Mexico City’s Smoggy Air Obscuring Mayor’s Future : He is the presumed front-runner for the presidency in 1994. But Manuel Camacho Solis is losing popularity because of the capital’s record-setting pollution.

The worst smog ever to shroud Mexico City is also casting a pall over the political fortunes of its mayor, who is the presumed front-runner to succeed President Carlos Salinas de Gortari in 1994.

Manuel Camacho Solis has done more than any previous mayor to tackle the city’s wretched pollution. And yet, when ozone levels soared to a record high last month, he was blamed for failing to solve what is, in the short term at least, an unsolvable problem.

Leftist opposition leader Cuauhtemoc Cardenas called Camacho ineffective and demanded his removal from the appointed post, while the leader of the conservative National Parents Union charged that Camacho and others were putting their careers above air quality.

It is one of the peculiarities of Mexican politics that almost from the day a president takes office, pundits begin trying to divine whom he will pick to succeed him six years later. The president names the candidate of the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which has claimed every presidential election for more than 60 years.

Camacho, 46, an old school chum and political confidant of Salinas, has long been considered the top contender among a short list of possible successors that also includes Treasury Secretary Pedro Aspe Armella and Education Secretary Ernesto Zedillo Ponce de Leon. Luis Donaldo Colosio, former PRI chief and newly named secretary of ecology and urban development, was added to the list this winter, as pollution levels rose.

Camacho insists that the restrictions he has imposed on drivers and metropolitan area industries are reducing air pollution, particularly lead and sulfur. Even ozone came down from its record-breaking levels after a second-stage emergency was imposed last month, he said.

Under Camacho, drivers have been required to leave their cars at home once or twice a week, depending on the pollution’s severity. Industries are being forced to convert to cleaner fuels and install anti-pollution equipment. On the worst days, they have been forced to cut production.

“You have to fire your shots with precision,” Camacho said, pointing an imaginary rifle during an interview. “You can’t trick people into believing this can be solved with two or three spectacular measures.”

The mayor’s polls, according to an aide, show that the March smog--the worst month ever for ozone--cost Camacho some support but that a majority of the city’s residents back him and the measures he has taken.

Cuauhtemoc Cardenas and his left-of-center coalition won Mexico City in the combative 1988 presidential race that left tens of thousands of people demonstrating in the streets against national electoral fraud. Subsequently, Salinas put Camacho at the helm of the world’s largest city to help assuage discontent, which to a large degree he has. The ruling party won all of the federal district’s congressional seats in last year’s midterm election.

Camacho originally expected to spend three years in the mayor’s office, then be moved to a federal ministry. But Salinas has decided to leave his friend in place. Camacho now apparently believes that his political future is best served by his serving the president in such a difficult, high-profile post.

And Camacho admits that despite the measures he is taking, most of Mexico City will not notice an improvement in air quality in the next three years. Which is why the weekly magazine Proceso ran this headline on its March 30 cover--”Camacho’s Big Problem: His Future, In The Air.”