Left’s Cardenas Risks Becoming Spoiler in Mexico

Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, Mexico’s veteran leftist presidential hopeful, led a boisterous parade of admirers through this quiet farming town on a recent Sunday, happily oblivious to the 100-degree heat and the tuneless brass band serenading him.

At a sunset rally, 15,000 people turned out to hear him, and someone waved a poster bearing the hand-scrawled slogan, “For the Peasant--Only Cardenas.”

Suddenly, Cardenas has managed to combine his trademark small-town barnstorming with nationwide television appearances to create a renewed electoral presence for himself--and for his leftist coalition’s vision of social justice for Mexico’s 40 million poor.

Only die-hard loyalists believe that Cardenas can win the July 2 election, despite his iconic role in the opposition movement that is trying to end the 71-year reign of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI. Just when a PRI defeat seems possible, it is not the stolid 66-year-old Cardenas but upstart conservative challenger Vicente Fox who is best placed to unseat the ruling party.

In opinion polls, the brash Fox has surged to a tie with the PRI’s Francisco Labastida--each is backed by roughly 40% of respondents--while Cardenas comes in a distant third with 10% to 20%.

But Cardenas’ poll numbers began to climb a bit in May, enough to shift perceptions of the race from a two-way battle between Fox and Labastida to a more complex three-way clash. And there’s no doubt that Cardenas could affect Mexico’s political future dramatically if his star rises further.

A Cardenas rebound could help his Democratic Revolution Party, or PRD, and its four leftist alliance partners gain ground in national congressional elections also being held July 2. The makeup of the coming Congress will be critical for whoever wins the presidency. And the vote results also could determine whether Mexico’s fractured political left lives on as a serious social democratic force.

Some people consider Cardenas a spoiler who inevitably will take votes away from Fox and quite possibly ensure a Labastida victory. But Cardenas insists that he is the only candidate committed to attacking the misery of Mexico’s have-nots--a commitment he has maintained since he plunged into student politics in 1954 at the age of 20.

Certainly, making his third presidential bid since 1988, Cardenas has campaigned with the rhythm of an earlier era, before the media set the pace. He has hunted for votes face to face, much as his famous father, Lazaro Cardenas, did on his way to winning the presidency in 1934.

“We are going up, and they are going down,” crowed Imanol Ordorika, Cardenas’ media strategist and a former student leader. “This is exactly the situation you want to be in four weeks before the election--going up, and going up fast.”

Cardenas’ refusal to fade away has especially infuriated Fox, who has called his leftist rival a “traitor” for undermining what many see as the only viable alternative to the powerful PRI machine. Fox repeatedly has called on Cardenas to give him his support and create an opposition alliance.

“Cardenas is in a very difficult situation, [and] he has decided to handle this in the worst possible way,” said Jorge Castaneda, a prominent leftist political analyst who has joined Fox as an advisor. “Cardenas is doing everything possible to take votes away from Fox and throw them to Labastida.”

Castaneda is part of a significant erosion of leftist intellectual support for Cardenas in favor of the Fox option as a pragmatic way of getting the PRI out of power. Other leftists are wrestling with whether to cast a “useful vote” for Fox or a principled one for Cardenas. Some worry that Fox could prove worse than Labastida.

Veterinarian Alceo Hernandez, attending a recent Cardenas rally in Patzcuaro in the candidate’s home state of Michoacan, said he would stay with Cardenas.

“Fox is very close to the PRI. What is Fox offering that is different from the PRI?” Hernandez asked.

But his friend Juan Gonzalez, an agronomist, was among those PRD supporters still torn.

“My own view is that we need a change, be it Cardenas or Fox,” Gonzalez said. “The first thing we need to do is break this power of the PRI, to break the old system.”

Events in the final week of May virtually ended the last shred of hope for a Fox-Cardenas anti-PRI alliance. In a nationally televised negotiation, Fox appeared childish as he argued with Cardenas and Labastida over the date for a planned debate.

Cardenas, usually a dour, frowning public presence, emerged from that confrontation the clear winner, looking like a wise and patient mediator able to crack jokes and admonish Fox at will.

Then he performed well in the subsequent formal three-candidate debate, even making what for him was a rare personal declaration: “You know that my conscience and my vote have no price.

“You have seen me near the people, without arrogance and without the bodyguards that offend the honest working people,” he went on. “I can say I am a happy man, without bitterness or rancor. I am in the struggle with principles and convictions, and the way I am is the way I will always be.”

Subsequent media response was warm. Milenio and Proceso, Mexico City’s two opinion-shaping weekly newsmagazines, both dedicated their covers to Cardenas, with Milenio headlining “The Resurrection of Cuauhtemoc.”

Cardenas was born in 1934, the same year his father was elected president. Lazaro Cardenas championed land-reform initiatives, nationalized the oil industry in 1938 and consolidated the PRI, then called the Mexican Revolutionary Party, as a powerful agglomeration of peasant and worker sectors.

His son served the then-leftist PRI loyally after earning a degree in civil engineering. While working on major water-supply and dam projects, he was also active in such organizations as the Movement for National Liberation. He married Celeste Batel in 1963, and they had three children, one of whom, Lazaro Cardenas Batel, is running for Senate for the PRD in Michoacan.

