourite punching bags, such as former president Carlos Salinas de Gortari, reviled by many as a symbol of corruption, or the banker Roberto Hernandez, one of the richest men in Mexico.
"I could have made a deal with those men, but I didn't," he says. "We don't want to go down the same old path . . . The country is tired of cosmetic changes. We need major surgery."
Sometimes he gets carried away. So far on the campaign trail this year, Lopez Obrador has called outgoing conservative president Vicente Fox a "puppet" of the US and a "squawking bird", earning widespread criticism each time. In fact, Lopez Obrador's rough-and-tumble campaign has many Mexicans wondering what kind of president he might be if he were to win the election on July 2nd. Is he a demagogue in waiting? Or is he a democratic reformer who will finally earn the poor a seat at the table with the country's political elite?
Or will he simply continue to be Lopez Obrador: the son of a humble Tabasco family who's never shaken his provincial air, but who is widely acknowledged to be the most talented political fighter in Mexico?
Lopez Obrador was born in 1953, the oldest of eight children of a lower-middle-class family in the village of Tepetitan, a place of slow-moving rivers where baseball, not soccer, is the favourite pastime. In the 1960s the family moved to the nearby oil-patch boomtown of Villahermosa, and he joined the party that dominated Mexico's political life, the Revolutionary Institutional Party, known by its Spanish initials, PRI.
Lopez Obrador was a true believer in the PRI but by 1988, he and other dissenters were accusing the party of betraying the poor and soon formed the new Democratic Revolution Party, or PRD. Lopez Obrador became its leader in Tabasco.
Two years later he was elected national president and in 2000 won election as mayor of Mexico City. He quickly made it clear that he would not be like any mayor the city had ever seen. He scheduled daily 6:30am news conferences. The news day began with Lopez Obrador, and often it ended that way.
Though he charmed many with his lilting Tabasco accent and often acerbic commentary, the Mexico City elite squirmed.
"He is a man of deep prejudices, and he doesn't think much of the Mexican bourgeoisie," says Rossana Fuentes Berain, a political analyst at the Autonomous Technological Institute of Mexico.
Political analysts widely agreed that he was the favourite to win the presidential election. Then, last April, PRI and National Action Party legislators joined in an effort to impeach Lopez Obrador on an obscure charge - a move that would have prohibited him from running. The political drama that followed polarised Mexico, but Lopez Obrador returned to the mayor's office more popular than ever: three polls gave him an approval rating above 80 per cent. "He is the most talented politician we have," says Fuentes Berain. "He is creative, inventive and has a tremendous capacity for response under fire." - (LA Times-Washington Post service)