2 Disparate, Unproven Contenders to Vie in Brazil Vote : Latin America: The outcome of Sunday’s election and the performance of the winner could affect much of the continent.

Facing political and economic uncertainty, Latin America’s largest country will make a crucial choice Sunday in the runoff round of Brazil’s first popular presidential elections since 1960.

The contest, close and unpredictable, is between two candidates of unproven statesmanship: a former factory worker representing a Marxist-oriented labor party, and a brash young populist on a crusade against corruption.

The outcome of the voting, and the performance of the winner in the early months of his term, could have a far-reaching impact on much of Latin America as well as on Brazil’s 145 million people. Bordering on every other South American country except Chile and Ecuador, Brazil is regarded as a continental bellwether.

The heated contest between socialist Luis Inacio Lula da Silva, 44, and populist Fernando Collor de Mello, 40, has been marked by emotional appeals, mudslinging and exaggeration. In a campaign-closing debate that ended at 12:30 a.m. Friday, Lula portrayed Collor as emotionally and politically unstable.

“Our adversary lost his emotional control in the past week,” Lula said. He said Collor had shown that “he changes parties more easily than I change shirts.”

In his final rally--Wednesday, in the city of Belo Horizonte--Collor sought to raise fears about the leftist orientation of Lula and his party. “He is a totalitarian who wants to implant dictatorship and communism in Brazil,” Collor said.

The latest surveys of voter preference show the two candidates so close that most political analysts are calling the contest a tossup. In the first round of voting, on Nov. 15, Collor led a field of 21 candidates with 28% of the ballots; Lula had 16%.

Since then, Lula has won the support of democratic socialists Leonel Brizola and Mario Covas, who finished third and fourth in the first round.

Neither Lula nor Collor seemed a likely winner at the beginning of the presidential campaign last year. Both rose from dark-horse status on a wave of popular discontent with unbridled inflation and ineffective government.

Lula grew up in an impoverished, fatherless family and never completed grade school. As a lathe operator in Sao Paulo’s industrial belt, he lost the little finger of his left hand in a shop accident.

The stocky, bearded labor leader became nationally known in the late 1970s when he organized strikes in defiance of the military government then in power. He won election to Congress in 1986.

Collor, handsome and slim, is the scion of a wealthy family that has been part of Brazil’s political elite in the past. He won a congressional seat in 1982 as a candidate of the party created to support the military government, but he later switched sides and in 1986 ran successfully for the governorship of Alagoas, a small and impoverished northeastern state.

He created his own party and quit the governorship last year to run for president after drawing national attention with a crusade against overpaid government officials. He calls himself a centrist reformer.

Lula has emphasized his party’s policy of giving workers decisive influence in a pro-socialist government, while Collor has vowed to streamline government and combat corruption.

Both candidates have promised to redistribute income in favor of Brazil’s poor majority, but both have been vague about how they hope to control inflation, which is approaching 50% a month.

Many Brazilian analysts have expressed fear that no matter who wins Sunday, economic problems will be so severe by inauguration day, March 15, that the new president will be unable to meet popular demands for solutions. Analysts also predict that the new president’s task will be complicated by a largely untested political framework, established under the 1988 constitution, and by campaigning for congressional and gubernatorial elections scheduled for next November.

Neither Lula nor Collor has clear majority support in Congress or the state governments, which gained important new powers in the 1988 constitution. The constitution replaced one adopted under the military regime that ruled from 1964 to 1985.

After the military takeover in 1964, the armed forces seized power in one South American country after another. Then the Brazilian regime’s gradual move toward elected government in the late 1970s and early 1980s reinforced a democratic trend on the continent.

Some social scientists warn that hyper-inflation could trigger social and political turmoil and lead to a new military takeover. For now, however, Brazil’s democratic spirit is running high.

“We have created a democratic society,” Jose Sarney, the transitional civilian president who has been in power since 1985, said Friday in a radio address. “The whole world is recognizing and at the same time admiring and praising the example that Brazil is setting.”