Election Loser, 77, Starts 260-Mile Protest March : Mexico: Cancer-stricken Salvador Nava refuses to accept defeat in last month’s fraud-tainted elections.

Salvador Nava, who refuses to accept defeat in the fraud-tainted governor’s race here last month, was quietly summoned a few days ago to meet with President Carlos Salinas de Gortari.

Was the challenger really going to press a claim of victory, the president wanted to know, by marching all the way to Mexico City? Isn’t 260 miles a long walk for a 77-year-old man with prostate cancer?

The 43-year-old president, in the respectful tone of one addressing an elder, offered this unsolicited advice: The hike is a bad idea. It could be damaging to your health.

“I have lived through many Decembers,” replied the trim, athletic-looking Nava, according to an aide who told about the meeting. “I’ll probably survive to see another January.”

Nava’s southward march, which began Saturday with hundreds of followers from this state capital, is an embarrassment to the reform-minded president who had expected last month’s mid-term elections to erase all doubts about his Institutional Revolutionary Party’s (PRI) right to rule.

It is also perhaps the last hurrah for a popular maverick who first cracked the PRI monolith in 1958 by capturing City Hall on a clean-government vote. Having been jailed twice for his efforts to become governor, Nava is mustering three generations of loyalists for a campaign of street protests that will last until Fausto Zapata, the PRI governor sworn in at noon last Thursday, steps down.

The campaign, launched that night with an outdoor rally where Nava took an oath as the “legitimate governor,” is a test of how far Mexico’s rulers can be pushed by the kind of civic nonviolent resistance used successfully in the 1980s to weaken military dictators from Panama to Chile.

“Our objective, day after day, will be to prevent the usurper from governing,” Nava told 20,000 cheering supporters at the rally. “Our objective, night after night, will be to prevent the usurper from even dreaming of governing a people against their will.”

The PRI, which has controlled Mexican politics since 1929, claimed a sweep of all six governorships and 320 of the 500 congressional seats at stake in the Aug. 18 balloting. Salinas, whose own 1988 election was marred by fraud, interpreted the numbers as a mandate to press ahead with plans for modernizing Mexico and bringing it into a free trade zone with the United States and Canada.

But well-documented charges of widespread vote-rigging in the Guanajuato and San Luis Potosi state elections threatened to undermine Salinas’ carefully cultivated image of integrity at home and abroad. Nava and Vicente Fox, the firebrand candidate of the conservative National Action Party (PAN) in Guanajuato, mobilized angry crowds and claimed they’d been robbed.

The PRI responded by negotiating an unusual deal with the PAN to throw out the Guanajuato results. Governor-elect Ramon Aguirre, apparently on presidential order, announced Aug. 29 that he would not take office. The state’s PRI-dominated legislature then voted to name Carlos Medina Plasencia, a PAN leader more palatable to the president than Fox, as interim governor. He has a year to organize new elections.

In San Luis Potosi, Nava’s supporters have staged spirited and imaginative protests--blocking roads, hurling coins at PRI officials and collecting money to buy Zapata a one-way airplane ticket to Mexico City--but so far Salinas has brushed them off.

After standing by Thursday as the newly inaugurated Zapata promised electoral reform and pleaded for “dialogue and understanding” with Nava’s forces, Salinas warned that he will not be swayed by “pressure from groups that act on the edge of the law.”

Some politicians say the president stood firm here because Zapata fits his image of a reformer and that he dumped Aguirre, his old friend in Guanajuato, because Aguirre does not.

Another difference is that the PAN threatened to withdraw from future elections throughout Mexico unless the Guanajuato result was overturned. Although Nava was backed by a coalition of the PAN and the leftist Democratic Revolutionary Party, he belongs to no party himself. While national opposition figures joined Nava at the start of his march, none has endorsed his call for a boycott of December’s municipal elections in this state.

That leaves Nava in his long-accustomed role of fighting his battles alone.

His Democratic Potosino Movement, born of a struggle for university autonomy in the 1950s, defeated a notorious PRI boss in the 1958 city election. As mayor, Nava took the radical step of publishing daily financial statements and vastly expanded the city’s water service and street lighting without raising taxes.

But he never abandoned his ophthalmology practice or sought to project himself as a national figure. His middle-class movement refused to subordinate itself to national political parties.

As a result, there was little outcry beyond this colonial-flavored industrial city in 1961 when army tanks rolled out to intimidate his supporters in the governor’s race and troops seized ballot boxes to assure a PRI victory. After weeks of unrest, gunmen killed eight people at an official Independence Day rally. Nava blamed the government but was arrested on charges of inciting the killings.

Freed from jail a month later, he kept protesting until he was arrested again in 1963 and beaten unconscious in jail. Then he quit politics for 19 years, until discontent over the rule of another PRI boss propelled him to a comeback in the 1982 mayor’s race. His movement revived and, after losing City Hall in 1985, he won it back three years later.

While the Salinas government has taken pains to avoid violence against Nava’s people, the latter charge that fraud in last month’s election was just as blatant as it was 30 years ago. When the president came here Thursday, Nava’s aides handed him copies of official tally sheets from 420 of the 2,148 polling places, each showing irregularities.

Official returns showed Nava lost the election by a 2 to 1 margin out of 492,062 votes cast. But his campaign workers claim that about 200,000 people who registered to vote were not able to do so because they did not receive credentials or because their names had been “shaved” from voter lists posted at the polls.

As Nava began his march, he declared himself in good health and his cancer in remission. He hoped to average eight miles a day over central Mexico’s cactus-dotted plains so he can reach the capital Nov. 1 and distract attention from Salinas’ state-of-the-nation message.