Young, Restless Mexican Voters Drive Election

They are the NAFTA generation, a tidal wave of people in their 20s who grew up in a dramatically changed Mexico. They are the country’s best and brightest, weaned on TV and tacos, a generation that traded cornfields for concrete. They are, in some ways, the success story of the modern Mexico created under the long-ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party.

And on July 2, they are likely to try to kick the party out.

“The party has lost credibility,” says Arturo Villafuerte, a 20-year-old engineering student, one of millions of young people who plan to vote for the opposition in the upcoming presidential election.

Poll after poll indicates that this historic election will split Mexico along demographic lines--urban versus rural, educated versus uneducated. But the most striking numbers may be those showing a majority of young voters who reject the PRI, which has held the presidency for 71 years.

The youth vote is crucial in what appears to be the fairest and most hotly contested presidential race in modern Mexican history. Nearly a third of Mexican voters are in their 20s, and almost half are younger than 35.

But the significance of the youth vote goes beyond the election. It reflects the collapse of faith in a political system that, although authoritarian and often corrupt, long delivered economic progress. And the youth vote points to the emergence of better-educated citizens--people who can’t be controlled through fear or the party organizations that once reached into every neighborhood and factory.

Young people “are less afraid. . . . They simply have fewer ties” to the PRI system, says Daniel Lund, president of the Mexican-based polling firm MUND. “They’re the first group really to break with the PRI’s historic hegemony.”

Young Mexicans grew up with the North American Free Trade Agreement, the centerpiece of a sweeping effort by recent PRI presidents to modernize the economy and shake off the country’s traditional isolationism. But it is precisely their economic situation that has prompted many young people to reject the PRI. In fact, in Mexico they are rarely called the NAFTA generation. Instead, they are described as the “generation of crisis.”

Villafuerte is a case in point.

“We live from day to day. We can’t hope for more,” the strapping, jet-haired student says as he relaxes after wrestling practice at the public Autonomous University of Nuevo Leon in Monterrey.

For decades, Villafuerte’s family had felt blessed by the PRI. His father had joined the government-owned railroad and its powerful, PRI-affiliated union at age 14. It turned out to be a ticket to middle-class prosperity in the 1954-70 boom, when the economy grew an average 7% a year.

Collapse of Peso, Collapse of Dream

But then came the era of crises, and the family’s dream collapsed. A 1995 peso devaluation caused interest rates to balloon--a nightmare for Mexicans, who generally hold adjustable-rate mortgages. Villafuerte’s family had to sell its home in El Contry, a Monterrey suburb of neat flower beds and satellite dishes, and move to a cramped house across town. Two years later, his father lost his job when the railroad was privatized. He now works as a city park manager.

“We lost everything,” Villafuerte says.

The Villafuerte story is repeated in millions of homes around Mexico, and young people have especially felt the impact. Their parents remember a PRI that could deliver schools, hospitals and economic growth. Young people, in contrast, have lived under a government that has produced economic upheavals with numbing frequency, in 1976, 1982, 1987 and 1995.

“The young person who is 20, 22 or 24 was born--and lived all his life--in a country in crisis. Young people don’t have very positive expectations for their lives,” says Guillermo Valdes, a political analyst at Grupo de Economistas y Asociadas, or GEA, a Mexico City-based think tank.

Five years after the last crisis, Mexico’s economy is now growing briskly. But that’s small comfort for the vast baby-boom generation. One in four Mexicans entering the labor force since 1994 hasn’t been able to find a formal job, as measured by membership in the social security system, GEA calculates.

And the NAFTA-linked economy that thrives in places such as Monterrey can’t cope with the flood of job-seekers. For all their buoyancy, the modern, export-oriented businesses create just 10% of Mexico’s jobs, Valdes estimates. The rest are generated by the Old Economy, which is still emerging from decades of government protection. That economy has grown just 0.9% annually in the past 15 years, GEA estimates, and pays miserly salaries.

With such prospects, it is little surprise that young people favor the opposition. Among the general population, polls show the PRI’s presidential candidate, Francisco Labastida, just ahead of Vicente Fox, of the center-right National Action Party, or PAN. But among people younger than 30, the charismatic Fox wins, with a double-digit lead in many polls. The PRI is about as popular as a parent at a keg party.

“I think it’s a protest vote,” Valdes says. “Many people aren’t PAN supporters, but they see in Fox the possibility of change.”

It’s the economy, estupido. But it’s also much more.

Young people symbolize the dramatic change in what it means to be Mexican. In only a few decades, a rural and uneducated population has been transformed into a better-schooled public living in an industrial economy.

Young people are the fruit of this transformation. But many feel that the party has not kept up with their aspirations.

Consider Gloria Ruiz, 20, a Zapotec Indian with delicate features and a mane of dark hair. She sells colorful woven rugs in an outdoor market in Teotitlan del Valle, a village outside the impoverished southern city of Oaxaca.

Ruiz’s parents are illiterate and barely speak Spanish. Ruiz, in contrast, graduated from her village’s secondary school at 16 and avidly watches national news programs.

