POZA RICA, Mexico — It's pouring. The sound system is failing. It's a workday. Yet the Plaza of March 18 in this gritty oil town near Veracruz is packed with teachers, peasants, executives, mothers and their babies, and unemployed oil workers, all craning for a glimpse of "The Great Beard." They are straining to hear how a devout, charismatic bolt from the blue could change the course of Mexico's political history.
Even a Papantla Flyers acrobatic team is here. Suspended 100 feet above the plaza on a platform, ankles tied to the tip of a towering pole, the acrobats are preparing to perform an ancient ritual jump in tribute to the 61-year-old gray-bearded man who has been cast as Mexico's Don Quixote--and possibly its next president.
"And now, I present to you Diego Fernandez de Cevallos, a living Cervantes, a modern-day Don Quixote, the future president of the Republic of Mexico," shouts a local leader of the candidate's National Action Party (PAN), through the fading loudspeakers.
Fernandez is no longer just tilting at the windmills of Mexico's once-monolithic ruling party. With less than two weeks before crucial presidential elections, pollsters and analysts say this man--known here simply as "Diego" but a virtual unknown outside the country even three months ago--actually could win. His victory would be the first presidential defeat of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) that has had a stranglehold on the nation and its political power since 1929.
The Poza Rica crowd roars on seeing the beard and hearing the name. Fernandez grabs the microphone. He thrusts his arm, trademark cigar in hand, toward the five men in golden costumes preparing to plunge toward the earth.
"I want to salute you, all of you," he bellows to the crowd, beneath a banner bearing the slogan, "A country without lies."
"Because, like the Papantla Flyers, you represent the flight, the flight of Mexico's history, the flight of illusions, of dreams, of desires and of the values we all share. I want to say to you, like them you are capable of confronting the towering heights, of breaking through the risk, without fearing the precipice."
He rails on about the need to dismantle a "corrupt" system ingrained after 65 years under the rule of a single party, and about the need to implement his party's platform of conservative but democratic transition.
"Today, I call on you all to abandon the fear of change."
It was vintage "Diego." Part poetry, part politics, all based on a common theme: Change with security, democratic freedoms without anarchy. And much of it appeared, as it often does at Fernandez rallies, to be mere words, ad-libbed prose that has nevertheless inspired villagers to compose epic ballads in his honor. Such performances have made him vulnerable to criticism that, unlike his opposition rival for power, center-left candidate Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, his words are populist rhetoric and he lacks the specific programs to implement real change.
But Fernandez's popularity has proved durable. And in the final phase of the hardest-fought campaign in six decades, it appears to be holding. Since he exploded onto center stage in Mexico's political drama after emerging as the clear victor in the country's first televised presidential debate last May, he has fought off strategic conflicts and occasional disorder in his own 54-year-old party. He pushed through a campaign slump in July and emerged largely unscathed from the daily verbal battles with both Cardenas and the candidate of the PRI, Ernesto Zedillo, a doctor of economics and a man two-thirds Fernandez's age.
Four major--though yet unproven--opinion polls released in the past two days showed Fernandez lagging well behind Zedillo but far ahead of third-place Cardenas, who is also a reform-minded opposition leader and is the son of a former president. Many Mexicans believe Cardenas was cheated out of the presidency by ruling party fraud in the last elections six years ago.
The polls, the first of their kind in Mexico and most of them financed by institutions that support the PRI, gave Fernandez between 19% and 22% of the vote, compared with 38% to 44% for Zedillo and 9% to 11% for Cardenas.
But the pollsters stressed that with 10 days left before the election the tide could turn, that even their data suggests Fernandez still has an outside chance to win. His core of support has held, and only one of the polls factored in the large percentage of respondents who indicated they were still either undecided or were afraid to express their true opinions.
"If all of them vote for Diego, he will just make it," said Robert Worcester, chairman of London-based Mori, whose nationwide poll released Friday in Mexico City's Excelsior newspaper indicated that one-fourth of those polled refused to say which candidate they supported.
At the heart of Fernandez's popularity, analysts say, is his tone of moderation, compromise and caution at a time when many Mexicans simultaneously want and fear political change.
