MEXICO CITY -- During The Cold War, when Latin American leftists gravitated toward communism, it was easy for them to identify their enemies: local military dictators or U.S. corporate imperialists. They had an economic system to demonize -- capitalism -- and an alternative -- socialism -- to put in its place. And they had a playbook, written by Marx and Lenin and Fidel Castro, to guide their thinking and strategy.

But times are different. There still is an activist left in Latin America, and it still does battle with inequality and poverty and undemocratic government. But the recent nine-month strike at Mexico's national university revealed a new kind of leftist movement, one whose new foe is the global economy. The strike, which devastated Mexico's most important university and divided its society, gave a preview of the vexing challenges the new leftists may pose to the region's young democracies.

The striking students at the National Autonomous University of Mexico declared that their fundamental purpose was to oppose the worldwide spread of free trade and the lean government, pro-business policies that promote it. But the conundrum for their movement was that the new adversary -- globalism -- was faceless. It was a product of commerce and technology more than of government or guns. It was emerging everywhere at once, with no clear alternative in sight.

If the students were confronting anarchic change, they met it with an anarchic movement. The strike steering committee took over the campus, using barbed wire to keep other students out. They elected no outstanding leaders and took their decisions in chaotic all-night assemblies. Over the months the university conceded demand after demand, but the strikers only upped the ante. The strikers confounded everyone who dealt with them, from conciliatory university administrators to conservative intellectuals to lifelong leftists. In the end, after the federal police marched in on Feb. 6 and hauled the remaining strikers away to jail, it seemed that the strike had been an end in itself, a form of complete resistance against social and economic changes they could never hope to control.

The new leftism probably emerged in Mexico because this country has led the charge in Latin America into the globalized age. Since signing on to the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement, Mexico has seen its international trade explode, its business middle class rise like a phoenix and the country's northern half become an industrial export powerhouse.

But the student strikers were also a product of globalization -- of two decades of policies that laid the foundations for Mexico's recent leap into the global economy. The government has stimulated growth by restraining inflation, mainly by depressing workers' wages. Official figures show that the minimum wage today buys 48 percent of what it did in 1982. So, while export enclaves have thrived, workers elsewhere have been drawn into a spiral of downward mobility.

The national university, with 275,000 students, was once Mexico's main avenue of social ascent. Today many students graduate wondering if they will be able to earn a living. Alfonso Zarate, a political analyst, said the strike revealed how much Mexico has become "a nation of winners and losers."

The strike was not radical at the start. It began last April, as a protest against a plan to charge tuition -- about $150 a year -- for the first time in decades. The university president, Francisco Barnes de Castro, cast the plan as an effort to get resources for a critically underfunded institution. But in today's increasingly impoverished urban working class, even small tuition costs can break a family's budget.

The new left gave the students a rationale for rejecting the plan. It was a vast plot by the business-friendly government to impose private sector logic on a public university, and deny working class youth the education they deserved.

Over time, a faction of strikers, dubbed "ultras" by their companions because of their intolerance for dissent, gained the upper hand through nasty purges. A central demand was for face-to-face negotiations with the university president. But the movement, once it was in the hands of the ultras, did not really negotiate. The strikers never moved an inch from their original demands. Administrators dropped the tuition plan, agreed to direct talks, agreed even to hold a congress to reform how the whole university was organized.

But the strikers, true to their anarchist core and lacking vision of an alternative, continued to resist.

"Rebellion is our only leader, our one true cause and the reason for everything we do," read one banner.

Alejandro Alvarez, an economics professor, at first supported the strike but fell out with the ultras. "They made distrust into a form of politics," he said.

In the end, the strike divided Mexico, which is in the midst of a delicate move from authoritarianism to democracy. While the general public applauded the police action to end the strike, many intellectuals, journalists and democratic leaders saw it as an extension of the bloody repression with which the student movement of 1968 was broken. The result was some of the most vigorous street protests Mexico has seen in years.

The damage to education and the division among Mexicans could serve as a cautionary tale to anyone who thinks the changes that globalization brings will only reinforce democratic institutions.

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