By JANE BUSSEY

 PUEBLA, Mexico -- Ana Teresa Aranda de Orea, mother of six and opposition
 stalwart, has campaigned across the dusty sierras of central Mexico, been
 beaten and kicked by riot police and faced down officials who were telling welfare
 recipients whom to vote for.

 ``You cannot believe how tough politics is here,'' said Aranda, who narrowly lost
 her run for senator on the conservative National Action Party (PAN) ticket in
 Puebla, a state east of Mexico City still controlled by the 71-year-old Institutional
 Revolutionary Party, the PRI.

 But last Sunday night, the 46-year-old Aranda finally witnessed what she had
 never quite believed could happen: a peaceful vote sweeping an entrenched and
 discredited ruling party out of power. The PAN's Vicente Fox, a 58-year-old
 rancher and former Coca-Cola Co. executive, had beaten PRI candidate Francisco
 Labastida for Mexico's presidency.

 ``It was a long-held dream,'' said Aranda. ``At that moment, truly, I started to cry.
 Just thinking that the injustices, the arrogance, the corruption and the
 tremendous marginalization of the poor that has been part of our lives for so long
 was ending and we were turning a new page so we could live a new life in this
 country!''

 Aranda's individual struggle through decades of civic and political activism
 represents one set of footsteps in the country's long march toward democracy.

 Tens of thousands of Mexicans, in the barrios and in the boardrooms, in rallies
 and in hunger strikes, from the political right to the left, fought to end the grip of a
 party that had outworn its welcome after seven decades in power.

 The change didn't happen overnight. The drama and turbulence of Mexican history
 had been accelerating in the past 20 or so years, an era marked by brazen
 electoral fraud, opposition killings, political assassinations, a regional insurgency
 and constant skirmishes at the ballot box.

 Throughout it all, the PRI desperately sought to maintain its grip on power. But in
 the end it was obliged to yield to the forces of democratic change that had been
 growing and gaining confidence despite -- or perhaps because of -- repeated
 defeats.

 Now that it has happened, historians, pundits and political commentators cite a
 number of significant milestones on the road to the historic election of last
 Sunday:

   The 1985 Mexico City earthquake, which created a level of grass-roots activism
 that began as a social self-help movement but quickly became political.

   The 1982 nationalization of banks that shocked the nation, spelled the end of
 prosperity and thwarted middle-class aspirations for a large segment of a
 population that had believed itself until then to be upwardly mobile.

   The 1968 student uprising that ended in bloodshed in the Mexico City
 neighborhood known as Tlateloco, forever tarnishing the PRI's image as protector
 of the people. Hundreds of students and supporters were killed when soldiers and
 civilian agents opened fire on a mass anti-government rally. Luís Echeverría, the
 PRI government minister who ordered the operation, went on to become Mexico's
 next president.

 The result of these and many other similar events led Mexicans to conclude that
 their system was oppressive.

 But until the very end, it was not a struggle that received much international
 support or attention. People who fought Latin American dictatorships were
 considered heroes, notes Carlo Arce, a PAN legislator from Guanajuato. But not
 anyone fighting Mexico's ``perfect dictatorship'' -- a term coined by Peruvian writer
 Mario Vargas Llosa, who visited Mexico City in 1989, to refer to the PRI -- which
 maintained the appearance, but not the substance, of democracy by combining
 paternalism with selective repression and corruption.

 REFORMERS FRUSTRATED

 The frustration of the political reformers and their evident lack of support outside of
 Mexico culminated on the night of July 6, 1988, when Carlos Salinas de Gortari
 brazenly declared victory in the presidential race over PRI breakaway challenger
 Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas -- before any results were in.

 The absence of a proof of victory did not seem to matter to the heads of state who
 sent their congratulatory telegrams to Salinas immediately. Among them: former
 U.S. President Ronald Reagan and Cuban President Fidel Castro

 Abroad, the PRI was seen not only as a stabilizing factor, especially by
 Washington, but until 1988 most Mexicans seemed content with their one-party
 system, whatever its excesses. Indeed, PRI governments from the 1940s onward
 were able to deliver 6 percent annual growth rates, which greatly improved the
 welfare of Mexicans.

 Historian Enrique Krauze traces the roots of the July 2 election back 20 years --
 when former President José López Portillo promised Mexicans a future of
 abundance, based on Mexico's vast oil reserves, but instead proceeded to
 nationalize the banks and eventually bequeathed the nation its $100 billion debt
 crisis.

 The new ``technocrats,'' U.S.-educated economists such as Salinas and
 President Ernesto Zedillo, were never able to restore the economic growth rates of
 the 1960s despite privatizing state-run companies, opening the borders or signing
 the North American Free Trade Agreement with Canada and the United States.

 DEADLY EARTHQUAKE

 Poet and environmental activist Homero Aridjis traces the beginnings of change to
 Sept. 19, 1985, when an earthquake measuring 8.5 on the Richter scale killed at
 least 12,000 people and leveled parts of the capital.

 While former President Miguel de la Madrid stayed out of the public eye for two
 days, his government paralyzed, ordinary Mexicans rushed to rescue victims
 trapped in ruined buildings, set up soup kitchens for the homeless and realized
 they could act alone.

 ``The 1985 earthquake was a social and political earthquake. It shook the system
 to the roots and awakened the opposition forces in grass-roots society,'' Aridjis
 said.

