Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum reiterated Monday her rejection of the anti-government march that brought together about 17,000 people on Saturday under the premise of belonging to the youngest Generation Z, a point that ultimately proved moot. “Many adults, few young people,” summarized the president in her morning conference, in which she disavowed protests that she considered inauthentic and which ended with strong clashes with the police in the capital’s Zócalo square. As a result, there were 120 injured, 100 of them officers and 20 arrested. “Attacks against police are unacceptable. If there is any abuse by a police officer, we let the city police themselves investigate, but what happened with this violence is inexplicable,” Sheinbaum said.
The Executive had already questioned the origin of this march the previous week, a few days before it took place. They then presented an Infodemia investigation which attributed it to an international disinformation campaign valued at more than 90 million pesos and denounced the participation of robot, influencersopposition politicians and the Mexican entrepreneur Ricardo Salinas Pliego, with whom the president had moments of discussion. The tycoon received the final blow last Thursday, after the Supreme Court rejected his protections and ordered him to pay his debts to the treasury, which already amount to almost 50,000 million pesos and whose payment has been postponed for more than a decade.
This only increased the tension between the millionaire and the president’s cabinet. “Salinas Pliego promoted the mobilization, wrote against us and promoted, incited the mobilization. The televisions (of which he owns) generated the idea that the government was repressive”, launched this morning Sheinbaum, who believes that those who really called for the protests were those of the pink tide, the movement born in 2022 as opposition to the then president Andrés Manuel López Obrador. “They are the same faces as always,” he said: “The difference is that then they managed to fill the Zócalo square.”
The accusations also point to the international coordination of the right. The official X account of the social movement, which has the anime symbol as its flag One pieceshared several messages from Venezuelan opposition leaders María Corina Machado and Edmundo González. This is the only explicit trace in a profile that has just 25 publications in total. “If they think that by connecting with right-wing organizations they will stop the transformation, they are wrong,” said Sheinbaum, who said it is important to know “who they are, where they come from and whether they are paid.”
Despite the strong criticism leveled at the march, the president assured that its refusal was not due to a protest by opponents but to the use of violence, which according to her was deliberately directed against the police, against whom they accused after they managed to force the fences of the National Palace. “We must not fall into provocation, it is a call to carry out peaceful mobilisations”, he said, specifying that he will investigate together with the Mexico City Prosecutor’s Office the groups behind all this.
