Mexico Presidential Hopefuls Spam for Edge

Democratic Revolution Party (PRD) presidential candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador speaks during a rally Friday, June 23, 2006, in Colima City, Mexico. Presidential candidates are in the last phase of the presidential campaigns, ending with the elections on July 2. (AP Photo/Guillermo Arias) (Guillermo Arias - AP)

One of the first political movements in Mexico to use the Internet effectively was the leftist Zapatista rebellion in the 1990s, which won international sympathy through rhetorical attacks on the Institutional Revolutionary Party that ruled for seven decades.

PRI candidate Roberto Madrazo now trails in third place, and e-mails favoring this "dinosaur" are notably sparse. That is because most PRI voters are too old or too poor to use the Internet, said pollster Jorge Buendia of Ipsos Buendia.

Calderon is winning the e-mail war, but Buendia said that will likely only reinforce his support because most Internet users are educated professionals already sympathetic to the candidate.

Calderon's advisers reportedly met once with U.S. consultant Dick Morris but did not hire him. The campaign will not comment.

Sarukhan also sought advice from activists with http://www.moveon.org , who tried to defeat President Bush in 2004. Calderon's campaign then built an interactive site that includes dozens of video and audio links and three video games.

"You have to adapt these ideas to the local environment or in most cases they won't work," Sarukhan said.

Candidates were using e-mails to get their message out before National Action's Fox won power in the presidential election six years ago. But there were just over 3 million Mexican Internet users then. Now, there are more than 20 million, according to the Mexican Internet Association.

To reach an even wider digital audience, Sarukhan said the Calderon campaign will send out millions of cellular phone text messages in the last days before the election. There are more than 40 million cell phones in Mexico, the association said.

But some Mexican voters are fed up with the cyberspace stumping.

"I've been getting campaign e-mails everyday, and they block up my account. It's invasion, saturation," said Luis Trujillo, 40, an electrical engineer who plans to vote for Lopez Obrador.

"I can make up my own mind who I want to vote for."

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On the Net (in Spanish):

http://www.felipe-calderon.org

http://www.lopez-obrador.com.mx

http://www.mexicoconmadrazo.org

http://www.campa.org.mx

http://www.patriciamercado.org.mx