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.