LA PAZ, Mexico — While rival parties still are choosing their candidates, populist Andrés Manuel López Obrador already was out of the gate Thursday, launching a road trip designed to keep momentum as the early frontrunner for the 2006 presidential election.
With promises to provide public-works jobs for the poor, government pensions for the elderly and better education for the nation’s youths, the former Mexico City mayor sounded more like former U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt plugging the New Deal than a saber-rattling Latin American leftist, as some have branded him.
López Obrador, known by his initials, AMLO, never has shied away from the leftist label, and his audience was working class and poor. However, his speech referred to U.S. residents as “North Americans” rather than gringos and he addressed supporters as “friends” rather than brothers or comrades.
“O-bra-dor! O-bra-dor!” chanted the mostly yellow-clad crowd of about 5,000 people packed into a sweltering open-air gymnasium.
The 51-year-old widower said his chief campaign themes — and the mission of a López Obrador presidency — would be to take on the social inequality and corruption that reach into all corners of the country.
López Obrador emphasized his campaign depends on the power and unity of the people because he doesn’t have the big money of his opponents.
Although he’s boosting the profile of his leftist Democratic Revolution Party, known as the PRD, it long has run third to President Vicente Fox’s conservative National Action Party, known as the PAN, and the Institutional Revolutionary Party, which ruled more than 70 years.
Among the crowd were cashier Ana Elvia Mayoral, 43, who brought her son, Santiago, 9, saying she wanted him to learn about democracy.
“This election will be the hardest fought ever — everybody wants it,” she said, noting that unlike previous presidential contests, each of Mexico’s three leading political parties has a fighting chance to win.
Fox can’t seek re-election and López Obrador is far ahead in most polls, making him more popular than his own party.
There was little doubt of the crowd’s approval, but López Obrador’s first campaign stop was rough around the edges.
There was an awkward lull when he arrived at the gymnasium, but quickly sat beside other party officials for several minutes as he signed undisclosed documents.
The crowd seemed puzzled, as it did prior to López Obrador’s arrival when a local organizer tried to rehearse a long, non-rhythmic chant about AMLO’s race for the presidency.
Some of his supporters hope the other two parties will be ripped apart by infighting over their yet-to-be chosen presidential nominees.
“Just one rooster,” read some T-shirts, boasting the PRD has one candidate in the fight rather than being divided.
Pamphlets were distributed listing AMLO’s 50 campaign promises on everything from sports to the military to government salaries.
López Obrador also said he’d like the nation’s railroad system to again move passengers throughout the country. While he would modernize the government-owned electric and petroleum industries, he wouldn’t privatize them.
Thursday’s rally marked his campaign start in this tiny fishing town on the Sea of Cortez. The four-day trip was to next take him to Tijuana, the border city where a PRI presidential candidate, Luis Donaldo Colosio, was assassinated in 1994 by an unstable man investigators concluded acted alone.
Many Mexicans continue to believe his death was part of a larger plot to stop him from becoming president.
In a live interview broadcast nationwide Wednesday evening, López Obrador discussed a range of topics, described himself as a leftist and his early years as a bit radical. He left some of what he would do as president up to speculation.
“Politics is the equilibrium of emotion and reason,” he said, adding that he would be his own man in the mold of leftists such as Brazil’s Luis Inacio Lula or Venezuela’s rowdy Hugo Chávez
Daniel Campos, 62, a downtown vendor, admitted he’s been swept up in the AMLO frenzy.
“He will be the best president in 100 years,” Campos said.
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