COLUMN ONE : Tilting at Mexico’s Windmills : Conservative candidate may have a chance of toppling ruling party. His cautious, populist approach appeals to voters who both want and fear change. Critics say he is all talk and has no real plan.

It’s pouring. The sound system is failing. It’s a workday. Yet the Plaza of March 18 in this gritty oil town near Veracruz is packed with teachers, peasants, executives, mothers and their babies, and unemployed oil workers, all craning for a glimpse of “The Great Beard.” They are straining to hear how a devout, charismatic bolt from the blue could change the course of Mexico’s political history.

Even a Papantla Flyers acrobatic team is here. Suspended 100 feet above the plaza on a platform, ankles tied to the tip of a towering pole, the acrobats are preparing to perform an ancient ritual jump in tribute to the 61-year-old gray-bearded man who has been cast as Mexico’s Don Quixote--and possibly its next president.

“And now, I present to you Diego Fernandez de Cevallos, a living Cervantes, a modern-day Don Quixote, the future president of the Republic of Mexico,” shouts a local leader of the candidate’s National Action Party (PAN), through the fading loudspeakers.

Fernandez is no longer just tilting at the windmills of Mexico’s once-monolithic ruling party. With less than two weeks before crucial presidential elections, pollsters and analysts say this man--known here simply as “Diego” but a virtual unknown outside the country even three months ago--actually could win. His victory would be the first presidential defeat of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) that has had a stranglehold on the nation and its political power since 1929.

The Poza Rica crowd roars on seeing the beard and hearing the name. Fernandez grabs the microphone. He thrusts his arm, trademark cigar in hand, toward the five men in golden costumes preparing to plunge toward the earth.

“I want to salute you, all of you,” he bellows to the crowd, beneath a banner bearing the slogan, “A country without lies.”

“Because, like the Papantla Flyers, you represent the flight, the flight of Mexico’s history, the flight of illusions, of dreams, of desires and of the values we all share. I want to say to you, like them you are capable of confronting the towering heights, of breaking through the risk, without fearing the precipice.”

He rails on about the need to dismantle a “corrupt” system ingrained after 65 years under the rule of a single party, and about the need to implement his party’s platform of conservative but democratic transition.

“Today, I call on you all to abandon the fear of change.”

It was vintage “Diego.” Part poetry, part politics, all based on a common theme: Change with security, democratic freedoms without anarchy. And much of it appeared, as it often does at Fernandez rallies, to be mere words, ad-libbed prose that has nevertheless inspired villagers to compose epic ballads in his honor. Such performances have made him vulnerable to criticism that, unlike his opposition rival for power, center-left candidate Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, his words are populist rhetoric and he lacks the specific programs to implement real change.

But Fernandez’s popularity has proved durable. And in the final phase of the hardest-fought campaign in six decades, it appears to be holding. Since he exploded onto center stage in Mexico’s political drama after emerging as the clear victor in the country’s first televised presidential debate last May, he has fought off strategic conflicts and occasional disorder in his own 54-year-old party. He pushed through a campaign slump in July and emerged largely unscathed from the daily verbal battles with both Cardenas and the candidate of the PRI, Ernesto Zedillo, a doctor of economics and a man two-thirds Fernandez’s age.

Four major--though yet unproven--opinion polls released in the past two days showed Fernandez lagging well behind Zedillo but far ahead of third-place Cardenas, who is also a reform-minded opposition leader and is the son of a former president. Many Mexicans believe Cardenas was cheated out of the presidency by ruling party fraud in the last elections six years ago.

The polls, the first of their kind in Mexico and most of them financed by institutions that support the PRI, gave Fernandez between 19% and 22% of the vote, compared with 38% to 44% for Zedillo and 9% to 11% for Cardenas.

But the pollsters stressed that with 10 days left before the election the tide could turn, that even their data suggests Fernandez still has an outside chance to win. His core of support has held, and only one of the polls factored in the large percentage of respondents who indicated they were still either undecided or were afraid to express their true opinions.

“If all of them vote for Diego, he will just make it,” said Robert Worcester, chairman of London-based Mori, whose nationwide poll released Friday in Mexico City’s Excelsior newspaper indicated that one-fourth of those polled refused to say which candidate they supported.

At the heart of Fernandez’s popularity, analysts say, is his tone of moderation, compromise and caution at a time when many Mexicans simultaneously want and fear political change.

