BY SUSAN FERRISS
 Cox News Service

 MEXICO CITY -- She's diminutive, soft-spoken and genteel.

 She's also an ardent feminist and one of Mexico's most powerful political figures.

 Amalia Garcia, 48, is the first woman to be elected president of a political party in
 this country where machismo still generally rules. Born just before Mexican
 women won the right to vote in 1953, she was committed to politics by 1975 -- the
 year Mexico finally erased a law declaring that husbands could forbid wives from
 working.

 Since her election in a nationwide vote last July, Garcia has led the leftist
 Democratic Revolution Party (PRD), founded 10 years ago in opposition to
 Mexico's ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI).

 To some, her rise to the top of one of the country's most powerful opposition
 parties could signal a new age for women leaders in Mexico.

 Garcia's victory certainly set a trend. In November the PRI appointed a woman,
 Dulce Maria Sauri, as its president. It was a move widely acknowledged as a nod
 to Mexico's women, who represent 52 percent of the potential electorate.

 Both these women lead their parties during a competitive election year when
 Mexicans will select a new president July 2, along with a new Congress and other
 top offices.

 WILLING TO CRITICIZE OWN PARTY

 Garcia, the single mother of a college-age daughter, is a firm believer in the liberal
 creed that government should intervene to solve social problems and help the
 poor. But she's also a feminist who doesn't hesitate to criticize people within her
 party when macho attitudes threaten to keep women in secondary roles.

 She was instrumental, in fact, in a party rule that requires that no more than 70
 percent of any PRD administration be dominated by one gender.

 Men make jokes about the policy, Garcia said in an interview in her office at party
 headquarters.

 ``They joke that the quota should guarantee that at least 30 percent should be
 men so they won't disappear,'' she laughed.

 An abortion-rights advocate and a veteran politician who fought to upgrade laws
 against rape and sexual harassment, Garcia is a woman constantly on the go
 and a regular front-page item in newspapers. She flies from city to city meeting
 constituents and political leaders of all backgrounds, and she has been credited
 with helping transform the PRD from a party on the margins to a force to be
 reckoned with.

 Garcia's style has helped her party move toward ``the famous middle road,'' a
 strategy that has worked for other leftist parties in the world, said political analyst
 Joel Estudillo of the Mexican Institute for Political Studies.

 ``Amalia Garcia could be the PRD's future,'' Estudillo said.

 BRAINS BEHIND ELECTORAL STRATEGY

 The PRI has controlled the country's presidency, its Congress and most state
 governments for 70 years. It was only two years ago that the PRI lost control of
 the lower house of Congress and the PRD began to gain more power.

 Out of 500 members of the lower house, the PRD now counts 123. Mexico's
 oldest opposition party, the conservative National Action Party (PAN), has 117.
 Nine members are independents or affiliated with other opposition groups.

 Garcia is considered one of the brains behind another successful electoral
 strategy that is starting to boost PRD presence in the governors' mansions and
 mayoral offices in various states: softening the party's militant image and forging
 coalitions with unlikely partners, including the conservative PAN and dissident
 PRI leaders.

 Since 1998, the party has won governors' offices in four of Mexico's 31 states.
 Last December, it sponsored a candidate who won the mayoral election in the
 high-profile, economically powerful resort city of Acapulco.

 In Zacatecas, Garcia's home state, she and the PRD wooed a dissident PRI
 leader and sponsored him as their candidate for governor. They did the same
 thing in the state of Tlaxcala. Both candidates won.

 The PRD also won the governorships of Baja California and Nayarit, where they
 established coalitions with the PAN to defeat the PRI.

 Both the PRD and the PAN are trying to drive the PRI from office and label the
 ruling party corrupt, negligent and anti-democratic. Their bedrock philosophies are
 worlds apart, however. The PAN is considered pro-free market and socially
 conservative, and it supports a continuing ban on abortion.

 PARTY ELECTED MEXICO CITY MAYOR

 While it hasn't made abortion rights a top issue in this largely Roman Catholic
 country, the PRD favors decriminalization of abortion and believes in only limited
 free-market economic reforms.

 Two-and-a-half years ago, the PRD had its first substantial national victory when
 its leader Cuauhtemoc Cardenas won the Mexico City mayor's race. Cardenas
 left office last year to run for president and appointed another PRD woman,
 Rosario Robles, as his successor.

 With Mexico City in its control along with four states, the PRD now governs a
 territory with more than 20 million of Mexico's 93 million people. Even though
 Cardenas is lagging third in polls, Garcia is convinced the party's experience will
 help him and other party candidates in the next election.

 ``Six years ago, during the 1994 presidential election the PRD didn't govern any
 entity,'' Garcia said. ``Now we govern five and citizens have seen there is no
 chaos, no uncertainty.''

 She added: ``It was said that businesses wouldn't trust [the PRD]. None of that
 has happened.''

 While she acknowledges that Mexico's presidency is the top prize long coveted
 by the country's opposition parties, Garcia thinks her party should also continue
 to try to win local elections city by city, state by state.

 ``In Mexico, everything has revolved around the figure of the president,'' she said.
 ``We believe that we should put an accent on each and every space in the
 government where there could be an alternative.''

                     Copyright 2000 Miami Herald