Mexico leftist's character key for vote aftermath

VILLAHERMOSA, Mexico, May 30: The last time Mexican leftist Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador lost an election, there was street fighting, political gridlock and a presidential crisis.

Lopez Obrador, a feisty former Indian rights officer, was so upset at allegedly being cheated out of the governorship in elections for Tabasco state in 1994 that he walked 560 miles uphill to Mexico City in protest.

Now, Lopez Obrador is running a close second in opinion polls for Mexico's July 2 presidential election and is complaining that President Vicente Fox is using illegal tactics to keep him out of power.

With campaign rhetoric turning nasty, labour unrest simmering and a peasant riot near the capital in early May, concerns are growing that Mexico's election could end in political chaos or even violent demonstrations.

Although still seen as an unlikely scenario, Wall Street investors have one eye on the possibility that Lopez Obrador might lose narrowly, claim fraud and then launch protests. That could ignite stock market panic and a flight of capital.

''My worst fear, and the only real fear I have on the political front, is what happens if the margin of victory is only, let's say, 0.5 percent? What's the reaction going to be? Are we going to see an attempt to rally the masses into the street?'' said Vitali Meschoulam, an economic analyst at HSBC Securities in New York.

Election peace may depend on how Lopez Obrador responds to defeat, if he loses.

The leftist, a complex character who has a long history of organising demonstrations, lost a large lead in opinion polls for the presidential election after conservative Felipe Calderon launched negative media ads against him.

Lopez Obrador has taken the fall badly, launching abusive attacks on President Vicente Fox, whom he accuses of illegally using government resources to back Calderon's campaign.

''He is a conflictive personality. You can see that in his language. I think he himself regrets a lot of the things he says. He is uncontrollable in that sense,'' said Juan Jose Rodriguez Prats, a senator for Fox's National Action Party from Tabasco, Lopez Obrador's home state.

SWAMPLANDS OF TABASCO

Lopez Obrador's world view was forged in the swamplands of Tabasco, where wealth from oil fields has fuelled corruption and widened a rift between rich and poor.

Dubbed the ''Mexican Messiah'' by one biographer, Lopez Obrador has a crusading spirit and a keen sense of injustice.

''That's due to his time here in Tabasco. It is something very personal, a feeling that you must help those who need it most,'' said Juan Manuel Focil, the head of Lopez Obrador's Party of the Democratic Revolution in the state.

Lopez Obrador lived for years in a hut with an earthen floor in a Chontal Indian town where he worked as a welfare officer. Later he mobilised peasants to block access to oil wells to complain about environmental damage. After years exposing state government corruption, he lost the election for Tabasco governor 12 years ago to Roberto Madrazo, now one of his rivals in the presidential election.

Madrazo and his Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, which ran Mexico for decades, were accused of spending many times more than the legal limit for the campaign.

Indignant, Lopez Obrador headed a march by hundreds of protesters to Mexico City that lasted five weeks. His followers camped out in the main square in state capital Villahermosa to demand he be named governor.

But, in an act of defiance unheard of at the time, Madrazo resisted efforts by Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo to keep him from office and local PRI leaders even talked of seceding Tabasco from the rest of the country.

PRI supporters violently dislodged leftists from the square and eventually the president backed down, leaving Madrazo as governor and Lopez Obrador the loser.

Those years earned Lopez Obrador a reputation as a rabble rouser, although many in Tabasco say his followers did not incite trouble but were instead victims of PRI attacks.

There are no serious claims of Lopez Obrador instigating violence.

''When there were protests of 2,000-3,000 people, when the people wanted to get in the governor's office and burn everything, he stopped them,'' said leftist leader Focil.

RESPECT FROM INDIANS

Local Indians revere Lopez Obrador.

''He got on very well with us. There was never any trouble,'' said Candelario Montero, 64, in the marshy village of Tucta.

His is one of tens of thousands of Tabasco households that still do not pay electricity bills in a civil resistance campaign that Lopez Obrador started years ago to protest vote fraud.

Even old adversaries in Tabasco say that while the presidential candidate can be a firebrand, he is unlikely to take Mexico to the brink if he loses on July 2.

Juan Molina Becerra, a wily PRI political operator in Villahermosa, said Lopez Obrador would often back down when the going got tough.

''He was good for sparring with but he never really made it as a champion fighter,'' he said.

Reuters