Cardenas, Mexico’s Sad-Faced Revolutionary, Polarizes a Nation : Politics: Voters either love or loathe the leftist candidate. Efforts to broaden his appeal have failed.

It’s hard to see Cuauhtemoc Cardenas as a dangerous radical.

Beneath a giant statue of his father, Gen. Lazaro Cardenas, Mexico’s most beloved modern president, the tall, sad-faced man speaks in a solemn voice about the goals of the revolution, the same principles expounded in this country’s election speeches for the last six decades.

Yet this wooden speaker provokes fiery declarations of devotion from the crowds that go to hear him and equal loathing from those who only read about it in the next day’s newspapers.

Foreign and Mexican investors threaten to pull their money out of the country if he becomes president.

Last Saturday, he received a widely publicized threat that he would be killed this week. He brushed aside a scrawled note calling him a “social scar” that the writer, whose identity was unclear, was willing to eliminate.

Many Mexicans breathed a sigh of relief when the 60-year-old Cardenas emerged battered from this country’s first presidential candidates’ debate last month and further bruised a few days later from an encounter with rebels in the southern state of Chiapas.

Others panicked as they saw hopes that had been nurtured for seven years--since Cardenas’ last presidential campaign--dissipating in a few weeks.

Cardenas has slipped into third place among the contenders in most polls. For months, as the candidate of the Revolutionary Democratic Party, or PRD, which he helped found, Cardenas had run a solid second behind the ruling party candidate.

There were still enough undecided voters to help him pull off the victory many Mexicans believe was stolen from him by fraud at the polls six years ago.

With the debate and a visit a few days later to the camp of armed Indian peasants who rose up against the government in Chiapas on Jan. 1 demanding better living conditions and democracy, Cardenas had hoped to swing those undecided votes to him. Instead, he appeared unable to counter the criticisms of his opponents and was chided by rebel leader Subcommander Marcos as being undemocratic.

Nearly destroyed by bold moves to broaden his appeal, Cardenas recently returned here to his home state of Michoacan to try to shore up his core support by playing his political trump card: the memory of his father.

“We have a good organization here,” Cardenas said in an interview between campaign jaunts to the towns where he grew up, in the state he was governing when he broke with the ruling party in 1987. “We have been working here a long time.”

Nevertheless, he was working hard to assure a good turnout that evening.

He spent the morning and early afternoon on a whistle-stop tour, inviting supporters to this town of pine trees and whitewashed buildings, birthplace of Lazaro, who expropriated the foreign oil companies and distributed land to peasants.

People piled into pickups and panel trucks to form a caravan winding through the countryside toward Jiquilpan. Squeezed into a white panel truck with yellow PRD banners hanging from the windows, Martina Cardenas, who is not related to the candidate, explained why she walked six miles from her village of Citala to catch a ride to see him.

“My father says we should be grateful to the government for the lands that they gave him,” she said. “But I say that was a long time ago. What we need now is a road that they have promised for years and never built.”

The head of their farming cooperative stands at the village precinct on election days and watches people vote to make sure everyone casts ballots for the Institutional Revolutionary Party that has ruled Mexico for 65 years, Martina Cardenas said. But in the presidential election Aug. 21, she added, she may defy him.

Such complaints provide fertile ground for candidate Cardenas’ message of a revolution betrayed by technocrats.

“We are going to put the government in order and let the people govern,” he promised at one stop.

But the ruling party technocrats, who have sold off hundreds of government-owned companies, declared there is no more farmland to distribute to peasant farmers.

And foreign investors are wary of Cardenas. The same last name that Mexican farmers find so appealing frightens them.

Born in 1934 in Mexico City while his father was campaigning for president, Cardenas was almost 4 years old when his father expropriated the foreign oil companies that had refused to obey a Mexican Supreme Court order in a labor dispute.

Mexicans formed long lines at the Palace of Fine Arts to contribute their jewelry and savings to pay for the nationalization of the oil companies. Little Cuauhtemoc turned in his piggy bank.

