Mexico Rivals Vie for Dissatisfied Middle

ECATEPEC, Mexico â€”  Jose Luis Arriaga is the kind of voter Mexico’s presidential campaigns are spending millions to reach -- or at least scare. If he makes the wrong choice on election day, they warn, his hard-earned savings might disappear into thin air.

They also remind him about what frustrates him most: spiraling crime, unemployment, rampant corruption and the fact that so many of his countrymen are leaving for the United States. On occasion, they appeal to his sense of social equality.

The taco stand owner is an undecided voter in an election being fought between two leading candidates who claim a strong base on either side of this country’s class divide.

Former Energy Secretary Felipe Calderon of the conservative National Action Party has a passionate following among the country’s well-off minority and its upper middle class. As for Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, the onetime mayor of Mexico City, one need only look at the slogan of his leftist Democratic Revolution Party: “For the Good of Everyone, the Poor First.�

In between are the people who consider themselves neither poor nor well off. In other words, people such as Arriaga, who runs a taqueria in this sprawling city of 1.6 million people in the key state of Mexico, a horseshoe-shaped territory surrounding Mexico City.

“It’s a hard choice to make,� Arriaga said. “We’re being told so many things, we don’t know who to believe.�

Mexico City pollster Dan Lund says the campaign for the July presidential contest has become a battle to win over middle- and lower-middle-class voters, the swing-vote “soccer moms� of this election.

“There’s a huge group of voters who are dissatisfied with their options,� said Pamela Starr, Latin America analyst for Eurasia Group, a global risk consulting firm. “They don’t associate themselves with the poor, but at the same time they’re dissatisfied with the way things have gone under� President Vicente Fox.

Here in Ecatepec, as elsewhere, swing voters seem to be torn between two dramatically different visions of where their country stands, and where it should go next.

Arriaga keeps his taqueria open 12 hours a day. He identifies with the poor, who buy his tacos and tortas (Mexican sandwiches) for about $1 each. If the city government, which will have a new mayor in a few months, were to suddenly evict him from his prime spot in the central plaza, he might be poor too.

In Fox’s Mexico, things are not going well for the poor, Arriaga said. “What the country needs is work,� he said. “Lopez Obrador says he’s for the poor.... But when they say so many bad things about him, you figure two out of 10 must be true.�

The “bad things� he’s heard come from Calderon’s campaign ads, which suggest Lopez Obrador would be a populist demagogue who would run the economy into the ground. Arriaga’s business might be small, with seating for only six customers, but he thinks like a businessman nonetheless.

“If the prices start going up again for the basic things, then it’s bad for us,� he said.

In a country with a history of devaluations and hyperinflation, one doesn’t take financial stability for granted. Fox was the president of financial stability, and Calderon is his party’s candidate. But Arriaga says he knows almost nothing about Calderon. And he’s troubled by a new Lopez Obrador ad that links Calderon to a controversial 1998 bailout of the country’s banking system that many saw as a giveaway to the rich. Calderon backed the bailout when he was leader of the National Action Party, known as the PAN.

In recent years, the ambivalence of residents such as Arriaga has made Ecatepec something of a political Frisbee, tossed from one party to the next. It is one of the few cities to have elected mayors from each of Mexico’s three major parties in its last three local elections.

“We like to vote for whatever is in fashion,� said Pablo Flores, director of Radio Ecatepec, a station that broadcasts via loudspeakers in the city’s plazas.

Once upon a time, the Revolutionary Institutional Party, known as the PRI, won all the elections here, thanks to a formidable party apparatus and a system of patronage that reached down to the block level.

Then, six years ago, Fox came along. “Everyone in Ecatepec got excited about Fox,� Flores said. “People liked the way he talked. He really caught on.�

Fox’s election in 2000 broke the PRI’s 71-year hold on power. His coattails helped PAN’s local candidate win the mayor’s race in Ecatepec for the first time.

“Fox came to change things,� said Humberto Soto Ramirez, the owner of a small clothing factory who supplements his income driving a taxi-van. “But what the PRI built in 70 years, Fox couldn’t change in six.�

But in 2003, after the PAN mayor became embroiled in corruption charges, the PRI took back Ecatepec’s City Hall.

In the most recent municipal elections, this March, Ecatepec elected a mayor from the Democratic Revolution Party, or PRD, for the first time: Lopez Obrador campaigned in the city, and his popularity no doubt helped local PRD candidates. The PRI has fallen out of favor, largely because of allegations of corruption surrounding its presidential candidate, Roberto Madrazo, who lags far behind in the polls.

“Lopez Obrador was in fashion, so we voted for him,� Flores said.

Like many people here, Flores likes what Lopez Obrador has to say about the state of Mexican government. Without prompting, he repeats a staple of the Lopez Obrador stump speech: that corruption eats up a big chunk of the public budget that would be better spent on government services.

“The people need to see more police, more security for the taxes they pay,� Flores said. “Instead, everything goes into ‘current spending,’ � a Mexican euphemism for the way bureaucrats dispense political favors disguised as administrative costs.

Still, Flores thinks that Lopez Obrador is a “populist� and that the educated Calderon is better prepared to be president. Lopez Obrador struggled to finish his studies at a public university in Mexico, whereas Calderon has a master’s degree from Harvard. But Calderon is seen by many people in Ecatepec as a bland technocrat and isn’t generating a lot of excitement here, Flores said.

“It’s just the way he is, his personality,� Flores said. “The people just don’t believe him when he says he’s our brother.�

The most enthusiastic campaigning going on in Ecatepec these days is for Lopez Obrador, Flores said. The local PRD has “youth brigades� that rally every week in the city’s main plaza.

“They’re sort of like evangelicals,� Flores said, frowning.

The idea that his campaign is a crusade to “make history� is one Lopez Obrador repeats often. A series of ads by filmmaker Luis Mandoki reinforce the message with black-and-white footage of his family’s rustic country home in Tabasco and of Lopez Obrador speaking to massive crowds in Mexico City.

By contrast, two Calderon ads use black-and-white shots of Lopez Obrador engaged in street fighting during protests against alleged electoral fraud in Tabasco, and of Lopez Obrador shaking the hand of the Zapatista guerrilla leader, Subcomandante Marcos.

In one sense, the campaign boils down to two very distinct ways of looking at the country’s most charismatic politician, Lopez Obrador.

Lopez Obrador portrays himself as an antidote to a corrupt past favoring the rich, offering his own plebian biography and record as a fighter for the poor as mayor of Mexico City.

Calderon is telling voters that rather than gambling on an uncertain future with an unstable leftist, they should choose his credentials as the U.S.-educated son of a traditional family.

“There’s been a lot of attacks,� Arturo Ortega said as he stood in the doorway of his home, looking out at Ecatepec’s plaza. “I don’t know about everybody else, but I’m exhausted from watching it all.