With 108 days to go before the election, L󰥺 Obrador, 52, leader of the Party of Democratic Revolution, appears to have consolidated his position as the front-runner, and many political strategists now predict he will win unless he stumbles spectacularly. Two polls this week showed him a solid 10 points above the other two candidates in a three-way race, with around 40 percent of the vote.

L󰥺 Obrador, who left his post as mayor of Mexico City last year to run for president, also possesses an instinct for going for the political jugular. He has expertly tapped into the widespread belief that politicians and their cronies among the business elite have enriched themselves while the average worker has seen little improvement in his or her day-to-day life.

L󰥺 Obrador also says he wants to renegotiate the free trade agreement with the United States to protect more farmers and workers in other weak sectors.

"The next president of Mexico will not be a puppet of anyone," he said here on Thursday, a veiled suggestion that Fox has been too closely allied with Washington. Then he added, "We are going to protect our markets as they do in the rest of the world."

At times his stump speech drifts into revolutionary rhetoric. He vaguely pledges "a real purification of public life" and says that the country needs "a change from top to bottom" and that "Mexico cannot stand more cosmetic changes."

L󰥺 Obrador's main opponents, Felipe Calder󮠯f the president's party and Roberto Madrazo of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, say the country cannot afford the social spending he proposes. They say his policies will bankrupt Mexico and return it to the days of huge international debts and closed markets.

They also say he has a tendency to be authoritarian and, at times, seems so suspicious of plots to torpedo his political rise that it borders on paranoia. Calder󮬠a free-market conservative, said earlier this week that L󰥺 Obrador represented "a real danger" to the country's future. Madrazo calls him a demagogue and populist who promises things he can never deliver.

L󰥺 Obrador, however, models himself on Benito JuᲥz, the president who kept the republic together during the French invasion in the 19th century. And as he did as mayor of Mexico City, he makes a point of being austere and saving money in his campaign.

He takes commercial flights and runs a no-frills whistle-stop campaign, traveling in vans, rather than private planes and helicopters, like his opponents. "Why do I take commercial flights?" he said in Juchitᮬ in southeastern Oaxaca. "I don't want to lose contact with the people below."

L󰥺 Obrador tightly controls his message. He rarely holds news conferences and regularly denies requests for interviews, as he did for this article. He has rejected a call for four presidential debates, saying he fears an ambush and will do only one, close to election day.

The son of a shopkeeper in Tabasco State, L󰥺 Obrador became involved in politics in college under the tutelage of a liberal poet-turned-politician, Carlos Pellicer. He has said his most formative years were spent as a social worker among the Chontal Indians in Tabasco; he moved his wife and baby son into a dirt floor shack there and shared the Indians' poverty for several years.

He lost a race for governor of Tabasco against Madrazo in 1994 in an election riddled with irregularities and fraud. L󰥺 Obrador mounted several aggressive street protests afterward, earning a reputation as rabble-rouser.

There is a messianic streak in L󰥺 Obrador, too, that appears on the stump and in interviews, as in a recent television appearance when he was asked about his religious beliefs. "I am Catholic, and fundamentally Christian," he said, "because the life and work of Jesus fills me with passion. He, too, was persecuted in his time, spied on by the powerful of his era, and they crucified him."

L󰥺 Obrador won the mayoral race in Mexico City in July 2000, weathered several corruption scandals and, last year, beat back an effort to knock him off the ballot for president because he had disregarded a court order, a move his enemies say suggests he will not respect the other branches of government if he becomes president.

On the campaign trail, L󰥺 Obrador takes great pains to assure his supporters he will not be corrupted by power. He says he will refuse to live in the presidential mansion at Los Pinos and will take less than half the salary Fox makes.

"I am not going to change my way of thinking or my way of being," he told the rally. "The presidency is not going to go to my head and make me dizzy."

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