CHIAPA DE CORZO, Mexico, Jan 20 (Reuters) – For most of the past five years, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador has journeyed far and wide across Mexico, railing against the corruption, fraud and injustice he says cost him the presidency.

Seething over his wafer-thin election loss to conservative Felipe Calderon in 2006, the fiery leftist shook Mexico with some of the biggest street protests in its history, damning its institutions and declaring himself the rightful president.

Yet since recently winning the support of Mexico’s main leftist parties to run again for president, Lopez Obrador has made a sharp U-turn, preaching love and forgiveness to win back voters who had been turned off by his protests and clamor.

The former mayor of Mexico City flanked his new approach with a drive to reach out to private business and reassure voters he will not put the economy at risk, charges that cost him dear in the final stages of the last election campaign, when his lead over Calderon evaporated.

The new message has forced Lopez Obrador into a delicate balancing act, struggling to convince waverers to follow him down the road to the “loving republic” he now invokes, while still firing up his core supporters.

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Full election coverage: [ID:nMEXVOTE]

CHIAPA DE CORZO, Mexico, Jan 20 (Reuters) – For most of the past five years, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador has journeyed far and wide across Mexico, railing against the corruption, fraud and injustice he says cost him the presidency.

Seething over his wafer-thin election loss to conservative Felipe Calderon in 2006, the fiery leftist shook Mexico with some of the biggest street protests in its history, damning its institutions and declaring himself the rightful president.

Yet since recently winning the support of Mexico’s main leftist parties to run again for president, Lopez Obrador has made a sharp U-turn, preaching love and forgiveness to win back voters who had been turned off by his protests and clamor.

The former mayor of Mexico City flanked his new approach with a drive to reach out to private business and reassure voters he will not put the economy at risk, charges that cost him dear in the final stages of the last election campaign, when his lead over Calderon evaporated.

The new message has forced Lopez Obrador into a delicate balancing act, struggling to convince waverers to follow him down the road to the “loving republic” he now invokes, while still firing up his core supporters.

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Full election coverage: [ID:nMEXVOTE]

MANAGUA (Reuters) – Nicaragua’s left-wing President Daniel Ortega has won over many critics at home with a successful drive to cut poverty and spur business-friendly policies in Central America’s poorest country.

But his choice of friends abroad makes many Nicaraguans worry that the former guerrilla and Cold War icon is dragging down the country’s reputation and unnecessarily antagonizing the United States and other Western countries.

Ortega took office for a second straight term last week after winning more than 60 percent support in a landslide election victory in November. It was by far his biggest share of the vote since the mid-1980s, when he led the Sandinista government during a civil war against U.S.-backed rebels.

Voted out of office in 1990, he spent 16 years in opposition before returning to power in 2006. At home, he has recast himself as a man of peace, replaced his Marxist rhetoric with Christian messages and worked well with farmers and business leaders who were once his most bitter critics.

But Ortega’s foreign policy looks very similar to the Cold War years, when Nicaragua was allied with Russia and Cuba.

Now Ortega’s closest ally is Venezuela’s socialist President Hugo Chavez, who has used oil revenues to help bankroll Nicaragua’s anti-poverty programs. Nicaragua remains close to Cuba and has strengthened its ties with anti-U.S. leaders like Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

When he stood to take the oath of office last week, Ortega was flanked on stage by Chavez and Ahmadinejad. He pilloried the U.S. “occupations” of Iraq and Afghanistan, lamented the death of former Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi and paid his respects to former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.

TAPACHULA, Mexico (Reuters) – Leftist presidential hopeful Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador has pledged to break up Mexico’s “monopolies” and press foreign mining firms for higher taxes and better wages if elected on July 1.

Lopez Obrador, often vilified by opponents as a threat to private enterprise, said wresting control of large sections of industry from just a few hands was vital to revitalizing the economy.

“This is all going to be corrected,” Lopez Obrador, who narrowly lost the last presidential election in 2006, told Reuters in a weekend interview. “In comparative terms, you pay more here for construction materials, telecommunications, for interest on loans than in any other place.”

Production of many goods and services, extending from bread and cement to Internet access and television, are dominated by just a few players in Mexico. Economists say the lack of competition has long been a drag on Latin America’s second biggest economy.