Under the slogan, “The only secure change,” Fernandez, a criminal lawyer and sitting congressman, has pledged that he will not veer much from President Carlos Salinas de Gortari’s economic policies, which opened the way to NAFTA, large-scale privatization and liberalized foreign investment. He has indicated he would be willing to include in his Cabinet highly skilled technocrats from the ruling party--a necessity, say some analysts, who note a dearth of qualified economists and professionals in the PAN structure.

That shortage of technocrats, combined with President Salinas’ public commitments to clean elections, has fed a series of political jokes making the rounds of Fernandez’s campaign. Among them: “Cardenas’ party (the Democratic Revolutionary Party) doesn’t want elections because it will lose; the PRI doesn’t want elections because it might lose, and PAN doesn’t want elections because it might win.”

Still, there is time before the election. Fernandez has committed several campaign gaffes. And his victory in a nation where the PRI still controls a vast grass-roots political machine is very far from certain. What is clear is that the Diego phenomenon--the fact that he is even a leading contender--says much about Mexico’s state of mind today.

When asked about his chances during an airport interview after the Poza Rica rally, a hoarse but animated Fernandez drew hard on his cigar and set up his answer with a bit of history.

“Before, the president of the republic designated the PRI candidate and (thus) the next president of Mexico,” he said. “Now, he only chooses the PRI candidate. Now, it is the people who will choose (the president). And they have come a long way.

“I believe that the people have decided in favor of change, and we are going to succeed . . . . We can, and must, win.”

Does he consider the Don Quixote comparison a fair one?

“Perhaps for being lanky, yes,” he replied. “For the beard, for the idealism. And that is all. I admire the images of Don Quixote’s dreams. But I also believe that in life there are many things that must materialize. I believe a man of government should have dreams, ideals, but also concrete realizations. Perhaps that is what makes today’s Quixote.”

For many critics, it is precisely those “concrete realizations” that Fernandez lacks.

Not everyone in Poza Rica’s driving rain that afternoon was, in the lexicon of Mexican politics, a panista --a hard-core supporter of Fernandez and PAN, which already controls three state governments and 89 of 564 seats in Congress. Most in the crowd were middle-class converts to a politician variously compared to Ross Perot and Ronald Reagan. But there were opponents too, supporters of Cardenas or Zedillo who said they came simply to hear what this new phenomenon had to say.

In fact, the 3,000 or so people at the rally represented a spectrum of opinions as broad and deep as Mexico’s social problems and inequities. And the crowd spoke volumes about how and why Fernandez has become a phenomenon in these elections, which the government is billing as the cleanest, fairest and most critical in the nation’s history.

Julio Cesar Ramirez, a 28-year-old Poza Rica schoolteacher, was among the army of supporters. In 1988, Ramirez voted for the first time. He chose Salinas and the PRI. Now, he said, he will vote for Fernandez.

“He’s going to give more balance and create more equilibrium,” Ramirez said, wiping the rain from his forehead. “Everything has to keep evolving every six years.”

Ramirez teaches in what is called telesecondario , a system in which high-school students are taught by television because there aren’t enough teachers or classrooms to meet the needs of Mexico’s burgeoning population, more than half of which is younger than 20.

“This is becoming a new country. People here are thinking about changing this system. . . . We are heading toward a plural society, and within this pluralism, the principal player now is Diego.”

Twenty feet away, Antonio Clemente shook his head.

“This guy is bad news,” the 61-year-old Clemente said, standing on the fringe of the Plaza of March 18--named for the date when Mexico expropriated and nationalized the foreign-owned oil industry.

“Diego is like a magician who has little balls hidden between his fingers, and he’s moving them around and playing with the people. . . . I just came here today to watch.”

As Fernandez shouted through the loudspeakers about the need for reform within the national oil company, Pemex, Clemente explained that the government laid him off from his oil-rig job along with thousands of others in 1991. He hasn’t found work since, he said. He plans to vote for Cardenas and his populist reforms.

There was a third view from Ramon Salomon Carmona, a 31-year-old manager of an electronics store on the town square. He had some positive thoughts about Fernandez, but not enough. Carmona said he plans to vote PRI.

The reason: No change is safe change.

“Diego is a political force that has grown,” Carmona said. “He’s contributing to political competition, which results in this principle: ‘Whoever wins, wins.’ The people are becoming more politicized--look how they keep coming here even in the rain. But nobody really knows where all this is going to go, or even who is going to win.