Cuauhtemoc Cardenas rose to become governor of Michoacan from 1980 to 1986. But the PRI moved steadily rightward in the 1980s and stayed on that free-market course by selecting technocrat Carlos Salinas de Gortari as its 1988 presidential nominee. That prompted Cardenas to quit the party, and he became the leftist coalition candidate.

Many, including Cardenas, believe that he actually won the 1988 election only to have the PRI steal it with massive fraud. Cardenas’ leftist movement went on to become the PRD, the nation’s principal leftist party, which pressured the government to institute electoral reforms to prevent vote fraud and create an independent oversight body.

Cardenas, whose bearing sometimes seems regal and aloof, lost the presidency decisively to Ernesto Zedillo of the PRI in 1994. But he went on to wage a skilled campaign and become the first elected mayor of Mexico City on July 6, 1997, the same day that the opposition parties denied the PRI its congressional majority for the first time.

But his brief, uneventful stint as mayor of one of the world’s largest cities--before he stepped down in September to again try for the presidency--was widely criticized by residents, the media and opposition politicians.

“He and his advisors made a great error to adopt a strategy of letting him play dead, as if he were a body floating in the river, so that his opponents couldn’t hit him,” said Jean Francois Prud’homme, a professor at the Colegio de Mexico who studies political parties. “The idea was: ‘We have very little time. We are going to avoid letting them attack us for our policies until Cuauhtemoc becomes the [presidential] candidate.’ This is what Cardenas is paying for now.”

Cardenas responded in an interview: “You have to look at the context of the 21 months in which I governed, in which anything I did, good or bad, brought attacks” from the pro-government media. “So we had to measure which [strategy] would have the least negative impact.”

Cardenas said he did lay the groundwork for significant changes in Mexico City that are now bearing fruit under the more popular Rosario Robles, a PRD veteran completing Cardenas’ three-year term, which ends in July.

Prud’homme said: “The campaign now is on TV for the first time, it is a matter of image, and Cardenas belongs to a different world of politicians. He is not a person of instant answers. He is a tragic person in a sense, because he fought to create a world in which he doesn’t fit well. He is not a modern politician.”

Indeed, on the same Sunday that he led the parade through Guasave, Cardenas sat for two hours in the morning as a procession of local farmers talked to him about agricultural problems in the northwestern state of Sinaloa. Apart from making some brief concluding remarks, he didn’t speak at all--in a remarkable stretch of patient listening at the height of a presidential campaign.

He then went to Guasave, a coastal farming town. After the sunset rally, he joined the townspeople for another slow stroll through the streets even though he risked missing a national television interview later that evening. (He just made it.)

Cardenas noted that in 1988, he was interviewed only twice on television during the entire campaign. And he recalled that more than one radio personality who dared to interview him was later fired. So he had no choice then but to barnstorm the countryside.

He also recalls traveling with his father, who was famous for traipsing across Mexico to visit peasants who had benefited from his land-reform programs. Lazaro Cardenas died in 1970.

The younger Cardenas’ campaign swings into rural areas evoke outpourings of emotion from elderly peasants and impoverished laborers who revered his father and see in him a hope of reclaiming some attention from the government.

In the Michoacan copper-craft town of Santa Clara del Cobre recently, residents draped a necklace of copper bells around his neck, and Purepecha Indians from surrounding villages pressed forward to touch him.

In the poor lakeside village of Erongaricuaro, a handmade banner strung across the town plaza declared: “The ideas of Lazaro Cardenas have not died. Cuauhtemoc Cardenas carries on in defense of Mexico and its poor people.” It was one of 20 towns in Michoacan where Cardenas spoke during a grueling three-day campaign swing.

“There is no substitute for direct contact with the people,” Cardenas said. “But we are using the media too. We don’t have the resources that the PRI has, but we are putting all we can into media, especially television.”

Unlike in 1988, Cardenas can’t keep up with all the broadcast interview requests.

“This is a huge change,” he said, “and not just in Mexico City for presidential candidates. Even in the states, the radio and TV are open to local candidates. I would say it is a change achieved by democratic pressure.”

Cardenas comes from a tradition of what he calls “social liberalism, a liberalism that opposes religious intolerance and restrictions on customs and culture. Mexican liberalism is not an economic liberalism.”

He proposes renegotiating the North American Free Trade Agreement with the United States and Canada to change provisions that have allowed agriculture imports to pour into Mexico, hurting native farmers. He has also called for review of a 1992 amendment to the land-reform program that allows communal peasant lands to be divided up and sold.

Such proposals worry free-market advocates, who accuse him of wanting to return to a government-driven economic model. But he is adamant that Mexico has sacrificed social justice in its headlong rush toward economic growth.

“For me, the role of the state is to intervene in overcoming social and economic and regional marginalization, and to incorporate technical and scientific advances in the productive apparatus of the country,” he said.

To Cardenas, a Fox victory would just be a change of the face in power, “not a reorientation of the priorities in public policy. He is only for alternating power. We provide a real alternative to the PRI.”