Mexico Candidate Takes Campaign Trail to L.A. : Election: Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, the opposition party’s presidential hopeful, says his nation should allow expatriates to vote.

In what was billed as a historic visit, Mexico’s leading opposition candidate Wednesday brought his long-shot presidential campaign to Los Angeles, home to millions of expatriate Mexicans and U.S.-born residents of Mexican ancestry.

With his Southern California audience in mind, Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, candidate of the Democratic Revolutionary Party in presidential elections scheduled for Aug. 21, denounced “xenophobes and racists” who foment hatred of Mexican immigrants, and called for the Mexican government to seek bolstered protections for its citizens who live abroad.

In addition, Cardenas reiterated his position that the Mexican Constitution should be revised to allow citizens living abroad to vote in national elections, just as U.S. citizens residing overseas can cast absentee ballots. Ruling-party lawmakers have blocked efforts to permit such a potentially huge number of expatriates to influence the Mexican electoral process.

Observers said the visit of Cardenas, son of a revered former Mexican president, marked the first time that a Mexican presidential hopeful had traveled abroad during the formal campaign period. Mexican lawmakers last year revised a statute that had long prohibited presidential aspirants from leaving the country during campaigns.

Cardenas came to Los Angeles not to campaign, aides said, but in response to an invitation from the Los Angeles World Affairs Council, a nonpartisan citizens group.

In comments Wednesday, Cardenas generally stressed familiar themes, calling for true democracy in a nation ruled since 1929 by the Institutional Revolutionary Party, known as the PRI.

“We are demanding an opening to democracy,” Cardenas told a morning news conference at the Biltmore, where he later gave a formal address before meeting with Mexican residents at an auditorium near Downtown. “We want to put an end to the party-state regime.”

Cardenas went one step further, though, calling on Mexico City to request that the United Nations send a formal contingent of observers to monitor the elections in August.

Amid pressure for reform, Mexican authorities recently amended the law to allow some independent electoral observers in a nation where ballot stuffing, repeat voting and other chicanery have traditionally marred election days.

Many supporters still believe that Cardenas himself was robbed of the presidency in the 1988 elections. Official tallies gave Cardenas almost one-third of the votes, leaving him second to Carlos Salinas de Gortari. Salinas won a bare majority, announced after an eleventh-hour computer breakdown delayed counting.

Cardenas’ visit to Los Angeles--at least the fourth trip he has made here since the 1988 elections, supporters say--underscores the increasing importance that Mexico’s ever-growing expatriate population has on events back home. Both opposition and ruling-party leaders have endeavored to extend their popularity to compatriots north of the border, knowing that such moves may pay political dividends in Mexico, where visits such as Cardenas’ trip tend to be heavily publicized.

“There’s a very high sensitivity in Mexico to the exploitation of the migrant worker, and to the extent that he (Cardenas) can associate himself positively with that issue, it can only gain him support,” said Wayne A. Cornelius, who directs the Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies at UC San Diego.

Cardenas has also been eager to shore up his reputation among U.S. and Mexican business leaders, many of whom are suspicious of his leftist leanings. “We need foreign investment,” Cardenas pointedly told a Los Angeles World Affairs Council luncheon.

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Although Cardenas opposed the North American Free Trade Agreement, he vowed Wednesday that, if elected president, he would enforce the accord, in effect since Jan. 1.

Although he now heads Mexico’s leading opposition force, Cardenas, 59, was long a PRI loyalist and served as governor of the state of Michoacan under the party’s tricolor banner. He broke with the PRI before the 1988 elections, however, after launching a movement that he said was intended to bring greater democracy to Mexico.

Polls show Cardenas trailing substantially behind Ernesto Zedillo, who was named the PRI standard-bearer after the assassination last month of Luis Donaldo Colosio in Tijuana. But Cardenas has gained somewhat since Jan. 1, when rebels in the southern state of Chiapas launched an insurrection that has galvanized opposition nationwide to what critics--including Cardenas--call the ruling party’s economic program of concentrating wealth at the expense of the poor and middle classes.

A strong pro-Cardenas network has arisen in Los Angeles. Supporters were predictably thrilled about his visit. “Cardenas is the man to change Mexico,” declared an exuberant Jesus Cardenas, who runs an Eastside tortilla factory.

Disputing that viewpoint was Ruben Arenas, president of a Los Angeles-based group that supports the PRI. “Cardenas is just trying to get publicity for himself here,” said Arenas, a businessman. “He’s wasting his time.”