Claudia Sheinbaum’s government succeeded in extremis in October to stop the blocks with which the campaigns put pressure on the Executive, but the luck was not repeated a month later. The farmers are making an unprecedented show of strength and on Tuesday left the negotiating table with the Ministry of the Interior, which has failed to channel the demands of a sector strengthened thanks to its internal coordination and its cohesion with the transporters. Road closures will continue until there is a concrete solution to address or alleviate farmers’ main concerns: insecurity on the routes and the low prices at which they have to sell their products. Establishing a dialogue table will not be enough to calm the protests that have intermittently held the Government’s hand for a month.
The agreement that managed to temporarily stop blockages in the country’s main arteries included the approval of government support of 950 pesos per ton of corn, a measure that only affected about 90,000 producers in the Bajío and which did not meet the expectations of rural representatives. The subsidy also provided for a maximum of 200 tonnes per farmer. The farmers demand a payment of around 7,200 pesos (about 390 dollars, at current exchange rates) for each ton of product, almost 1,200 pesos more than what the Executive offers them. Even though the pact put an end to the mobilizations, the truce lasted only a short time. Farmers have returned to the charge and this Monday closed about 40 roads in 22 states, 17 entities according to the final count.
Every attempt at containment by the presidential cabinet has been buried by the firmness with which the sector is facing a dialogue that does not end up bearing fruit and which demonstrates the strength that the sector has acquired, in full escalation at a national level. For Mariela Díaz Sandoval, an expert on social movements at the University of Guerrero, there are two elements that have made this unprecedented coordination possible: “the splits within Morena” and the “constant weakness of the State in guaranteeing security and economic certainty”.
The first is due to the coming and going of statements within the party that contradict each other. This same Monday, the Secretary of the Interior, Rosa Icela Rodríguez, attempted to discredit some protests that she attributed to the opposition, only to be contradicted shortly afterwards by the coordinator of the Morenoist deputies, Ricardo Monreal. In this tsunami, the president also contributed to the internal confusion, stating that Rodríguez had not said what the cameras had recorded him: that several protest leaders had for years opened investigation files against them for the same type of road blocks, which constitute a crime.
Regarding insecurity, reported vehicle theft reports or events on the road briefly declined between 2023 and 2024, from 3,204 to 3,196, but remained well above the 1,860 in 2022, according to the federal National Public Safety Census. Added to this is the growing extortion, a crime for which the Government has not yet found a solution, despite the general decrease in other types of crimes, such as intentional homicides, which it often boasts about.
To these factors, the specialist adds the existence of “an institutional environment that allows dialogue but does not provide an effective solution to the claims”. “Although channels of dialogue exist, this does not translate into concrete actions to address at least the two central issues of the demands: violence against transporters and the crisis in the countryside,” he summarizes. The coordinator of the Alliance of Motor Carriers (AAARM), Francisco García, expressed this frustration on November 3. “They hold well-intentioned working groups, but to no avail,” he summarized at the time, a sentiment that also permeates the rest of the convening organizations and which caused the negotiations to stagnate this Tuesday.
“There is not the slightest political will to resolve the mobility crisis that exists at the moment. This is why we have decided to withdraw until they call us again with a different perspective and will”, announced Eraclio Rodríguez, leader of the National Front for the Rescue of the Mexican Countryside and former Morenoist deputy, leaving this Tuesday the table established by the Interior. The Minister of Agriculture, Julio Berdegué, and his deputy, Leonel Cota, participated on behalf of the Government; the Undersecretary of the Interior, César Yáñez; the deputy general director of the Hydroagricultural Infrastructures of Conagua, Aarón Mastache; and the deputy director general of the Water Administration, Mauricio Rodríguez.
The strategy of establishing negotiating tables is not new and has not borne great fruit in the past. The latest precedent is the protests of the National Coordinator of Teachers (CNTE), which kept the government in suspense for almost a month before the summer with a national strike that paralyzed the Mexican capital several times. Then, as now, the president refused to respond with police repression and established several dialogue tables that have stalled time and time again due to a lack of results despite good will. The strike was called off 23 days later, without an agreement between the parties and with the threat of resuming the mobilizations which are now starting to take shape. Union representatives announced Monday that they will follow Sheinbaum on all of the president’s weekend tours of the United States, a way to warm up for the 72-hour strike they are already preparing, with no date yet in sight, for the return of Christmas.
Among the arguments that the Government has put forward to reduce the authority of the mobilizations that keep it at bay is the accusation of responding to spurious political interests. However, the leader of the FNRCM, Eraclio Rodríguez, responded that his only political connection is, in fact, with the party in power, of which he was a member and with whose acronym he won his seat in the federal Congress. Social unrest due to insecurity spreads across all strata and sectors of society, indifferent to political color and increasingly sensitive to a crisis of violence that the Executive is unable to stop, despite good general data. Whether the palpable discontent of recent weeks will diminish or enter a spiral that is increasingly difficult to stop, will depend on the concrete measures that they manage to put on the table.
