MEXICO

By TIM PADGETT/MEXICO CITY

Joaquin Bermeo brought a decisively hip style of voting to last week's remarkable election in Mexico. As a dour procession of villagers strode to the polls in San Andres Calpan, southeast of Mexico City, Bermeo, 21, rode up on a neon-colored bicycle. Wearing a fringed vest and oversize rainbow-colored sunglasses, he swaggered into a booth to mark the first ballot of his life--and step into the vanguard of a democratic revolution. No way, he said, would he vote for the authoritarian Institutional Revolutionary Party (P.R.I.), which has ruled Mexico virtually unchallenged since 1929. "Every week I have to go to Mexico City to find work because P.R.I. corruption has left this town with no money for jobs," Bermeo complained. "I don't know if the opposition will change that, but I'm sure not going to vote for what doesn't work for my parents."

That kind of youthful logic helped send Mexico tumbling through its most dramatic political upheaval in eight decades. The general election's stunning outcome finally made the country something more than a pseudo democracy with one all-powerful party. In the first ever race for mayor of Mexico City, one of the world's largest and most poverty-ridden capitals, Cuauhtemoc Cardenas Solorzano of the leftist Democratic Revolution Party (P.R.D.) dealt the P.R.I. the worst defeat in its history, while the conservative National Action Party (P.A.N.) captured two key governorships, including the highest office in Nuevo Leon, an industrial state on the U.S. border. Most important, the P.R.I. lost its majority in the lower house of the national congress for the first time since the party was founded 68 years ago. This tectonic shift in federal power could hamstring the administration of President Ernesto Zedillo Ponce de Leon, a staunch U.S. ally, and possibly sweep his party out of office when a presidential election is held in 2000.

At the epicenter of the political quake were Bermeo and his cohort in the so-called NAFTA generation, the largest and most independent-minded youth wave Mexico has seen since the 1920s. They got that moniker by having come of age during the new era ushered in by the three-year-old North American Free Trade Agreement, which freed up not just commerce but also the flow of ideas across the border with the U.S. Empowered by its huge size, the NAFTA generation promises to have an impact on Mexican politics, economics and culture as profound as the clout wielded by the older baby-boom generation in the U.S. Some 65% of Mexico's 95 million people are under age 30, and more than a third of the registered voters in last week's election were ages 18 to 29.

These young people support the opening of the Mexican economy in principle--they certainly scoop up American products like Gap jeans and McDonald's burgers. But they want NAFTA-generated wealth to be more widely distributed through the population, and they blame the government for a growing gap between the rich and poor. The opposition parties they supported have campaigned for modifications in NAFTA that would protect particularly vulnerable sectors of the economy, like agriculture and small manufacturing.

The rebellious young split their votes between the parties of the left (P.R.D.) and the right (P.A.N.)--anybody but the Establishment P.R.I. In a recent poll of Mexicans from 18 to 24, only 1% said they trust the government, making them even more restive than their U.S. counterparts, known as Generation X. "Disgust, nonconformity--it's all there," says Guillermo Martinez, 24, "youth reporter" for the national Radio Red network. "I don't see the current system surviving us."

The revolt got rolling in the last federal election, three years ago, when 52% of voters from 18 to 29 chose opposition parties--among students, the figure was 65%--placing Mexican youth in the forefront of a political movement that has spread to older age groups. This time, close to 70% of the 18-to-29-year-olds rejected the ruling party, and droves of 30-to-49-year-olds decided to join the younger folks.

As a result, Mexico seemed transformed, suddenly but peacefully, from what Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa once called "the perfect dictatorship" to a pluralistic society. Thanks in large part to Zedillo's own sweeping electoral reforms--which did much last week to end Mexico's long tradition of ballot-box fraud--the government should at last be subject to genuine checks, balances and debate. Even foreign investors, irritated in recent years by the whims of P.R.I. rule, reacted enthusiastically: the ever shaky peso strengthened the morning after the votes were counted. In an interview with TIME, Cardenas, who may have had the 1988 presidential election stolen from him by the P.R.I., insisted that "no one will again rule Mexico with a wave of his hand."

But the revolution is not complete, and the country may or may not be ready for the messy give-and-take of democratic politics. Cardenas and the P.R.D. have more experience in protesting than in governing, while the P.R.I. and its legion of local bosses cannot be counted out. The acrimony among the three major parties--the by-product of a half-century's struggle for democratization--may yield little more than governmental gridlock over the next few years, particularly since the 2000 presidential election is now wide open. Still, says Sergio Aguayo, head of the government watchdog group Civic Alliance, "we at least have the opportunity to become a new country. Before last Sunday we didn't have that."

Aguayo credits the NAFTA generation with helping create this opportunity. "It's going to be very hard to fool this generation," he says. The youthful enthusiasm for change--any change--has nonideological roots. The young are prematurely jaded by the political corruption that keeps blackening Mexico's image. And they are fed up with the country's seemingly endless economic malaise. Since childhood, they have known only spasms of prosperity interrupted by one financial disaster after another, from the 1982 foreign-debt debacle to the 1994 peso crash, which triggered Mexico's worst recession in 60 years. Pablo Raphael, 27, a novice restaurateur whose hip El Octavo Dia is a favorite Mexico City hangout, defines himself and his peers as "the crisis generation"--quite an admission, since Raphael is the nephew of former Mexican President and P.R.I. stalwart Miguel de la Madrid Hurtado.