As a young civil engineer, he worked on one of Mexico’s boldest projects for a government-owned company: the mammoth Las Truchas steel foundry, industrial port and hydroelectric plant that was built from nothing on the Pacific Coast of Michoacan.

The project cost the Mexican taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars in construction costs, and, later, subsidies as international steel prices fell. It was among the companies sold in this administration.

Cardenas has tried to allay investor fears, making regular trips to the United States to talk with groups such as the World Affairs Council.

He hired a Washington consulting firm, the Whalen company, to help improve his image in the United States, but the strategy backfired this week when Whalen sent out a press release accusing the Cardenas campaign of being four months behind in its payments to the firm.

Cardenas has also dropped his opposition to the North American Free Trade Agreement, the litmus test in the minds of many foreigners for acceptance of a global, free-market economy.

“I do not think he scares sophisticated investors that much,” economist Rogelio Ramirez de la O said.

But some large institutional investors who have stuck with Mexican stocks throughout the volatile last six months say they may take their profits or losses and leave if Cardenas is elected.

They are not convinced that Cardenas could withstand the pressures of the leftists around him to return to high tariffs and stiff regulations for foreign capital or even to expropriate some recently privatized industries.

Cardenas dismisses such ideas.

“The world is not the same as it was 60 years ago,” he said. “Mexico is not the same.”

A practical concern, one investor said, is that the government would be paralyzed as the new leaders try to sort out which jobs are political appointments and which are career posts in the bureaucracy, a problem that never arose when a single party always ran the country.

As for Mexican investors, even Cardenas aides repeat the joke about the warm reception he received at the Anahuac University, attended by children of the privileged.

“Why are you so enthusiastically supporting me?” the candidate is supposed to have asked one student. The reply: “Because my dad says that if you win we are moving to Vail.”

But the biggest obstacle Cardenas may still have to overcome is the feeling of many Mexicans that he is a turncoat, part of the system when it served his interests and leader of a political rebellion when it became clear that he would not be nominated president.

Cardenas acknowledges that he became governor by dedazo , the big finger of the president choosing the candidate.

“At that moment, I did not see any other way,” he explained in an interview with his unlikely biographer, Paco Ignacio Taibo II, a well-known mystery writer. “I did not see any options for political or party work outside the state scheme. . . . The chance to govern Michoacan gave me the opportunity to open up (the political process) within the confines of a state government.”

As a PRI governor, Cardenas recognized opposition victories in three large towns and half a dozen villages.

PRI attacks on him have been relentless.

Wednesday, Cardenas drew thousands of cheering students to a rally at the mammoth Mexican National Autonomous University--where the ruling party candidate had been jeered.

On Thursday, the PRI released a poll of 356 rural voters that indicated his support in the countryside may be far less than previously believed.

Only 11% said they favored Cardenas, while 45% said they would “never vote for him for president.”

The independent polling firm that conducted the survey said its margin of error was 5.8%.

Cardenas replies with a rare laugh when asked why people react so strongly to him, either as loyal supporters or sworn enemies.

“This happens when a person has a clear line,” he said. “The majority of the people have suffered. These people cannot be lukewarm. The country is in a bad way. The others have to defend their interests. They have a lot to lose.”

What they have to lose, Cardenas tells supporters, is an economic policy that has benefited the rich at the expense of the poor. Just by eliminating corruption, the candidate says he can increase government spending by 10% without raising taxes.

“There really has been nothing done to stop corruption,” he said. “You have to cut off the head. Important people must be punished.”

To fulfill those promises, Cardenas must pull his campaign out of third place.

He said his plan is to campaign intensely, visit more towns, do more interviews, advertise as much as his shoestring budget permits.

At every stop, he reminds supporters of the formidable challenge they face on Election Day, recalling how the computer vote-counting system mysteriously crashed in the 1988 presidential election, when half the returns showed him leading by a narrow margin.

“So many votes have to come in,” Cardenas said, “that there can be no doubt about what the will of the Mexican people is.”