Campaign's End

Just as if he were really in a contest, Presidential Candidate Adolfo Lopez Mateos rolled through Mexico City this week at the head of a giant parade of gaily decorated floats and charros (cowboys) on prancing horses. As they have since 1946, Mexicans will go to the polls next week and--barring an upset more sensational than Harry Truman's--elect the candidate of the Party of Revolutionary Institutions (P.R.I.) to a six-year term.

Former Labor Minister Lopez Mateos, 48, was hand-picked for his job by the inner circle of P.R.I. politicians, and he has used the campaign mostly as a chance to show his face to the people in all 29 states. Crowds have been well-ordered and speeches safe: "Every Mexican has the right to enjoy the liberty created by our heroes." But in small round-table sessions everywhere he went, wavy-haired Lopez Mateos, a deskman by training, has lined up the loyalty of political leaders who count. Like his predecessor, Adolfo Ruiz Cortines, he will probably head a government that talks to the left in public but runs down the political middle.

Opposition Candidate Luis Hector Alvarez of the right-wing National Action Party (P.A.N.) has campaigned earnestly for cleaner government--and got nowhere. He has been heckled in the hinterlands and relegated to newspaper back pages. As for the Communist Party candidate, an ancient lawyer named Miguel Mendoza Lopez, few Mexicans even knew where he was last week. The campaign has been historically quiet; only one P.A.N. worker has been killed.

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