 The de la Madrid administration witnessed the rise of the PAN, an elite party
 founded in conservative Catholics in 1939 that had never built a popular base.
 When PAN candidates began winning mayors' races in the northern state of
 Chihuahua, the PRI/government began resorting to fraud.

 In the 1986 gubernatorial race in that state, PRI operatives stuffed ballot boxes,
 robbed others or simply tampered with the vote count. Feeling cheated, PAN
 activist Luís H. Alvarez of Chihuahua staged a hunger strike to demand the vote
 be respected. The national attention he drew indicated that more and more
 Mexicans were tiring of a system that tolerated electoral fraud.

 Alvarez's hunger strike led to another significant event in the evolution of the
 political system: Manuel Clouthier, one of the nation's leading businessmen,
 decided to join the PAN and turn it into a true national organization with
 grass-roots support.

 Meanwhile, inside the PRI, Cárdenas was leading an internal rebellion to try to
 wrest control from the technocrats. The 1988 presidential elections were a
 watershed in this struggle as Cárdenas broke from the PRI and ran against
 Salinas, supported by grass-roots groups that grew up after the earthquake.

 Clouthier, the first PAN candidate to have the popular touch, also threw his hat in
 the ring. Although he was killed in a car crash in 1989, Clouthier further
 contributed to the party's eventual success by recruiting new leaders such as Fox
 and Aranda.

 TAINTED VICTORY

 When, on the night of July 6, 1988, Salinas declared a victory that would always
 be questioned -- since 40 percent of the ballot results were never made public, as
 required by law -- he also proved prophetic in declaring the end of the one-party
 state.

 Indeed, his tainted victory changed everything.

 After the 1988 elections, Mexicans read news reports saying that ballots were
 burned, buried or dumped by the side of the road. Even those made cynical by
 decades of PRI domination were outraged, and the opposition became more
 determined than ever.

 Its members concluded that the only way to win was to reform electoral laws so
 that an autonomous agency and not the government was in charge of the process
 -- and to station poll watchers everywhere to stop electoral fraud before it
 happened.

 Refusing to be co-opted by the system, the defeated Cárdenas formed his own
 party, the Party of the Democratic Revolution, which had to wage its own fight
 against repression as more than 300 activists were killed in the early 1990s,
 according to party officials.

 OPPOSITION RISES

 Elsewhere in Mexico, other opposition leaders sprang up to defy the PRI and
 demand that the government live up to its claim of democracy.

 In the rugged central state of San Luís Potosí, respected doctor Salvador Nava
 ran for governor in opposition to the PRI in a tainted 1990 election. His struggle to
 have the government recognize his victory, including a March for Dignity from the
 state capital to Mexico City, finally coalesced a grass-roots movement of the right
 and left to work for democratic elections.

 ``I have been at this for nine years,'' said Rogelio Gómez-Hermosillo, coordinator
 of the Civic Alliance, a non-government organization that monitors elections. ``I
 am tired.''

 Fox also began his struggle, running for governor in the central state of
 Guanajuato in 1991, finally winning in 1994 as the PRI tacitly acknowledged that,
 in a true democracy, it could not win every election every time, as it had for
 decades.

 Fox immediately began planning his run for the top office in 2000.

 GRASS-ROOTS LEADERS

 Meanwhile, grass-roots leaders like Aranda were sprouting up all over the country.
 She joined a women's civic group at age 17. Her political efforts began in 1989
 when she joined the PAN and tried to run for mayor of Puebla.

 The PRI-dominated legislature refused to grant her legal residency, even though
 she had lived in the state the required five years.

 ``They said I was not `dignified, nor relevant nor respectable,''' Aranda recalled.
 But she was not to be stopped. A communications specialist by training, she
 took her husband and six children, set up a tent on the square in front of the state
 legislature and camped out in protest.

 After nine days, officials relented, she said, because they did not want to
 embarrass Salinas, who was traveling to Washington to receive one of many
 awards for statesmanship.

 For the last decade, Aranda has been trying to force the hand of PRI government
 both to provide services for citizens and to hold clean elections.

 For several years, she said, she spent hours every day standing in front of tax
 offices, holding a bullhorn and urging the poor to ask for fairer property taxes. She
 and others painted 3,000 potholes blue to force the local PRI government to repair
 the streets, a kind of civic activism that would once have been considered totally
 alien to the Mexican political system.

 UNSUNG HEROES

 Across the nation, there are thousands of unsung heroes like Aranda.

 Myriam Arabian, 40, who is the coordinator of the Citizen's Coordinating Council
 in Puebla, another grass-roots group, had worked since 1992 to bring about last
 Sunday's stunning defeat of the PRI.

 ``It was a myth that died, the myth of power, because the PRI was nothing more
 than a group of men who all protected the same interests,'' Arabian said.

 Last Sunday's vote came as such a surprise because many Mexicans were still
 afraid of telling pollsters how they planned to vote.

 But they believed the changes in election rules and the advertising campaign that
 said the vote was secret and free. Under PRI pressure, they publicly promised to
 vote for the PRI -- then went to the ballot box and voted their conscience.

 PAN activist Alvarez said in an interview after the elections in 1988 that many
 people would have to die to bring democracy to Mexico. But in the end, the PRI's
 demise, the product of years of struggle by its opponents, came with a whimper
 instead of a bang, and the prediction of the man who staged the first important
 hunger strike did not come true.

 Last Sunday, a smiling Alvarez sat alongside PAN leaders to celebrate the victory
 of its presidential candidate in the freest election in Mexican history.