It was a PRI government that built the local secondary school in 1980 and brought electricity to the village in 1968. But Ruiz isn’t impressed by this ancient history. She wants the party out.

“They’re very corrupt,” she declares, referring to constant scandals surrounding the party in recent years. “I see on television what the PRI has done.”

Educational Gains Lead to New Attitudes

Older people in this village of artisans and farmers continue to vote for the party out of habit, she says. But Ruiz and her friends are debating whether to cast their ballots for Fox or for Cuauhtemoc Cardenas of the center-left Democratic Revolution Party, or PRD, who trails a distant third in the polls.

“We think more about things,” she concludes.

Ruiz’s experience reflects Mexico’s great leap forward in education. The average Mexican still has far less schooling than a U.S. student. But what a difference a generation makes: In 1970, only 8% of Mexican women between the ages of 15 and 24 had finished secondary school, the equivalent of ninth grade. By 1997, the most recent statistic, the figure had increased fourfold, to 32%. The percentage of young Mexican men completing secondary school has shot from 14% to 37%.

“It’s a generation that, in some cases, has doubled the level of schooling of their parents,” says Jose Antonio Perez Islas, director of research at the government-run Mexican Youth Institute. “We are harvesting what, in the 1970s, was called the ‘massification’ of education.”

The increased schooling, and access to freer media, has fed young people’s interest in elections. Polls indicate that voters in their 20s are as likely as older Mexicans to cast ballots. That is a big change from the past, when many young people didn’t bother, assuming that the PRI would win through its monolithic control, its popularity or outright fraud.

Before the democratic changes of recent years, “elections had no meaning in Mexico--because there were no [opposition] parties. Now there are parties, and young people are very aware,” says Ricardo Becerra, a top official at Mexico’s election organizer, the Federal Electoral Institute.

Education isn’t the only factor explaining young Mexicans’ greater political sophistication. Young people are now mostly city slickers. As recently as 1970, a majority of young Mexicans, nearly 60%, lived in rural areas. But because of a vast migration of job-seekers, 3 out of 4 Mexicans now live in cities.

That shift has a profound impact on how young people see their country.

Ricardo Gonzalez, for example, grew up in a hardscrabble corn-farming village near the central city of Toluca. Even today, the hamlet is an hour’s walk from a paved road.

When he was 15, Gonzalez moved to Mexico City to earn money for himself and his 12 brothers and sisters. He hawks calculators, stereo equipment and umbrellas from a stand near a bustling subway stop outside Chapultepec Park.

“When I was a kid, it was pure PRI, PRI, PRI,” recalls Gonzalez, 22.

In his village, he says, the party was synonymous with the Mexican government. The PRI’s colors were those of the Mexican flag, and the PRI embodied the ideals of the 1910-17 Mexican Revolution. Even if locals had heard of one of the struggling opposition parties, they were afraid to vote for it.

“They thought the government would take away the running water, or not give them food packages,” a traditional PRI electoral giveaway, he explains.

But living in the big city, Gonzalez feels no such fear. Nor does he feel loyalty to any party. In 1997, he voted for the PRD, which swept the Mexico City elections. In next month’s presidential race, he plans to vote for the PAN’s Fox.

“You have to focus on what the candidates say,” Gonzalez says. “Fox has new ideas. It’s a party we didn’t know before. We only knew the PRI.”

Has the PRI lost the Mexican youth vote? Esteban Moctezuma, head of the Labastida campaign, is blunt. “We never had it,” he says.

Many young people used to abstain, he notes. “Youth have become politicized in an important way,” he adds. “Because of the role of television and radio in Mexican politics, young people now participate more.”

But the younger voters are, the less they credit the party for Mexico’s modernization, Moctezuma acknowledges.

The PRI takes heart from the fact that Fox’s lead among young people has shrunk somewhat lately. Labastida, the PRI candidate, is hoping to attract youth with proposals for scholarships and greater facilities to build homes, a priority for newlyweds. And the party can count on its vast networks in neighborhoods, factories and the large informal sector to pull in some of the youth vote.

But the PRI seems unsure how to appeal to young people. The PAN, in contrast, features young people in top jobs and is aggressively courting voters in their 20s and 30s.

The Fox campaign has sponsored concerts with the popular rock band Tri; targeted young people with leaflets and direct mail; and pledged better educational and job opportunities for youth. Fox, an irreverent former rancher and Coca-Cola executive, travels the country in jeans and cowboy boots--in sharp contrast to the traditional stiff, dark-suited PRI pol.

At a recent youth rally in Mexico City, Fox pledged to continue to consult with young people if he wins.

“I propose that you pass from being the ‘generation of crisis’ to the ‘generation of change,’ ” cried the candidate, to cheers from young people waving his trademark foam-rubber V-for-victory signs.

The country’s democratic transition, he added, was in their hands.

“In the future, historians will say, ‘It was this generation of young people who were responsible for the change of power in our country.’ ”