Key election today in Mexico

Will Mexicans follow the trend set by Latin American countries such as Venezuela and Bolivia and elect a leftist leader? Or will more well-to-do voters rule the day and elect the pro-business candidate who will likely continue current policies?

Unless the election is extremely close, we should know tonight. The latest polls — none of them particularly recent because of Mexican laws that sharply restrict election-related activities in the week before the election — indicate that the race for the Mexican presidency could be extremely close between the two frontrunners, Felipe de Jesús Calderón Hinojosa of the pro-business Partido Acción Nacional and Andrés Manuel López Obrador of the left-leaning Alianza por el Bien de Todos. Three other candidates also are on the ballot.

Calderón is expected to easily carry the prosperous (by Third World standards) northern part of Mexico, while López Obrador, whose slogan is "Primero los pobres" ("First, the poor"), will likely carry the south. The outcome could depend on decisions by voters in Mexico City and the surrounding Mexico state.

To learn more about today's elections — and work on your Spanish — following are some sites that should be of interest. Note that the official campaign sites are mostly taken down because of campaign restrictions leading up to the election:

• Calderón campaign
• Excélsior newspaper
• Instituto Federal Electoral
• López Obrador campaign
• Reforma newspaper
• El Universal newspaper