Speaking in the southern city of Tapachula after a campaign rally, Lopez Obrador said his team had analyzed the data and found that Mexican consumers would save up to 10 percent of their income “if there were no monopolies in this country.”

The former mayor of Mexico City came within a hair’s breadth of taking office in 2006 and denounced the result as fraud, leading huge street protests in the capital when conservative Felipe Calderon was declared the victor.

Those protests damaged his popularity and recent polls have shown Lopez Obrador with support of between 15 and 25 percent, way behind front-runner Enrique Pena Nieto of the opposition Institutional Revolutionary Party. However, the gap is starting to close.

MANAGUA (Reuters) – Nicaragua’s President Daniel Ortega on Tuesday urged Israel to destroy its nuclear weapons to foster peace in the Middle East as he hosted Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad who is touring Latin America.

Speaking in a ceremony where he was sworn in for a second consecutive term in office, Ortega attacked the U.S. “occupation” of Afghanistan and Iraq, condemned the killing of former Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi and offered a brief valediction to Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.

Ortega – flanked by his close ally, Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez – defended Iran’s stated intention to develop atomic energy for peaceful ends, an explanation Western powers say is a cover for a nuclear weapons program.

“Simply by starting to push for talks in the region in which the steps are laid down for Israel to give up and destroy these nuclear arms, I’m certain this would bring about great peace in the region,” the former Marxist guerrilla said.

Instead, western powers are ignoring those with nuclear weapons and threatening a country which only wanted atomic energy for peaceful purposes, Ortega added, pointing to Iran.

“Christ never said: Israel arm yourself, arm yourself to the teeth,” said Ortega, whose speech moved swiftly from one topic to the next, backed by a musical accompaniment of strummed guitars and chanting peppered with rapped shouts.

Ortega, 66, suspended diplomatic ties with Israel in 2010 in protest after Israeli commandos staged a deadly raid on a flotilla trying to break a blockade of Gaza.

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) – Mexico’s ruling conservative party had been in power just 50 days when drug lord Joaquin Guzman slipped out of a dark prison and into Mexican folklore.

Eleven years later, President Felipe Calderon’s government is furiously trying to flush out the man nicknamed El Chapo – “Shorty” – to rescue its bloody war on drug cartels.

Guzman’s flight from a maximum security prison in a laundry cart on January 19, 2001, was a major embarrassment to Calderon’s predecessor Vicente Fox, who had just begun a new era as the first National Action Party (PAN) official to lead Mexico.

Now, Guzman is the greatest symbol of the cartels’ defiance of Calderon, whose war unleashed a wave of gang violence that is eroding support for the PAN ahead of presidential elections on July 1. Calderon is barred by law from seeking a second term.

In the last few months, authorities have arrested dozens of Guzman’s henchmen, seized tons of his contraband and razed the biggest single marijuana plantation ever found in Mexico, subsequently chalked up as another setback for El Chapo.

Over Christmas, three senior Guzman associates fell into Mexico’s hands, including one named as his chief of operations in Durango, a state where he has been rumored to hide out.

“He’s certainly aware people very close to him have been captured over the past two weeks, so he must be seriously concerned,” said Vanda Felbab-Brown, a Brookings Institution expert on the drug trade. “The noose seems to be tightening.”

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) – A leading presidential candidate of Mexico’s ruling conservatives raised the possibility on Thursday of listing oil company Pemex on the stock exchange to help revamp the state-owned giant.

Josefina Vazquez Mota, who is bidding to become the first woman to serve as Mexican president, told Reuters in an interview the next administration needed to examine how Brazil had managed its partly privatized state oil firm Petrobras.

“The case of Petrobras is a good reference point, not necessarily to copy it 100 percent, but it deserves particular attention,” said Vazquez Mota, who is leading the race to be the candidate for President Felipe Calderon’s National Action Party, or PAN, ahead of the July 1 election.

Oil production has dipped at Pemex, which has been dogged for years by allegations of inefficiency and corruption, prompting many Mexican lawmakers, particularly from the right and center of the political spectrum, to urge an overhaul.

