By Kevin Sullivan and Mary Jordan
Washington Post Foreign Service

MEXICO CITY, Jan. 23 -- Millions of Mexicans see it as pointless, a slavish mimicking of the United States, an annoyance that disrupts their biological clocks --
and even their sex lives. The two most powerful elected officials in the nation are feuding over it.

Never mind that President Bush is coming to visit and a bloodthirsty drug lord just escaped from prison in a laundry truck. One of the hottest topics in Mexico this
week is the deeply divisive issue of daylight saving time.

"It has a terrible effect on my personality; I get angry about everything," said Maria Elena Torres, 36, who owns an ice cream shop in Mexico City. "I hate the
change. And finally when my body gets used to it, it's time to change again."

Seizing on those sentiments, Mexico City Mayor Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador has taken up the cause, partly because it is good populist politics and partly to bust
the chops of a man who is fast becoming his arch rival, President Vicente Fox.

Fox and Lopez Obrador, the two most powerful elected officials in Mexico, had breakfast the other day to try to work out their chronological differences, but they
parted no closer than they started. Fox still favors the five-year-old "summer timetable" as a means of saving electricity and synchronizing Mexico with foreign trade
and financial markets. He did, however, offer to shorten it from seven months to five -- May to September instead of April to October.

Lopez Obrador wants to dump it altogether. He is threatening to keep Mexico City and its 20 million residents on a different time than the rest of the country --
setting up a time warp that would put the city's suburbs an hour ahead of downtown, discombobulating everything from bus schedules to television programming to
deliveries of fresh fish.

"I don't know what he's been eating," said Guadalupe Loaeza, a prominent social critic in Mexico City, who believes Lopez Obrador is waging a political war with
Fox that is "childish" and "unproductive."

Loaeza said the mayor is simply venting the frustrations of his Democratic Revolutionary Party, or PRD, Mexico's flagging leftist party. She said that the PRD is in
disarray after its laggard performance in last summer's national elections and that Lopez Obrador is trying to paint Fox -- who ran as Populist Number One -- as a
leader ignoring the will of the people, perhaps as a way to position himself to run for president in 2006.

But beyond the political shenanigans is a simple truth: Time is nothing to mess with in Mexico. Every great Mexican writer has tried to capture the Mexican
conception of time. Nobel laureate Octavio Paz and novelist Carlos Fuentes have devoted much thought to the subject, which Americans often describe, in a
simplistic stereotype, as the "manana syndrome." Paz noted that in the Mexican way of thinking, it makes no sense to leave something enjoyable now to rush off to
something else. He and others argue that the different perceptions of time are cultural factors developed over centuries.

Jorge G. Castaneda, Mexico's new foreign minister, once wrote of U.S.-Mexico relations that "time divides our two countries, as much as any other single factor."
For example, American executives here see Mexico's three-hour business lunches as lazy and wasteful; Mexicans see them as an opportunity to conduct business in a
relaxed setting outside the office. Late-arriving Mexican employees irritate American bosses; many Mexicans do not see why a few minutes or hours here or there is
a big deal.

"Letting and watching time go by, being late (an hour, a day, a week) are not grievous offenses," Castaneda wrote. "They simply indicate a lower rung on the ladder
of priorities."

Globalization and increased trade with the United States have changed Mexico to a certain degree. Mexico City, Monterrey and other cities are now dotted with
Internet companies or big exporters that take a more hard-nosed view of time. But much of Mexico, particularly in the countryside, still operates as if clocks are
more of a suggestion than a requirement.

The infamous rebel uprising in the southern state of Chiapas on New Year's Day 1994 was delayed for an hour because a key rebel unit arrived late for the planned
attack. Some of Mexico City's most expensive hairdressers do not take appointments; customers are always so late that they simply take them as they arrive. If
dinner guests are invited for 8 p.m., showing up at 10 or later is not considered impolite.

"In Germany, when you are invited for dinner at seven, you are there at seven, or maybe three minutes to seven," said Brigitte Doellgast, librarian at the German
Goethe Institute in Mexico City. "If you turn up at five minutes past, you must bring an excuse. A quarter-past is a crime, and at half-past you are never going to be
invited again.

"But here," said Doellgast, who has lived in Mexico for three years, "I have learned my lesson. I never turn up on time. If you are invited at eight, you turn up at
half-past eight, then you have dinner at midnight."

So the idea of changing clocks by an hour twice a year has left Mexicans scratching their heads. It seems to many a cold, bureaucratic intrusion on the poetry of daily
life. And every clock change causes great confusion. Factories find workers arriving even later than usual; classes are out of sync in many schools. Last year, about
20 percent of passengers at Mexico City's airport missed their flights on the day the time changed.

When then-President Ernesto Zedillo passed the "summer timetable" into law in 1996, his reasons seemed clear: It would save electricity in a country chronically
short of power, and it would bring Mexico in line with its most important trading partner, the United States.

Mexican officials estimate that daylight saving time saved $680 million in electric bills in 1999 -- the equivalent of the total electricity used in seven weeks by about 20
million homes. But among many ordinary Mexicans, who distrust government statistics, the summer timetable is yet another government imposition. People complain
that they end up sending their children to school in the dark and save virtually nothing on their electric bill.

Pablo Mulas, director of an energy study program at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, said average consumers save only about 1 percent on their
electric bills because of the time change. He said the government sold the program to people by telling them they would save money. "Well, they didn't, and now they
blame the government, saying they lied to them," Mulas said. "We need a well-designed information campaign so people understand."

Fox is trying to rally public support, getting the word out that a little personal inconvenience has meant significant savings for the nation as a whole. "This is for
Mexico," Fox tells people.

Lopez Obrador is not buying. He wants a referendum, which he says will prove that people overwhelmingly oppose the time change. "The president thinks this is a
measure that favors the Mexican people, but I think the opposite," he said. "We have to consult with the people. That is democracy."

Others argue that there is more at stake than democracy. One Mexican legislator argued in Congress last year that the summer timetable was ruining sex lives. He
said harried couples hustling out of bed in the darkness to get their children off to school were missing out on morning lovemaking, known here as a mananero.

"I can believe it would affect someone's sex life," said Sylvia Romero Paredes, who owns a coffee shop in Mexico City. "I mean, you expect something at a certain
hour, and you want it at a certain hour."

                                                   © 2001