Frustration is high because free trade has not yet fixed the accumulated damage from past economic mismanagement. So while the NAFTA generation boasts burgeoning numbers of entrepreneurs, engineers and financiers, the unemployment rate among young adults is twice as high as that of older people--a situation that sends more and more youth over the U.S. border each year in search of work. And a higher proportion (more than 40%) of people under 30 live in poverty than of any other Mexican generation. In an alcove beside one of Mexico City's busiest subway stops, a growing community of homeless and jobless young men live on old mattresses and sofas. "So many guys our age, and there's no work," says Luis, 18.

During this generation's short life-span, Mexico has become more open to outside influences than ever before--thanks in large part to NAFTA. That has given young people in particular access to different standards and values by which to measure the old order. And the young resent the inequities they see. Today's free-market rulers, like Zedillo and former President Carlos Salinas de Gortari, sport Ivy League Ph.D.s. But Guadalajara lawyer Cristina Organista, 25, saw her dream of graduate study in the U.S. canceled by the peso crisis. "My family's aspirations went from sending me abroad to simply saving our house," she says.

Organista's experience helps explain why the NAFTA generation is much more poised to break with entrenched economic and cultural traditions. Young people want realism instead of nationalist ideology in their movies and music, and surveys show they prize honesty, competence and practicality over old-fashioned lockstep thinking and knee-jerk anti-Americanism. With AIDS the third leading killer of Mexicans under age 35, they are demanding a more candid discussion in the traditionally prim media of issues like sexuality. The demands have helped spawn a renaissance in Mexican television, cinema and journalism.

Fernanda Gallego, 24, who is head of Youth Development, one of the many nonpartisan civic groups sprouting up on every university campus these days, exemplifies the new, no-nonsense mind-set. "Every time I hear public officials shout about defending our national sovereignty, I shake my head," she says, "because I know that their corruption and mistakes have compromised my country's sovereignty as much as any gringo has."

Among the most visible role models for the NAFTA generation is movie actress Salma Hayek. Most Americans know her as a rising Hollywood siren (Desperado, Fools Rush In). What they don't know is that behind her almond-eyed beauty lies an outspoken Mexican rebel. Six years ago, as a soap-opera star at Televisa, the broadcast giant that has strong ties to the P.R.I., she stunned her bosses and fans by bolting to Los Angeles. Today Hayek, 28, still delights in snubbing her country's Establishment in ways few celebrities have dared--whether by endorsing new competition against Mexico's telephone monopoly or slamming the P.R.I. "I'm proud to be Mexican, but we've been lied to a bit too often," she told TIME. "This system can sell people, especially women, a lot of dreams they never get."

Hayek has a strong influence on young Mexican women like Rosalva Orozco, 24, who passed up a cushy P.R.I. patronage job to work as a reporter at a small, independent radio station. "I look at Salma, and I see choices my mother never saw," Orozco says. "I can do something with my life in Mexico beyond the P.R.I. or Televisa or all the other stodgy things."

She isn't alone. The NAFTA generation is noted for shunning the ubiquitous bureaucracy to seek careers in the private sector or take the risk of starting a business. Diego Ordax, 21, and three young cousins this year set up a one-stop shop for computers in Mexico City. It is doing well, he says, thanks to "customers like us." Many deride the gargantuan, tuition-free National Autonomous University of Mexico as a socialist-era anachronism and scrape together scholarships to attend private colleges like the Monterrey Technological Institute. The young leave home for studio apartments before marriage--something previous Mexican generations never dreamed of doing--and they aren't afraid to take a job in a city hundreds of miles away. Says Gerardo Guerra, 27, who left his native Guadalajara, got a master's degree at Yale and holds a management post at a private cement firm in Monterrey, one of Mexico's leading industrial centers: "We just want a system that works and works fairly, and we still don't have that."

But it is far from certain that they'll replace it with something better. Although they vote, the members of the NAFTA generation are known for their reluctance to get involved in the process they whine so much about. Aside from a mass demonstration against economic policy last October, one of the few marches young Mexico City residents have joined in the past year was a protest against a change of music format at one of their favorite radio stations.

Still there are grounds for optimism. The young, uncorrupted public attorneys (average age: 29) who handle consumer-complaint and civil-damages cases have turned the federal small-claims court into the only branch of Mexico's judicial system that functions honestly and efficiently. "Here," says public attorney Bertha Arteaga, 28, "I feel that I'm actually righting wrongs." And novice politicians like Heriberto Ramirez, 27, a P.A.N. member who last year made headlines when he refused to let local P.R.I. bosses annul his mayoral victory in the small town of Huejotzingo, are convincing their peers that running for office is as cool as heading for Hollywood.

Official Mexico knows it must catch the new wave. Zedillo recently appointed Luis Sanchez Gomez to be director of a new government-sponsored group called Causa Joven, (Youth Cause) effectively making him the President's adviser on issues involving the young. And last Sunday the federal election commission set up mock voting booths for children around Mexico City. Throughout the day, radio stations broadcast cute interviews with the preteen electorate. But the implication is serious: for the foreseeable future, anyway, the voices that count in Mexico are those of the pups, not the old dogs.

--Reported by Paul Sherman/Mexico City and Daniel Dombey/Monterrey

With reporting by PAUL SHERMAN/MEXICO CITY AND DANIEL DOMBEY/MONTERREY