MEXICO CITY (Reuters) -- Former presidential hopeful and Mexico City
                  mayor Cuauhtemoc Cardenas on Tuesday emerged as the runaway favourite
                  to win his leftist party's nomination for the key 2000 presidential contest.

                  Having secured the support of most state leaders of his Party of the
                  Democratic Revolution (PRD), Cardenas won the backing of the party's
                  federal lawmakers on Tuesday-- at the expense of the lawmakers' own
                  congressional leader.

                  In a public letter, 93 of the PRD's 126 federal deputies said they backed
                  Cardenas over his party co-founder and PRD congressional leader Porfirio
                  Munoz Ledo, who has launched his own bid for the party nomination.

                  "Cuauhtemoc is the president Mexico needs," the PRD deputies said in the
                  letter.

                  Cardenas, son of former president Lazaro Cardenas, is considered a top
                  contender for the 2000 race even though he failed in his two previous bids in
                  1994 and 1988. He is believed by many Mexicans to have been denied the
                  1988 race only through blatant vote fraud.

                  Cardenas and Munoz Ledo are both career politicians who bolted from the
                  ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) in the mid-1980s after
                  unsuccessfully trying to open up the party's candidate selection process.
                  Traditionally, the sitting president has hand-picked his successor.

                  Ironically, Munoz Ledo criticised the PRD last week for imitating old-style
                  PRI policy in backing Cardenas publicly before other candidates had a
                  chance to oppose him, and announced he was forming an independent wing
                  within the PRD.

                  "The ones who are promoting (Cardenas') campaign are committing,
                  knowingly or not, the same mistakes the PRI did when (Cardenas and I)
                  began the democratic current," Munoz Ledo told Reforma daily on Tuesday.

                  Although the party is not supposed to pick its candidate officially until
                  November, the process started early when Munoz Ledo in October first
                  announced his run for the nomination. "I hope (Munoz Ledo) understands it
                  is not his time to be candidate, and that within the party there exists total
                  support for Cardenas," deputy Fernando Hernandez told reporters.

                    Copyright 1999 Reuters.