MEXICO: The two leading contenders in Mexico's presidential race faced off in their only debate of the campaign this week, an event that saw a conservative and a left-winger offer radically different solutions to the problems of unemployment, crime and migration.
Rarely have Mexican voters faced such a stark choice with conservative Felipe Calderon and left-winger Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador standing clearly on opposite sides of a wide ideological divide.
The contrast was evident in Tuesday night's debate, with Mr Calderon calling for fiscal responsibility and a "firm hand" against crime, while Mr Lopez Obrador said he would end the "privileges" of the Mexican elite as part of a war on poverty.
The polls released before the debate showed the two men in a statistical dead heat.
The debate was a last opportunity to reach voters ahead of Mexico's first game in the World Cup this Sunday. Whoever lost might find it difficult to make up ground in this soccer-obsessed country, especially if Mexico progresses to the tournament's second round.
"Futbol . . . will take control of the public consciousness," columnist Rafael Ruiz Harrell wrote on Saturday in the newspaper Reforma. "On the field and with the ball rolling, no one cares about the gross domestic product, the crime rate or the inequality of salaries."
At the debate, all five of the candidates on the ballot shared a single stage, but only the two men at the head of the polls engaged in face-to-face attacks.
Mr Calderon of the National Action Party suggested that a Lopez Obrador presidency would bring anarchy and financial collapse and he attacked his record as mayor of Mexico City.
"It would be worthwhile for the former mayor to explain to us how he managed to transform Mexico City into the most crime-ridden and corrupt city in Mexico," Mr Calderon said.
Mr Lopez Obrador of the Democratic Revolution Party shot back, describing a Mexico in which the rich - including Mr Calderon's brother-in-law - escape paying taxes. It wasn't right "that a few people have everything and that the majority suffers from lack of basic needs," he said.
Already, the campaign has seen more dramatic turns than a lucha libre wrestling match, with a couple of farcical episodes thrown in for good measure.
Trailing Mr Lopez Obrador by as much as 10 points in some polls in March, Mr Calderon made up ground with a series of black-and-white TV attack ads suggested his opponent's proposals for public works programmes and subsidies to the poor would bankrupt the country.
The spots, crafted with the help of a conservative media consultant from Spain, helped Mr Calderon surge ahead in many polls, but Mexico's election authority forced Mr Calderon to withdraw the ads this month, calling them character assassinations.
In May, after weeks of eschewing the media, Mr Lopez Obrador began striking back. Among other things, he sat down for an hour-long interview with a comedian-clown called Bronzo who is one of Mexico's most important tastemakers. He surged back into a tie.
Mr Lopez Obrador is calling for an increase in subsidies to the poor and public-works projects to stimulate the Mexican economy. He says certain elements of the North American Free Trade Agreement should be renegotiated, especially those that will eliminate tariffs on US corn and beans in 2008.
Mr Calderon promises to continue the free-market policies of outgoing president Vicente Fox, who cannot seek re-election. He says enticing more foreign investment will create the jobs necessary to stop Mexicans from migrating to the United States.
This week, a new challenge emerged for the Lopez Obrador campaign: lawyers for an Argentine entrepreneur jailed here on corruption charges said they would release secretly recorded videos showing Mr Lopez Obrador's aides accepting bribes when he was mayor of Mexico City.
Mr Lopez Obrador's allies said the videos were a crude attempt at extortion. Then, just hours before the debate, the entrepreneur's lawyers said they would not release the tapes. Someone had shot at the entrepreneur's family, apparently from a passing car, but his wife and three children all emerged unscathed.
Some were suggesting that the "attack" was itself a staged campaign dirty trick.