“He really understands what is happening in the country. . . . But the way the situation is now, well, any change would be very drastic with everything it would imply.”

Fernandez’s ability to speak out persuasively for grass-roots issues--the key, analysts say, to his hands-down victory in the debate--is perhaps as puzzling as his support among some of the poorest of Mexico’s poor. That voting bloc logically would seem to belong to Cardenas, who has taken his social welfare proposals on an extensive campaign to poor rural areas.

Fernandez has won significant backing from the poor through such rhetoric as, “The government can say what it wants, but the end result is 40 million in poverty and 40 multimillionaires, very rich millionaires.”

The PAN candidate himself is anything but poor. His family may not be among the 37 or so that control as much as half of Mexico’s economy, nor his lifestyle a flamboyant one--five daily Havana cigars are among his few luxuries. But he is a rancher, with a sprawling hacienda north of Mexico City. His elementary education came from a private tutor at the family’s rural estate; his law degree is from Mexico’s best university.

His party is known best for its pro-business policies, and his primary base of support is the powerful corporate elite in the northern industrial city of Monterrey.

In an effort to square the apparent contradictions, one veteran Mexican City political reporter who has covered Fernandez’s campaign since February said, “Diego has become a phenomenon of communications. On May 12, Diego was at his El Estanco ranch in San Juan del Rio, and he announced that he was going to pueblear .”

Fernandez coined the word, which roughly means “to whistle-stop.” And, with the exception of a 38-day hiatus after the debate when his strategists, mistakenly perhaps, focused on television interviews at the expense of live appearances, Fernandez has struck a distinctly folksy tone in his barnstorming tours.

One diplomat summed him up as “a Catholic gentleman--very spiritual, very moral and very committed to family. He’s the kind of person who, when you have an appointment with him, he tells his secretary, ‘Hold all calls--except my mother’s.’ He is totally devoted to family, and he has a vision of a better Mexico.”

That morality has not come without controversy.

Fernandez is consistently vague about his position on abortion, birth control and the role of the church in a deeply Roman Catholic nation where the church has been kept firmly out of politics. In an interview last November, when he was chosen as PAN’s candidate in its public party convention, Fernandez was quoted as saying, “The Catholic Church has every right to participate in active politics and political parties.” Later, amid a storm of criticism, he hedged on the issue.

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In describing his religious roots, Fernandez once told an interviewer, “Our parents made us see that life had meaning only when we gave it an authentic Christian projection.” He never recorded his marriage of 18 years in the civil courts, but only “through the law of God” in the church.

In another seeming contradiction, Fernandez has an illegitimate son. In addition to three teen-age children with his wife, Claudia Gutierrez Navarrete, Fernandez fathered Rodrigo, now 21, the product, Diego once confided, of a wilder youth. For Fernandez, and in the context of Mexican society as a whole, that is a source of pride rather than shame. He told an interviewer several years ago, “He’s a stupendous boy, and I want my other boys to be just like him.”

Other human touches have been less well received.

Fernandez was quoted soon after last May’s debate as using the word viejaria to refer to women. Translation: “broads.” Wry bumper stickers soon began appearing with a big red lipstick mark and the words, “The broads vote Diego.” In Mexico’s macho culture, it wasn’t the worst of gaffes. But with a voting public that is 52% female, even campaign aides said they cringed when they heard it.

Fernandez’s response to criticism that he is no more than his image as a bearded idealist, at a time when Mexicans are in search of a Quixote, has been somewhat contradictory.

During a dinner with American journalists last month, Fernandez, who says he speaks no English and whose travels outside Mexico have been limited to eight or nine visits to the United States, reacted angrily.

“That’s a big lie,” he said. “What happened is simply that I can say what they (the other presidential candidates) cannot say. It’s not a matter of having a strong personality. I am no different than you.”

Later, at a forum with Mexico’s national news agency Notimex, Fernandez conceded that here and throughout the world, individual personalities mean more than parties or platforms, “for good or for bad--and I believe it is bad.”

Finally, when a television reporter asked him the same question on camera after the Poza Rica rally, saying flatteringly that it was Diego’s “engaging” personality that had brought him to the brink of the Mexican presidency, the candidate smiled and kissed the reporter on the cheek.

“Thank you for what you have said,” he told her, “but, no, I am like everyone else.”