MORRIS THOMPSON AND RICARDO SANDOVAL
 Herald World Staff

 TOLUCA, Mexico -- Almost three years after he launched his bid to end 71 years
 of one-party rule in Mexico, Vicente Fox Quesada, the onetime chief for
 Coca-Cola in Mexico and Central America, appears heading for a victory that
 would make him the first Mexican president from outside the ruling Institutional
 Revolutionary Party (PRI) since 1929.

 The victory for Fox's National Action Party (PAN) would be a political earthquake
 for Mexico, causing deep uncertainty in a nation where the PRI and the
 government have long been indistinguishable.

 Despite seesawing in recent polls, the former governor of the central state of
 Guanajuato appears to be back in the lead after a key debate late last month. In
 one poll last month, Fox was leading with 46.3 percent to 41.6 percent for PRI
 nominee Francisco Labastida, the first time his lead has been greater than a
 poll's margin of error.

 The PRI may lose power not because it has changed but because Mexico has,
 said Lorenzo Meyer, a professor at the prestigious Colegio de Mexico in Mexico
 City. Fox, he said, is appealing strongly to voters who are younger, better
 educated and more urban than the PRI's supporters. He appears to be gaining by
 blaming Mexico's sorry economic condition on ``70 years of bad government.''

 Fox, who will be 58 on Election Day July 2, is trying to present himself as a
 sensible man of vision on the vital relationship between Mexico and the United
 States, which are each other's largest trading partners but are frequently at odds
 over drug trafficking and illegal immigration from this country of 100 million where
 half live in poverty.

 The annual process by which the U.S. Congress must certify aid recipients as
 good partners in the war against illegal drugs is widely seen in Mexico as
 humiliating, hypocritical and pointless. Fox said he wants it replaced with an
 agreement among the hemisphere's drug-producing countries -- transit nations
 such as Mexico and consuming countries such as the United States. Each, he
 said, would be responsible for quantifiable goals, with the United States, for
 example, improving drug interdiction and reducing the number of users.

 His ideas on immigration are sure to prove controversial in the United States. Fox
 wants a North American common market much like Europe's that ``over five to 10
 years'' would allow the free movement of people. The resulting equalization of
 wages, he said, is how Germany and other prosperous northern European
 countries stopped so many poor people from immigrating illegally from Spain,
 Portugal and Greece.

 Fox has traveled to the United States, seeking support among Mexican
 expatriates, meeting with members of Congress and with U.S. anti-drug czar
 Barry McCaffrey. He declared his candidacy for president in July 1997, mounting
 an expensive U.S.-style campaign that dissuaded all possible competitors in his
 party from even declaring.

 He's a fan of U.S. political consultant Dick Morris, who engineered President
 Clinton's claim on the political middle ground in the 1996 U.S. election. Fox is
 trying to do that, too.

 REACHING OUT

 He also is reaching out to constituencies whose support his party historically
 never sought, although critics say he has made incompatible promises.

 For example, he has told teachers that education would be the central task of his
 government and that he would accelerate efforts to make up their lost buying
 power, savaged over two decades by currency devaluations and economic crises.
 He also has told Native Americans, still at the bottom of society five centuries
 after the Spanish conquest, that guaranteeing their rights would be his central
 aim.

 Founded in 1939, Fox's party is Mexico's oldest opposition party. Its ideology is
 conservative, pro-business, nationalistic and Roman Catholic.

 Fox, the grandson of an Irish immigrant and a Spanish-born mother, couldn't have
 run for president until a constitutional change in 1994 no longer required that both
 parents of a president be Mexican-born. It's still an issue in this deeply
 nationalistic country.

 ``You're more Mexican than he is,'' Tomas Bustos Munoz, a PRI official in
 Guanajuato, said to a Mexican-American reporter. ``How can he know the depths
 of the problems facing Mexico?''

 WORKED FOR COKE

 Born on a ranch near Guanajuato's largest city, Leon, Fox is a devout Catholic
 and opponent of abortion, although he has softened some positions on social
 issues and women's rights. He was educated in Jesuit schools in Guanajuato and
 at the Roman Catholic Ibero-American University in Mexico City. He went to work
 for Coca-Cola, rising to chief executive for Mexico and Central America before
 quitting to work in the family's frozen-vegetable export and boot-making
 businesses.

 He says he joined the PAN after a call from Manuel Clouthier, the party's
 presidential nominee, in 1988. He was elected to Congress that year and was so
 widely believed to have been robbed of the Guanajuato governorship in 1991 that
 all the opposition parties declared him the victor.

 Then-President Carlos Salinas voided the results, but appointed another PAN
 member as governor. In 1995, Fox won outright.

 The PRI charges that Fox had a poor record of providing social services for
 Guanajuato's poor. He instituted charges for previously free services, such as
 medical checkups and child vaccinations.

 ``To him, indigenous Mexicans and peasants have always been [just] farm
 workers,'' said Luis Miguel Rionda, a political science professor at the University
 of Guanajuato.

 EXPORTS GREW

 But Fox points to a record of increasing the industrial base of the historically
 agricultural state, with exports growing tenfold in three years. GM Suburbans now
 are made at a giant plant in Guanajuato, for example.

 Fox says he will help Mexico prosper through increased investment from abroad
 and greater savings at home. His strategy, he said in the interview, will include
 capital amassed through creating pension plans for the 27.5 million people in a
 work force of 40 million who don't have such coverage. And he promises to use
 micro-business loans to foster small businesses, which he did as Guanajuato
 governor.