Cardenas: The Unforgotten One

By John Moody/Mexico City

Cuauhtemoc Cardenas is not certain, but he thinks that the very room in which he slept as a child 50 years ago is now being used as an office by the President of Mexico. In trying to regain that room -- and the rest of Los Pinos, as the presidential residence is known -- Cardenas has changed the political landscape of his country more than anyone, even he, believed possible.

Cardenas was born in 1934, the year his father became President. In a gesture of populism, Lazaro Cardenas abandoned Chapultepec Castle, in which the Emperor Maximilian and nearly all subsequent Mexican rulers lived. Instead, the President, his wife and his son -- who was named for the last Aztec emperor and whose name is pronounced Kwa-tay-mok -- moved into Los Pinos, a white stone box set in a corner of Mexico City's Chapultepec Park. "I have only isolated images of it," says Cardenas of his boyhood home. "But one thing I do remember: I was given every possible opportunity to succeed."

The desire to give other Mexicans that chance is the foundation of Cardenas' challenge to the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party. Says he: "I want to see a Mexico without official corruption, with more equal distribution of wealth, a Mexico that does not subordinate itself to businessmen or to the United States."

There were few hints in his past that he would one day refuse to subordinate himself to the P.R.I. Cardenas attended private schools and saw the country by traveling with his father, who instilled in him an abiding love of Mexico's physical beauty. He earned a degree in civil engineering in Mexico, studied in France, West Germany and Italy, then returned to Mexico and worked for two decades as an engineer and planner. Along the way he met his elegant Portuguese-born wife Celeste and started a family that now includes two grown sons and a five-year-old daughter.

He avoided the lure of politics until 1980, when, with the P.R.I.'s backing, he was elected governor of his home state of Michoacan. By the end of his term in 1986, Cardenas was voicing doubts about the P.R.I.'s commitment to Mexico's poor. He was quickly informed by party leaders that such comments were unwelcome, even from governors with illustrious names.

Cardenas refused to back down. He co-founded the Democratic Current, a movement within the P.R.I. to give rank-and-file members more say in choosing the presidential candidate. When the P.R.I. responded late last year by expelling the rebels, Cardenas announced his candidacy.

The Cardenas campaign was an eight-month odyssey in search of people he calls the "forgotten ones." He stayed in hotels so unpleasant that journalists covering his campaign refused to enter them. Says Campaign Aide Carlos Torres: "We talked to the Yaqui Indians in Sonora, the Triques in Oaxaca, the Mazahuas in Mexico State. We went to see them. We didn't have them brought to us."

Cardenas has not spoken to Carlos Salinas de Gortari in two years. He views the reform-minded P.R.I. candidate as a prisoner in a gilded cage. "The official party is just a collection of personal interests, not even ideologies," he laments. Cardenas believes that his father, who died in 1970, would support what he is doing. "We were friends," he recalls. "In our family, there was a trust that whatever one was doing was out of conviction." Cardenas' showing at the polls this month ensures that he will continue to be a factor in Mexican politics. Besides, since he is unlikely to be invited to Los Pinos as a guest, he will have to continue his campaign if he wants to sleep again in his old room.