A Common Man With Fanfare

The candidate has a certain sex appeal. Imagine a mestizo Bill Clinton: cappuccino-colored 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, realizes 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.

Polls released this week show he has retaken the lead from conservative, free-market candidate Felipe Calderon.

Lopez Obrador 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 metropolis 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, a variation of the Sentra sold in the U.S., and the kind of unassuming vehicle favored here by penny-pinching office workers. Today, while his opponents charter jets, Lopez Obrador crisscrosses 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, roustabout men and young mothers sweat in the shade of the central plaza’s few trees as 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 favorite 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 United States and a “squawking bird,” earning widespread criticism each time.

In fact, Lopez Obrador’s rough-and-tumble campaign has many Mexicans wondering exactly what kind of president he might be if were to win the election July 2.

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 family from the gulf coast state of Tabasco who’s never quite shaken his provincial air, but who is widely acknowledged to be the most talented political fighter in Mexico?

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Lopez Obrador was born in 1953, the eldest 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 favorite pastime.

“Back then, Tepetitan had 600 people or so,” Lopez Obrador recalled in a recent interview with filmmaker Luis Mandoki. “There was no high school, no roads. All the communication was by river. Tabasco is water. We have as much water as sky.”

His parents ran a small store. Andres Manuel the child was as headstrong as Lopez Obrador the politician would grow up to be. Because he tensed up every time his parents found fault in his behavior, he earned the family nickname “The Rock.”

The young Lopez Obrador’s dream was to make it to baseball’s major leagues, said Luis Alonso Torres, a childhood friend. “We weren’t from rich families. Like every public school student, he had to make a lot of sacrifices to continue his education.”

In the 1960s, his family moved to the nearby oil-patch boomtown of Villahermosa, and he joined the party that dominated all aspects of Mexico’s political life, the Revolutionary Institutional Party, known by its Spanish initials, PRI.

Lopez Obrador was a true believer in the PRI and even wrote the lyrics to the PRI’s Tabasco anthem. 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 the PRD leader in Tabasco. In 1994, he ran for governor and lost to the PRI candidate, Roberto Madrazo. He denounced the result as a fraud and launched a protest campaign to force the federal government to overturn the result. It left him bloodied by police.

The fight in Tabasco helped propel Lopez Obrador to national prominence. Two years later, he was elected national president of the PRD. And in 2000, he won election as mayor of Mexico City.

Lopez Obrador quickly made it clear that he would be unlike any mayor the city had ever seen. He scheduled daily 6:30 a.m. news conferences. The news day began with Lopez Obrador, and often it ended that way.

“It was the first time a politician had made himself available to the Mexico City press corps every day without reading from a script,” said Hector Aguilar Camin, an author here.

His government began building elevated roads and special bus lanes to relieve traffic congestion, the most important public works in the city in 20 years.

Lopez Obrador also bucked the fiscal austerity of Fox’s government by launching monthly subsidies for all residents over 70. His popularity soared.

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,” said Rossana Fuentes Berain, a political analyst at the Autonomous Technological Institute of Mexico.

Political analysts widely agreed that he was the favorite to win the presidential election, with his pledge to fight poverty by increasing social spending and using government funds to stimulate the economy.

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 for president.

The political drama that followed polarized Mexico.

Addressing a crowd of thousands in Mexico City’s central square on the day he was to be removed from office by Congress, the tough politician looked, if only for a moment, thoroughly beaten. He wiped his brow as he approached the microphone, struggling to hold back tears.

“I was worried,” he would tell friends later.

“I asked people what I could do to hold on. The best they could tell me was, ‘Breathe deeply.’ ”

In the end, it was the “hard and angry tone” of the opening lines of his speech that saved him, he said.

Congress voted to impeach him. Within days, more than half a million of his supporters took to the streets of Mexico City. A local judge tossed out the original complaint. The attorney general resigned, and Fox announced that the case would not proceed. “The Rock” had won.

Lopez Obrador returned to the mayor’s office more popular than ever: Three polls gave him approval ratings above 80%.

“He is the most talented politician we have,” Fuentes Berain said. “He is creative, inventive and has a tremendous capacity for response under fire.”

Months later, as the presidential campaign got underway in earnest, Lopez Obrador made what is widely regarded as a crucial mistake. He refused to respond to a series of attack ads by Calderon, the National Action Party candidate, including one that compared him to Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, the bete noir of Latin American conservatives.

Then he chose not to show up for the first presidential debate.

By late May, however, the old Lopez Obrador was back, firing with ads and interviews on TV news programs.

“I hate to use the media, because it’s ridiculously expensive,” he told one interviewer. This was the same man, after all, who still lived in a modest Mexico City apartment rather than the sprawling residential compounds favored by many top politicos here.

Lopez Obrador says he doesn’t want to lose his authenticity, the qualities that keep him close to the common people. At nearly every rally, he repeats the same promise: “I will not steal, I will not lie, and I will not betray the people.”

If Lopez Obrador wins the presidential election next month, it will be because millions of Mexicans believe he will keep that promise.

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Cecilia Sanchez of The Times’ Mexico City Bureau contributed to this report.