Although many advocates of oil reform say Pemex needs private investment, they have shied away from discussing a potential listing for the company, which has been a sacred cow since Mexico nationalized the oil industry in the 1930s.

“It’s one of the scenarios, not the only one,” Vazquez Mota, a former education minister and ex-PAN congressional leader, said of floating Pemex on the stock exchange. “In the end, the most important thing isn’t whether to list Pemex or not, that could be the result of many prior decisions.”

In August, three private companies won the first contracts to operate mature oil fields in a bid to modernize the oil industry. Pemex says the number of fields operated by private firms will jump by the end of 2012.

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) – Mexico captured a suspected drug trafficker with links to the country’s most wanted man, Sinaloa cartel boss Joaquin “Shorty” Guzman, whose operations have recently suffered a string of blows.

Mexico’s federal police said on Wednesday they had captured Luis Rodriguez Olivera, known as “El Guero” (Blondie), for whom U.S. authorities have offered a reward of up to $5 million.

In a statement, Mexican police said Rodriguez Olivera and his brothers were responsible for trafficking cocaine to the United States between 1996 and 2008 for Guzman’s gang.

A “wanted” statement on the U.S. State Department’s website said Rodriguez Olivera and his brothers split with the Sinaloa cartel around 2005 and later forged a strong relationship with Guzman’s rivals, the Zetas cartel.

One intelligence official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the 39-year-old Rodriguez Olivera had ties to Guzman but had recently struck out on his own. Federal police arrested him on Tuesday in Mexico City airport.

Later on Wednesday, the government said it had seized eight containers carrying more than 120 tonnes of monomethylamine in the Pacific port of Lazaro Cardenas in Michoacan state.

It was the second big seizure announced this week of monomethylamine, a compound used to make methamphetamines. According to calculations by security analysts, the shipment could have been worth $300 million dollars or more.

MEXICO CITY, Dec 26 (Reuters) – Mexico landed its third blow against the country’s most wanted drug trafficker in as many months after capturing a suspected lieutenant of Joaquin “Shorty” Guzman, boss of the powerful Sinaloa cartel.

On Monday, masked Mexican soldiers presented Felipe Cabrera, known as “el Inge,” to the media following his capture in Culiacan, capital of Sinaloa, the northwestern Pacific state after which the drug cartel is named.

Cabrera, whose nickname is an abbreviation of the Spanish word for engineer, was the second suspected Guzman lieutenant to be seized there in the past two months.

“These are blows to the (Sinaloa) organization, but the structure for drug trafficking and money laundering is still intact,” Alberto Islas, a security expert at consultancy Risk Evaluation, said after Cabrera’s media parade in Mexico City.

In what may have been another bitter pill for Guzman, the government said later that the navy had seized 21 tonnes of monomethylamine – a compound used to make methamphetamines – in the Pacific port of Manzanillo, traditionally his turf.

The shipment may have been intended for Guzman given that several others belonging to him had been seized there, one official told Reuters, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Islas said the haul, which was intercepted on its way from Peru to Guatemala – where the Sinaloa cartel is also active – was probably worth at least $50 million in unprocessed form.

MEXICO CITY, Dec 8 (Reuters) – A mounting drugs war death toll and concerns that Mexico’s fragile economic recovery will fall victim to the European debt crisis are clouding the outlook for Mexico ahead of a presidential election next July.

DRUGS WAR

Anger is growing about the roughly 45,000 lives that have been lost since President Felipe Calderon launched a war on drug cartels in late 2006, and violence has spun out of control in large areas along the U.S.-Mexico border. [ID:nN15124805]

There are now signs it is moving further to the south. On Nov. 24, suspected drug gang hitmen killed at least 26 people and dumped their bodies near a major landmark in Mexico’s second city, Guadalajara. [ID:nN1E7AN0MZ]

It was the fourth mass public dumping of bodies in regional centers in just over two months, a rash of killings officials blame on brutal turf wars between rival drug cartels.

Local media said a message with the bodies in Guadalajara purported to be from the brutal Zetas gang and was directed at Sinaloa cartel boss Joaquin “Shorty” Guzman.

Officials blamed a group with ties to Guzman for two mass dumpings of more than 60 bodies, seen as a signal to the Zetas, in the eastern port city of Veracruz in September and October.