MEXICAN PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN GETS DIRTY

MEXICO CITY - As a candidate for the Mexican presidency, Vicente Fox
pulls no punches. He has suggested his opponent has ties to drug
traffickers, is less than a macho man and belongs to a party of
"bloodsuckers, leeches and black adders."

His opponent, Francisco Labastida Ochoa of the ruling Institutional
Revolutionary Party, has taken slightly higher ground. He has called Fox,
from the right-of-center National Action Party (PAN), an "idiot" who
substitutes "foul language for ideas."

Welcome to Mexico's new, more open democracy.

For the first time in Mexican history, presidential candidates from
opposition parties have the television time and mass public exposure to
launch aggressive, accusatory campaigns. They are taking full advantage of
it, and their attacks are transforming electioneering in a country run for
the last 70 years by the PRI, as the party is known by its Spanish initials.

Allegations and innuendo that would have been confined to cantina gossip in
past elections now make front page headlines and top the evening news.
Beyond rhetorical grenades lobbed from the campaign stumps, Mexico City's
first opposition-appointed prosecutors are using their powers to launch
corruption investigations against members of the ruling party.

"In other elections, the PRI candidate wouldn't stoop to debating with his
adversaries because he knew he was going to win," said Alberto Aziz Nassif,
a political analyst at a Mexico City think tank, the Center for Superior
Research and Study in Social Anthropology. "But now we have a real
competition."

As a result, Labastida has been forced to defend himself against
accusations that he was "partners with narco-traffickers" when he was
governor of the northern state of Sinaloa, where drug mafias are
influential and deeply entrenched. Labastida has denied the allegations,
calling the charges "a low, dirty, rotten blow."

But the ruling party also has had to contend with more than remarks. With
the left-of-center Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD) in control of the
Mexico City government for the first time, the city attorney general has
initiated unprecedented investigations against powerful PRI officials.

City Attorney General Samuel del Villar has accused the PRI tourism
minister, Oscar Espinosa, of embezzling $45 million from city coffers
during his tenure as the appointed city administrator before 1997. The
charges are particularly damaging to the PRI, because Espinosa also served
as finance chairman for President Ernesto Zedillo's campaign six years ago.

Del Villar also has alleged that one of the nation's two television
networks, TV Azteca, was used by former president Carlos Salinas de
Gortari's brother to launder illicit money. The network has denied the
charges. The former president's brother, Raul, is in prison on a murder
conviction and corruption charges.

Ruling party officials say the city attorney general is using his position
to launch politically motivated investigations. Del Villar has responded by
accusing the ruling party of interfering in some of his highest-profile
criminal cases to make his office appear ineffective.

But nothing has created more political buzz in Mexico than the indelicate
and often bawdy campaign style adopted by Fox, a former state governor and
Coca-Cola executive whose trademarks are an open-necked shirt, cowboy boots
and salad plate-size belt buckle emblazoned with his name.

"The truth is that Fox is the most entertaining candidate," wrote newspaper
columnist Jesus Silva Herzog, son of the PRI Mexico City mayoral
candidate of the same name. "The former Coca-Cola manager understands that
electoral politics is now run by the entertainment industry, and
consequently he behaves like an effective comedy actor who prefers to come
out with cream pie on his face rather than be out of the camera frame."

And in a presidential campaign where opposition candidates have had far
more access to paid and free television time than ever before - until
recently, opposition candidates were not allowed to buy television spots -
TV appearances have become the most powerful campaign tool.

"Newspapers don't matter, and speeches don't matter - nothing matters but
TV," said Jorge Castenada, a political analyst who is a Fox supporter and
author of a recent best-selling book on the Mexican presidency.

Because candidates do not have enough money to buy as much paid television
time as they desire, Castenada said, they turn to the "outrageous,
strident, exaggerated statements that get you on TV." Castenada and others
noted that the candidates also are resorting to personal attacks to get
attention because their positions on most substantive issues are remarkably
similar.

In a nation where machismo is a cliche as well as a badge of honor, Fox has
frequently questioned Labastida's manhood. Mexican newspapers have quoted
speeches in which he referred to Labastida as "a transvestite," asked him
"not to act like a sissy" and told him "to be a little man, which he has
never been."

"It's unfortunate that the campaigns have gotten to this level," Labastida
said in a recent interview on the campaign trail in Mexico. "I'm not going
to run a campaign of insults, nor am I going to lower myself to insults."

But Labastida has taken some of his own potshots at opposition candidates,
including Fox.

In a reference to Fox's signature campaign salute – two fingers raised
in a victory sign - Labastida reportedly told a group of young PRI members,
"People who make the sign with their two fingers are idiots, and they're
going to lose."

The Labastida campaign quickly attempted to distance the candidate from the
remark. A campaign spokesman said the next day, "Officially, candidate
Labastida did not say that."

But on the same day, Fox grabbed one of his huge plastic "V for Victory"
signs, bent back the index finger (leaving only the middle finger upright)
and shouted: "Labastida even tried to copy my insults."

Meanwhile, Mexico City Mayor Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, running a distant third
as PRD's candidate, has engaged in far less negative campaigning than the
two front-runners. It is widely believed in Mexico that Cardenas won the
1988 presidential election, but that the PRI used voter fraud to put
Salinas in office.

Public opinion polls and the candidates' own focus groups indicate the
public is becoming weary of the candidates' personal attacks. Most public
opinion polls now give Labastida an 11- to 15-point lead over Fox.

"That kind of audacious and dirty humor has ... helped [Fox] distinguish
himself from the other candidates," said Cecilia Soto, a onetime
presidential candidate for the Labor Party who now writes a weekly
newspaper column. "But he hasn't reached a level in which people can
imagine him in Los Pinos," the Mexican White House.

Correspondent John Ward Anderson and researcher Garance Burke contributed
to this report.