The murder of the popular mayor of Uruapan, Carlos Manzo, generated a wave of expansion that Claudia Sheinbaum’s government had not foreseen. In a country where violence has taken over part of the territory, the brutal assassination of the Michoacan councilor triggered social unrest that seemed controllable for an executive that presented a successful security strategy. The failure to prevent crime undermined the triumphalist discourse of the presidential cabinet and served as fertile ground for the mobilizations that on Saturday brought together around 17,000 people in the Mexican capital with very different agendas and one clear slogan: the rejection of the Morena government. The rest – who is behind it, what ideas support them and what the specific demands are – is a mystery that forces the president to confront a new adversary who has no face but has many interests that resonate with the regional far right.
Sheinbaum, struggling with the battle against a classic and fossilized political opposition, which he addresses without much effort in his morning conferences, now finds himself facing a movement without a defined form or a leader to turn to. The protests, initially attributed to Generation Z, which groups together those under 28, showed that the theme was much more varied than expected and included young, old and very old: some linked to the parties of the other benches and others directly with speeches that fit into the Trumpist currents that cross the continent. Thus, the legitimate requests for a safer country with less corruption coexist in the magma with those outside the Mexican political spectrum, little given to extremism, but today permeable to regional dynamics, who look with suspicion at what happens in the North American country. No phenomenon is just local anymore.
US President Donald Trump said on Monday that he saw what happened in Mexico City over the weekend. “There are some serious problems over there,” he let out. “The Mexican government is on the verge of collapse,” also amplified Alex Jones, the well-known far-right radio host and conspiracy theorist, who has more than four million followers on the social network X, key to the appeal.
The movement’s confusing agenda means that all critical sectors try to attract it, and it is no coincidence: this is the first initiative that manages to be inserted into the political agenda of a government that controls all the state’s resources and is guided by a policy with overwhelming popularity ratings. Among the faces who have tried to overcome this gap is the Mexican entrepreneur Ricardo Salinas Pliego, with whom the government has had a long political and judicial dispute over the debts he has had with the treasury for more than a decade.
The president accused him of instigating the demonstrations and financing the anti-Morenist campaign. The tycoon, for his part, reciprocated the accusations and jumped on the train of social discontent. “I regret that the head of the National Palace office seeks to delegitimize and minimize critical citizens. It is shameful to see her invent plots to discredit young people,” wrote the fifth richest man in Mexico, who the previous week met the president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, whom he praises as a reference for his potential presidency.
In the orbit of the self-proclaimed marches of Generation Z there is also the trace of other faces of the Mexican right, such as Lilly Téllez or Xóchitl Gálvez, who bring back to the present day the Pink Tide, the movement that brought together the opposition against the then president Andrés Manuel López Obrador. The complaints of “narcogovernment”, the pejorative form with which the PAN and PRI groups refer to the Morenoist executive, anchor at least one foot of the mobilizations in the language and agenda of the opposition, which is committed to recovering part of the lost ground.
“They’re the same faces as always,” Claudia Sheinbaum said Monday in an attempt to define and discredit an opponent who seems more elusive than usual. They are some of the usual faces, but not only. The investigation presented by the Government itself highlighted the participation of bot AND influencers who add their own flavor to a context crossed by both national controversies and the international context.
The emblem of the summoners, the skull with the straw hat from the anime series One pieceillustrates the complexity of a movement that is inspired by others but is not their equivalent. That same symbol has been used in other places in the world, such as Nepal, where the efforts of the young generations managed to overthrow the government that had previously decreed a social network blackout. Despite the aesthetic replication, Mexico is not Nepal. The president of the North American country enjoys great social support, even among the youngest, one of the social groups to which she pays most attention together with the older ones.
The enormous confusion has become the only thing clear in some mobilizations in which the original meaning, the unrest over the murder of the mayor of Michoacan, was diluted and obscured by the barrage of images showing the violence with which the day ended, which left 120 injured: 100 police officers and 20 civilians. The powerful images, devoid of context, travel the world in service of different agendas that fill the void left by protests without a clear message or with too many messages claiming their place within the mix. The president, who still doesn’t have another pair of eyes to turn to, must now answer to all of them.
