Mexico City Protests a Sign of Mounting Unrest : Dissent: Growing numbers are showing no confidence that their voices will be heard.

On yet another eye-tingling, smoggy Friday in the continent’s largest city, traffic has come to a screaming halt for blocks on Paseo de la Reforma, the main boulevard. Horns honk and pedestrians gawk as 500 or so chanting medical workers troop by with banners denouncing their contract offer from the government health care agency.

This protest is only the latest in a series of marches that have become a daily occurrence in this chaotic city. Farmers from Zacatecas in the north, Indian rights groups from Oaxaca in the south, oil workers from Tabasco on the Gulf Coast--all have converged on the capital’s crowded streets and plazas, demanding solutions to their problems.

Archconservative television announcers here belittle the protesters for tying up traffic and contributing to pollution. Which they do. Administration officials laud them as examples of democratic free expression. Which they may be.

But increasingly critics see the street demonstrations as symptoms of a broader problem: The government and political institutions set up to resolve Mexicans’ complaints are breaking down. Growing numbers of people are showing that they have no confidence that their voices will be heard through official channels.

“The Mexican political system is no longer functioning,” asserted Rodolfo Gonzalez Guevara, a top campaign official for opposition presidential candidate Cuauhtemoc Cardenas.

If he and other critics are right, the government has a serious problem. And with presidential elections coming up next year, so does the Institutional Revolutionary Party, known by its Spanish acronym, PRI.

Traditionally, the PRI has won the loyalty of its supporters by intervening with the government for them, in a style similar to what Americans know as ward politics. Divisions of the party are set up to serve certain groups--one section for workers, one for farmers and one for everyone else. When this system was created six decades ago, it seemed to take care of the needs of most Mexicans.

Since then, the government also has set up myriad attorneys general to tend to citizen complaints on issues from consumer gripes to human rights abuses.

But many Mexicans find their interests no longer served by PRI or government institutions. The disaffected now include unions, farm organizations and civic groups unaffiliated with the official party; they all have gained prominence in the past decade. The growing urban middle class also feels underrepresented in the PRI.

In frustration, notoriously nationalistic Mexicans have even begun to turn to the U.S. government to get a hearing for their complaints. They know that their government desperately wants to win approval for the North American Free Trade Agreement, which would gradually remove trade barriers among the United States, Mexico and Canada.

That knowledge has encouraged citizens groups, who feel ignored in the official channels here, to take their concerns north.

For example, worries that lax Mexican anti-pollution enforcement will encourage U.S. companies to move south under NAFTA have focused attention on Mexican environmental policy.

“Our government does not listen to us inside the country, but the administration is concerned about its environmental image in the United States,” said Homero Ardjis, president of the Group of 100, an organization that has publicized Mexican environmental issues in the United States.

The group has formed close ties with its U.S. counterparts and sent out regular updates this summer when a tanker loaded with sulfuric acid got loose on the Pacific Coast, endangering ocean life.

The reports were especially critical of Mexican government information, which the Group of 100 said was incomplete and late. The group has cited the tanker incident to raise questions about how cooperative the Mexican government would be about sharing environmental information with its NAFTA partners.

Workers whose unions are not affiliated with the PRI have also tried to play on concerns that the trade treaty, scheduled to be considered by the U.S. Congress this month, will attract U.S. companies to Mexico to exploit cheap labor.

Desperate to draw attention to their plight, teachers locked out of a private school wrote a letter to President Clinton saying: “The teachers and administrative and maintenance personnel . . . who suddenly find ourselves driven from our workplace are fully aware that Mexican labor laws are designed to protect our jobs. However, we also realize that big-business interests in both the United States and Mexico are trying to get around the laws that protect us.”

Teachers said they have taken their case to the Mexican labor relations board but that their hearing before that panel had been postponed for months. They thought that connecting their problem to NAFTA might help get results.

Groups opposed to NAFTA have been even more direct about going outside the country, because they believe there is no place for them to be heard in the Mexican system.

“Unfortunately, the Mexican government has transferred the decision to the United States,” said Berta Lujan, a union activist who has led the Mexican opposition to NAFTA as part of the Free Trade Response Network.

So, Mexicans opposed to NAFTA have lobbied the U.S. Congress rather than their own legislators.

In Mexico, meanwhile, NAFTA opponents have burned President Carlos Salinas de Gortari in effigy, a shocking exhibit of disrespect by Mexican standards. They also have joined the streams of protesters who march through the streets at peak traffic hours and set up tent cities on prominent public plazas in an attempt to embarrass the government into listening to their problems.

“We recognize that some of these cases are the result of government carelessness,” said Mario Miguel Carrillo Huerta, a city official whose department handles citizen complaints. “People figure, ‘Rather than wait my turn, I will go out in the street and demand attention.’ ”

That explanation angers Ricardo Barco, secretary general of the Independent Proletarian Movement, known by the initials MPI, which has organized more than 20 marches this year for various causes. “It isn’t fun to go out in the rain and cold to march, but it is one way to pressure the authorities to solve problems that they should solve without any pressure at all,” he said.

His group has won notoriety here not only for its marches but also for blocking entrances to the city until their demands are met. That tactic has been devastatingly effective, officials admit. “It is not that our policy is to respond to blockades,” Carrillo Huerta said. “But we have to respond to the risks they create for the rest of the city.”

Barco defends his organization’s blockades, saying they are the only alternative left to angry citizens.

“When we try to solve our problems by going to government offices, we have to stand in line and keep going back and going back,” he said. “It is increasingly clear that the government understands only one language: the language of pressure.”

Carrillo Huerta responded that many of the problems are solved in their places of origin--simply not to the satisfaction of protesters, who then take their complaints to the capital in hope of a different solution.

“Most problems are solved through normal channels,” he said. “Most of the marches are simply people asking for interviews.”

The problem, said campaign official Gonzalez Guevara, is that marches are one of the few means of effective expression in Mexico.

“Unless there is real political reform,” he predicted, “the protests will increase and instability will grow. That could lead to an instability whose consequences are difficult to foresee.”