Mexican Stand Off; A close, bitterly contested election may have echoes of Florida 2000. But it's a sign of the times in Latin America.

Byline: Joseph Contreras and Monica Campbell (With Mac Margolis in Rio de Janiero)

The black and white t shirt bore the legend smile, we're going to win, but Abraham Flores was all frowns on election night last week. Earlier that day the 24-year-old moving-company employee had voted for left-wing presidential candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, the former Mexico City mayor who campaigned on a pledge to address the needs of Mexico's poor and to build a more equitable society. But the preliminary returns from polling stations were not encouraging, and Flores filed into the famous Zocalo plaza in downtown Mexico City with hundreds of other stunned Lopez Obrador supporters to back the candidate's demand for a ballot-by-ballot recount. "If the elites get their way and Lopez Obrador doesn't win, they'll hope the Mexican people will forget and go on with their lives," fumed the slender, $10-a-day menial laborer. "But I doubt that will happen. Lopez Obrador speaks to the poor, and we're sick of the elites trying to rule the country."

By the weekend Flores's worst fears had been confirmed: final vote tallies showed Felipe Calderon of the center-right National Action Party (PAN) defeating Lopez Obrador by about 244,000 votes in Mexico's closest-ever presidential race. The ex-mayor vowed to challenge the result before a federal election tribunal; his infuriated supporters threatened to take to the streets. Their resistance could muddle the political picture for months, confusing not just Mexicans but outside observers who had looked to the ballot for a clear indication of which way Latin America was tilting--toward the leftist populism of Venezuela's Hugo ChAvez, or the pro-market, pro-U.S. stance of Colombia's Alvaro Uribe.

What Mexico's electoral crisis makes clear is that the answer is neither. Instead many of the region's key countries are splitting down the middle, as the gap between globalization's winners and losers grows ever wider. In Mexico Calderon vowed to maintain the pro-business economic policies of outgoing incumbent Vicente Fox, and that message garnered overwhelming support among affluent voters and in the industrialized states of northern Mexico. "I want a job out of college, and Calderon's the guy who'll help make that happen," says Jose Jesus Cervantes, an 18-year-old university student who cast his first ballot ever for the PAN nominee. Lopez Obrador's populist platform, by contrast, attracted the urban poor and helped him capture the country's less-developed southern states. That neat geographical divide (see map) echoes the Red-Blue splits that have characterized Mexico's neighbor to the north ever since its equally bitter 2000 election.

The echoes don't stop there. In Bolivia, where ChAvez acolyte Evo Morales won last December's presidential vote by targeting slum dwellers and indigenous communities, four of the country's more prosperous eastern provinces approved a ballot measure last week calling for greater political and economic autonomy from La Paz; five poorer provinces rejected the same measure. Peruvians divided sharply along class lines in last month's runoff election, with the middle and upper classes boosting ex-president Alan Garcia to victory over a former Army officer. A similar schism is apparent in Nicaragua's presidential campaign, where Sandinista leader and former president Daniel Ortega is in a tight race against center-right candidate Eduardo Montealegre.

The divisions owe much to how unevenly the benefits of economic liberalization have been distributed. Even in a normally placid country like Costa Rica, the debate over the supposed benefits of free-trade agreements has polarized the electorate. Nobel Peace Prize winner and ex-president Oscar Arias nearly blew his shot at a second term last winter when a center-left rival repeatedly attacked a pending trade accord with the United States backed by Arias.

In Mexico, the benefits of NAFTA are indisputable, but mostly limited to certain classes and specific parts of the country. According to a 2004 United Nations study, literacy rates, life expectancy and educational opportunities in the town of Metlatonoc in the southern state of Guerrero are on a par with destitute villages in Sierra Leone. By contrast, the living standards of a ritzy Mexico City neighborhood like Polanco compare favorably with the poshest districts ...