MEXICO: Mexican presidential candidate Felipe Calderon strode from the players' tunnel on to the floor of Aztec Stadium and more than 100,000 supporters chanted his name at his last rally in the capital before the July 2nd election.
"Fe-li-pe, Fe-li-pe," yelled the capacity crowd on Sunday, with fans waving pennants and balloons coloured in the orange, blue and white of Mr Calderon's National Action Party.
Mr Calderon, his wife and their three young children walked to all four corners of a stage that covered half the stadium's famed soccer field. The family smiled and waved, a campaign portrait of an idealised Mexico of good jobs, good credit and good prospects.
Amplified to "deafening" by an 80,000-watt sound system, the chorus of his pop-style theme song summed up his campaign promise: So we can live better.
Mr Calderon (43), who has a degree from Harvard, has only a few days left in a tight race with left-wing Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador to persuade Mexican voters to maintain the free-market path of President Vicente Fox, which brought some reforms but still has left half the country in poverty. A conservative lawyer and economist, he delivered the same proposals to the rally he has made in all 31 of Mexico's states since his national campaign began six months ago: more jobs, universal healthcare, safer streets, better education, more investment and fewer reasons to emigrate.
He also echoed his campaign's warning: that Mr Lopez Obrador would be a stubborn, big-spending menace likely to trigger inflation, debilitating federal debt and other economic troubles.
Mr Lopez Obrador, the former Mexico City's mayor, holds a slight edge in polls and is wildly popular in the capital and among the rural poor. He has promised to reduce poverty through subsidies to single mothers and the elderly, as well as ambitious public works. The candidate of the Democratic Revolution Party will hold his final rally in the capital's centre square today, by law the last day of campaigning.
"Poverty is cured by jobs and for that reason, I will be the jobs president of Mexico," Mr Calderon said in his speech. He promised to close the wide gap between rich and poor, one of the reasons millions of Mexicans have gone to the United States.
Victor Alfonso Peralta (21) counts himself among the prospering Mexicans who have come of age under Mr Fox and the National Action Party.
He graduated from the National Autonomous University of Mexico with a degree in international relations and works as a supervisor.
"We've had stability and I don't see why we should change the economic model now," said Mr Peralta, who sat with his family. "I'm afraid Lopez Obrador might end up like politicians from the past and suppress the people who oppose his ideas."
Mr Fox in 2000 became the first president in seven decades to defeat the candidate of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, which had run Mexico through a combination of patronage, collaboration, corruption and force. As with all Mexican office-holders, he cannot run for re-election.
The Institutional Revolutionary Party candidate, Roberto Madrazo, is third in most polls.
Juan Hernandez is a former Texas literature professor who worked on the Fox campaign and then headed a federal office for Mexicans living abroad. "The most exciting thing about today," he said as he surveyed the stadium, "is that we know whom people vote for is who will win. Of Mr Fox's accomplishments, this is the biggest, that whomever the people want will win, and everyone believes it."