World Perspective / LATIN AMERICA : 7,000-Pound Movie Star Heads for Rehab

Free Willy still isn’t. But a C-130 transport plane awaits. So does a high-tech hoist that will lift the 7,000-pound whale from his cramped tank at Mexico City’s Reino Aventura theme park.

On Sunday morning, the killer whale that starred in the 1993 Warner Bros.’ film “Free Willy” is scheduled to finally begin a long, expensive journey from the park that has been his controversial home for more than a decade.

He will soon be in a custom-built, $7.3-million rehabilitation facility in Oregon. Eventually, marine environmentalists here and in the United States hope, Willy will find freedom in the Icelandic waters of his birth.

The scheduled departure of Keiko, the real name of Mexico’s celebrity whale, is the end product of more than a year’s effort by animal rights activists and the movie’s producers to transform the 18-year-old whale into a symbol of wildlife protection.

The campaign began soon after the movie’s release, when U.S. and Mexican animal rights groups revealed that Willy was chronically ailing in substandard conditions at the facility here, which bought Keiko for $350,000 from a Canadian theme park in 1985 and has used the whale’s performances as a main draw ever since.

Amid an avalanche of protests in November 1994, the San Francisco-based Earth Island Institute formed the Free Willy-Keiko Foundation with $4 million in donations--half of it from Warner Bros.--to free the star aquatic mammal.

After months of negotiations--as the Mexican theme park staged a final flurry of Keiko-related events--environmentalists celebrated. At the least, they said this week, Keiko’s professional career of entertaining humans will end with his departure from the facility, which agreed last year to donate the whale to the foundation.

“There will be no more performances. It will not breed, and, hopefully, he will be released,” said Mark Berman, a program associate at Earth Island and a member of the Free Willy-Keiko Foundation. “This will take some time. But Keiko already has become a powerful symbol. . . . People will no longer accept the capture of whales.”

Keiko’s new home, after an eight-hour journey on a cargo plane donated by United Parcel Service, will be the Oregon Coast Aquarium, a nonprofit facility in Newport. He will spend at least the next year in a pool four times larger than his Mexico City home. He will have his own private freezer that holds up to a year’s supply of food--120,000 pounds of frozen fish. And two viewing windows will permit visitors to watch marine scientists prepare Keiko for the wild--trying to unteach him old tricks.

Keiko’s new home also includes a medical pool, where doctors will try to treat a series of ailments apparently resulting from his captivity. He is, for example, about a ton underweight.

“Keiko’s History, Current Condition and Future Care,” a document issued last month by the foundation, states that the whale suffers from skin lesions, digestive problems “most likely caused or exacerbated by limited diet, poor overall muscle tone from inactivity due to warm water, worn teeth from chewing on edges of [a[ concrete pool and a fallen dorsal fin.”

Under “Medical Prognosis,” the document stated: “Unknown.”

“The decision to release Keiko will ultimately rest with the Free Willy-Keiko Foundation board of directors,” it concluded. “It may take two years before Keiko is considered ready for release-ability assessment.”

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A spokesman for the Mexican park that has owned and housed Keiko said the giant animal had received the best care possible in Mexico--given his captivity. The spokesman noted that the park’s owners had cooperated fully with the foundation and had volunteered to give up their major attraction in the interest of wildlife conservation.

But Mexico’s leading environmental group, the Group of 100, issued a statement Thursday blaming much of Keiko’s illnesses on his living conditions, saying: “The skin infections certainly would have been from the air and water pollution in Mexico City. The food that was given him was inadequate and stale.”

The group also echoed U.S. animal rights activists in concluding that Sunday’s first step in Keiko’s liberation is symbolic and that it should send strong signals to governments in Iceland, Norway and Japan “to protect all whales throughout the world in their natural environments.”