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 News Around the Republic of Mexico | August 2005 
Former Mayor is Taking His Bid for Mexican Presidency on the Road
 Dane Schiller - Express-News
| | Lopez Obrador will be received by crowds far smaller and less energized than those in Mexico City's historic town square. |
La Paz, Mexico — Where cacti meet the sea and unpaved streets bake in the Baja California sun, urban populist and early presidential frontrunner Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador will be far from home today as he launches an exhaustive tour testing the national waters of his candidacy.
The four-day, approximately 2,311-mile trip, not counting the distance from Mexico City, where he recently resigned as mayor, offers the chance to better establish himself in a region where he has limited support, but doesn't likely expose himself to embarrassment or uncertainty.
"His power is concentrated in the center of the country," Fernando Gonzalez Reynoso, a professor at Baja California's Autonomous University, said of Lopez Obrador. "When you get to the extreme edges of the country, in some places, he's almost unknown."
Lopez Obrador rose to prominence as mayor of one of the world's largest cities and established himself as a champion of the poor, the elderly and other disenfranchised groups.
His populism rallied thousands of die-hard supporters from the lower classes, but turned off the far smaller, but certainly influential middle and upper classes.
Now Lopez Obrador, who resigned in order to campaign fulltime, faces the challenge of keeping the momentum he held while in office and building popularity in areas where people don't have parents who have received the pensions he started, don't drive on the roads he's paved or walked in the parks he's refurbished.
His candidacy takes a few risks and twists as he is seen as far more popular and trusted than his own political party, the leftist Democratic Revolution Party, known as the PRD.
He's poised to give the PRD a much larger seat at the table of power overwhelmingly occupied by President Vicente Fox's conservative National Action Party, known as the PAN and the age-old Institutional Revolutionary Party, known as the PRI, which Fox defeated in 2000, ending more than 70 years of dictatorship-like rule.
Gonzalo Reynoso, the professor, said Lopez Obrador's best shot at success is to keep doing what he did in Mexico City — stay close to the people and on the populist track.
"There is a population that needs him — the marginalized people that nobody remembers," he said.
A Lopez Obrador campaign official said his candidate does intend to stay close to the people and use the formula that has worked: "Be natural."
The official, who requested his name not be published, said Lopez Obrador would keep his entourage small, likely limited to three or four large sports utility vehicles, rather than buses.
He offered only slight insight as to what the campaign expects to accomplish during the journey, which will stretch from La Paz, up Mexico's western most edge to the U.S.-Mexico border behemoths of Tijuana and Mexicali, and then back south through the drug-cartel stricken state of Sinaloa and Puerto Vallarta resort.
"We will see what happens as the trip goes along," the official said.
"The idea is to establish himself more in areas where he supposedly does not have much of a presence."
If Isabel Olivo, 27, who works here in the tourism industry is any indication, even though his PRD party holds the governorship in this state, Lopez Obrador will be received by crowds far smaller and less energized than those in Mexico City's historic town square.
"Some people don't like him much; they say he is all talk," she said. |
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