His Election Would Restore Confidence, Presidential Hopeful Says : Rightist’s Prescription for Mexico: Riches, Straight Talk

His wealth, his girth and his crude style would seem to make Manuel J. Clouthier an easy target of typical government propaganda against privileged, right-wing politicians in Mexico.

That suits Clouthier just fine: He thinks that riches, fat and a little straight talk are what Mexico needs these days.

The white-haired, bearded businessman, known for off-color conversation in private and fiery oratory on the stump, is the presidential candidate for the conservative National Action Party, Mexico’s always-a-bridesmaid political party. He attracts notice and crowds with his unusually direct approach to politics in a country grown accustomed to hazy rhetoric.

Once in answer to the question of who should be considered Mexico’s best president this century, Clouthier named Alvaro Obregon, a one-armed Mexican revolutionary general.

Physical Limitation

“With only one arm, he could not steal as much,” Clouthier explained.

Despite the color he gives to an otherwise gray array of Mexican presidential candidates, Clouthier is unlikely to improve the fortunes of his party in the July 6 presidential election here. In the first place, the winner will almost surely be Carlos Salinas de Gortari, candidate of the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party and beneficiary of an overwhelming government electoral organization.

Also, despite a long history of battling the PRI, as the ruling party is known, National Action has failed notably to broaden its support beyond its middle-class roots. Formerly considered at home and abroad to be the party with the best chance of unseating the PRI in important elected offices, National Action has undergone a leveling off in its appeal, political observers say.

“National Action has reached its maximum ability to gain support. It is destined to never move beyond No. 2,” said Adrian Lajous, a newspaper columnist and expert on presidential politics.

Even the party’s hold on second place may be in jeopardy, because the leftist presidential candidacy of renegade PRI politician Cuauhtemoc Cardenas has caught fire in parts of Mexico.

Of the five candidates running, only Salinas, Clouthier and Cardenas are drawing significant support. The other two candidates are Rosario Ibarra de Piedra of the Revolutionary Workers Party, a Trotskyist group, and Gumersindo Magana of the Democratic Mexican Party, a party of the extreme right.

The fading hopes of National Action, known by its initials PAN, stand in contrast to its effervescent activity of two and three years ago, when all Mexico was watching to see if it could wrest governorships from the PRI in northern Mexican state elections.

In votes tainted by fraud, the PAN not only failed to win any statehouses but lost important city hall races across the north. In short, the PAN was virtually wiped off the political map. The use of fraud by the PRI to nail down northern victories was part of a policy to reverse opposition gains as the presidential campaign approached, Mexican observers say.

If fraud occurs in the July 6 presidential election, PAN is threatening to embark on a campaign of civil disobedience in an effort to overturn the result. As a foreshadowing of things to come, PAN demonstrators recently blocked highways and bridges in the northern state of Coahuila to protest the loss of a municipal election in the city of Monclova.

The threat of such protests has attracted the attention of PRI leaders who are responding with vague warnings of repression.

“The people will know how to put those who promote violence and disorder in their place,” PRI’s president, Jorge de la Vega, said in a speech last week.

Reaganomics Echoed

Clouthier, himself an unsuccessful candidate for governor of Sinaloa, campaigns as if he somehow will be occupying the presidential palace by year’s end. He rails against the “authoritarianism and corruption” of PRI governments. Clouthier says that as president, he would hand out individual land titles for ejidos , the communal farm holdings that form the basic structure of rural life in Mexico.

Some of his proposals are reminiscent of Reaganomics: For example, he said that he would reduce the size of government and reverse current policy to encourage foreign investment from the United States and other countries.

“I would rather be in business with U.S. companies than in debt to their banks,” Clouthier said in an interview during a campaign stop here.

He says that the government must create a climate of confidence to induce Mexican businessmen to bring back the billions of dollars they have stashed in foreign banks and invest them in Mexico.

“If I am elected, that in itself will restore confidence,” Clouthier said.

His supporters answer with wit and enthusiasm: “Beards, yes. Ears, no!” they shout in reference to Clouthier’s luxuriant facial growth and Salinas’ prominent ears.

An engineer and rice magnate from Sinaloa, Clouthier expresses a businessman’s distrust of politicians. He also has a northerner’s view of the interdependence of the United States and Mexico. He tells of the time several years ago when U.S. farmers tried to halt Mexican tomato imports. When politicians from both sides dragged their feet on the issue, Clouthier said, he went to Florida to talk with the American growers himself.

“They asked why we Mexicans thought we had a right to sell tomatoes in the United States, anyway. I said, ‘I’ll tell you why. Because I get up every morning and shave with a Gillette razor, I open a General Electric refrigerator for breakfast, I get in my Ford car to go to the office and dictate on my Remington (voice recorder). . . . That’s why I have a right to sell tomatoes to the United States,’ ” Clouthier said.

With typical self-confidence, Clouthier insists he defused the international situation by force of his own personality: “We got drunk together and resolved the problem ourselves.”