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 News Around the Republic of Mexico | July 2005 
Mexico City Mayor's Last Speech a Platform for Next Move
 S. Lynne Walker - Copley News
| | Leftist López Obrador running for president in 2006. |
Mexico City – Mexico City's popular leftist mayor bid farewell to the city's 9 million residents yesterday during a rousing state of the city address that set the stage for his campaign to become Mexico's next president.
With a wave and a thumbs-up sign to a cheering crowd, Mayor Andrés Manuel López Obrador stepped down from the job that thrust him into the national spotlight five years ago and made him the leading candidate for the 2006 presidency.
"I am going to fight together with many Mexicans, women and men, for a true transformation of Mexico," he told several thousand city workers who were given time off to hear his speech at the National Auditorium.
López Obrador, the city's second elected mayor, leaves his post with an unprecedented 76 percent approval rating, according to a poll published yesterday in the Mexico City daily Reforma.
"The mayorship has been a grave for other politicians, but López Obrador has turned it into a launching pad," said George Grayson, a Mexico scholar at the College of William & Mary who is writing a book on López Obrador.
The mayor managed to shake off two allegations of corruption even though they were captured on videotape. One showed a close aide stuffing his pockets with pesos from a businessman's brown paper bag. Another showed the mayor's finance secretary spending thousands of dollars at Las Vegas blackjack tables – money that investigators said may have been stolen.
López Obrador also survived a federal government effort to jail him over a land dispute, turning the episode into a rallying point that brought him new supporters.
López Obrador planned to register today with the leftist Democratic Revolution Party, or PRD, as its candidate for the presidency. When the party, which has never won a presidential election, chooses its candidate Sept. 17, López Obrador is almost certain to win the nomination.
López Obrador enters the campaign season as "an early and stable front-runner," said political analyst Federico Estévez.
But he is at a decided disadvantage because he doesn't have the political war chest enjoyed by the two other major parties.
"They (PRD officials) have to spend big-time money, and they need to get big-time money," Estévez said. "That means business support, big-business support."
But López Obrador has been accused of being an enemy of big business. His critics say he is a populist who wants to dismantle the North American Free Trade Agreement, a claim López Obrador has denied.
In exchange for supporting López Obrador, big business is "going to want some strong commitment on some areas of economic policy," Estévez said. "He will have to moderate his policy line."
López Obrador, who grew up in a farm town in Tabasco state, has cast himself as a humble man who eschews the trapping of Mexico's political elite. The 51-year-old widower travels across the city in an aging economy car and lives in a crumbling apartment building near the university where he earned a degree in political science and public administration.
As mayor, he attacked the city's traffic and pollution problems while helping the urban poor. He gave a modest monthly stipend to elderly and disabled residents, awarded scholarships to children and founded the University of Mexico City.
His critics accuse López Obrador of running up the public debt to implement his politically popular programs. The mayor said the city's debt now stands at almost $4 billion, up 4 percent from the previous administration.
Mexico City residents are also dissatisfied with the mayor's efforts to curb the growing crime problem.
He insisted in his speech yesterday that homicides, car thefts and robberies of businesses are at their lowest levels in 10 years.
But the Reforma poll showed that 57 percent of residents believe he did not keep his promise to reduce crime.
When a million people marched through Mexico City's streets last summer to draw attention to their concerns about crime, the mayor labeled it an effort by rivals to discredit his administration.
"He can't continue to bad-mouth bourgeois concerns," Estévez said. "He has to care about these guys as voters. He feels the poor's pain, but he's got to feel the middle class's pain as well." |
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