Cardenas Wraps Up California Tour

Finishing his campaign tour of Southern California, Mexican Presidential candidate Cuauhtemoc Cardenas told Cal State Northridge students Tuesday that he would seek to improve Mexico’s justice and economic systems and keep more children in school.

“Democratic change is at a standstill,” he told the crowd in Spanish, accusing the ruling PRI party of authoritarian tactics.

About 30 students gathered inside the university’s Chicano Studies Department to hear Cardenas, the candidate of the center-left Democratic Revolution Party.

“He seems more like someone who will do things for the people--he’s not just talk,” said Luz Berrios, a 20-year-old junior from Sun Valley.

Berrios, a Mexican citizen, is barred from casting an absentee ballot in the July 2 election because she lives outside the country--a law decried by Cardenas.

“U.S. citizens can vote anywhere. This doesn’t happen with Mexicans,” he said.

Berrios said she will tell her relatives to vote for Cardenas.

Cardenas began the second and final day of his California swing in a meeting with editors at the Los Angeles Times. He insisted he could win the presidency, despite polls that show him well behind Vicente Fox of the National Action Party, or PAN, and Francisco Labastida of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI.

“The polls are changing. They will continue changing from now until the election date,” Cardenas said.

He cited a poll released this week by a Mexican firm showing him leading among voters in Mexico City.

Some Mexican politicians and analysts have called on Cardenas to throw his support to Fox to oust the PRI from the presidency it has held for 71 years.

But Cardenas ruled out such a move.

“I consider that Fox and the PRI represent the same political project. They have differences in some political issues. But they represent the same economic policy,” Cardenas said.

Cardenas and Fox have stumped in California in recent days in the most extensive U.S. campaigns ever by Mexican presidential candidates.