The New Yorker,
DECEMBER 4, 2014
Crisis in
Mexico: An Infrarrealista Revolution/BY FRANCISCO GOLDMAN
The informal
nationwide civic movement that has emerged in Mexico in response to the
disappearance of forty-three students is propelled by people and groups with
all kinds of agendas and ambitions.
This is the
fourth part in Francisco Goldman’s series on the recent upheaval in Mexico. He
has also written “The Disappearance of the Forty Three,” “Could Mexico’s
Missing Students Spark a Revolution?,” and “The Protests for the Missing Forty
Three.”
In mid November,
three caravans converged on Mexico City, led by family members of the
forty-three students from the Ayotzinapa Normal School whose abduction, in late
September, has led to nationwide protests. One caravan was coming directly from
Guerrero State, where the students disappeared, another from the state of
Chiapas, and another from the city of Atenco, in Mexico State, the site of the
most notorious act of violent government repression committed by Enrique Peña
Nieto, Mexico’s current President, in 2006, when he was governor there. The
plan was for the caravans to come together and for the travellers to lead a
giant march on November 20th.
The kidnapping
is now known to have been carried about by the municipal police of Iguala,
Guerrero, on orders from the city’s mayor. According to the government, the
police handed the students over to a local narco gang, which murdered them and
burned their remains in the Cocula municipal dump. This scenario is still
awaiting forensic confirmation, and the families of the missing students, and
many others, do not accept it. “They were taken alive, we want them back
alive!’ remains one of the most common chants at the marches. “It was the
state!” and “Peña Out!” are also staple slogans.
As the caravans
approached Mexico City, President Peña Nieto, along with members and supporters
of his PRI government, began issuing statements and warnings that seemed to
signal an aggressive new strategy to counter the protests. On November
seventeenth, Beatriz Pagés Rebollar, the PRI’s Secretary of Culture, published
an editorial on the PRI’s official website.* “The chain of protests and acts of
vandalism—perfectly well orchestrated—replicated in various parts of the
country, demonstrate that the disappearances and probable extermination of the
43 normal-school students were part of a strategic trap aimed at Mexico,” she
wrote. “All these activists and propagandists have the same modus operandi.”
Pagés included opposition media on her list of these activists and
propagandists, accusing them of fraudulently confusing Mexicans into believing
that the students’ disappearance “was a crime of state, as if the Mexican
government gave the order to exterminate them.”
Two days later,
Carlos Alazraki, a veteran PRI insider and an advertising executive who has
worked on the election campaigns of several of the party’s Presidential
candidates, published an editorial entitled “Open Letter to All Normal Mexicans
(Like You)” in the newspaper La Razón. “46 days ago, two bands, students and
Iguala narcos, got into a brawl,” he wrote. “There are varying versions of what
happened. . . . That one [band] were guerrillas, the other narcos. One or the
other wanted to run the whole region.” Since the start of the “narco war,” in
2006, equating victims’ criminality with that of narcos has been a routine
pro-government strategy. Such insinuations characterized many of PRI
supporters’ early responses to the crime in Iguala. Alazraki closed, “Dear
comemierdas. I curse the hour in which you were born. You’re murderers. You
hate Mexico. And to finish, let me remind you that violence generates violence.
Don’t be shocked if the federal government responds.”
The day before,
in Mexico State, President Peña Nieto said in a speech, “There are protests
that are not clear in their objectives. They appear to respond to an interest
in causing destabilization, generating social disorder and, above all, in
attacking the national project that we’ve been constructing.” Just a few days
before that, he’d warned that the state is legitimately empowered to employ
force to impose order.
Peña Nieto
often speaks like an actor playing a stereotypical President on a television
show: talking about the legitimate use of force as though phrases like that
have a magical power to insulate him from the squalid realities of
authoritarian power brutally and lawlessly wielded, and of a government
hopelessly compromised. (Jon Lee Anderson recently wrote about Peña Nieto.) When
a President like that speaks of the legitimate use of power and describes
protesters as threats to a “national project,” what people hear are threats to
wield that power violently and arbitrarily.
In the late
afternoon hours of November 20th, people began to gather at various spots in
Mexico City to meet the three Ayotzinapa caravans for the march that would
converge in the Zócalo, the main plaza of Mexico City. That night, I went to
the march with some friends and neighbors. By the monument El Ángel, I saw an
elderly woman holding a hand-drawn sign that read, “Yes, I’m afraid! I tremble,
sweat, turn pale, but I march! For Ayotzi, for me, for you, for Mexico.” As
Ayotzinapa family members and students and other members of the Guerrero
caravan were led to the front of the march, people chanted, “You’re not alone.”
In the Ayotzinapa group was a young woman who held a swaddled baby and sobbing
as she walked forward. There were machete-wielding peasant farmers from Atenco
mounted on horseback. I saw many middle-class families, including children.
Raucous contingents of university students joined too, of course. It seemed as
if every imaginable group and sub-group, large and tiny, that exists in Mexico
City was present. For a while, we marched between a contingent from a capoeira
school and a marijuana-legalization group. I saw a nearly seven-foot-tall young
man with long, blond hair, marching in the nude and holding up a sign that read
“Sweden is Watching.” Many protesters shouted counts up to forty-three, followed
by “Justicia!” “#YaMeCansé” was scrawled on countless signs, followed by
whatever that marcher had “had enough” of. For instance, “#YaMeCansé of the war
against those of us raising our voices. The criminals are the politicians!”
Many chants were inventive or cheerfully obscene or sexual. The larger
contingents, from universities and secondary schools, used rope barriers to
cordon themselves off from infiltrators. People shouted at marchers wearing
masks to uncover their faces. The masked marchers were presumed to be possible
members of anarchist groups, or even provocateurs who would provide the police
with a justification for responding with violence.
Usually, the
main significance of a march is simply that it took place: that people took the
time to walk in protest or support of something, because it felt like the right
outlet for their indignation or approval. But sometimes a march makes concrete
a moment of collective cultural expression that can be harder to put into
words. This march was an expression of Mexico City—of a way its residents like
to think of themselves—in full flower. But it was also a manifestation of a
discernible change that seems to be taking place throughout Mexico. When a
friend said that he “could feel Mexico on the move” at the march, he didn’t
seem, to me, to be exaggerating. We didn’t reach the Zócalo until about three
hours after the first marchers. By then, the podium where the Ayotzinapa family
members had addressed the rally was dark and empty, and I saw no sign of the giant
effigy of Peña Nieto that had been set aflame, photos of which were featured,
the next day, in media reports all around the world.
As had occurred
at the end of the previous march, a small group of anarchists (or perhaps
government provocateurs) clustered in front of one door of the National Palace,
apparently battling a line of armored riot police. From the distant, opposite
end of the vast plaza, we could hear and see explosions and flashes, presumably
from Molotov cocktails, perhaps also from tear-gas canisters fired by police. A
dark mass of thousands still mulled in the Zócalo, many slowly moving toward
the streets exiting the plaza. The reporter in me wanted to get a closer look
at the conflagration, but the people I was with didn’t want to go any nearer. I
left them waiting, and I’d walked perhaps fifty yards when I suddenly heard
loud bangs and screams and sensed panic surging through the crowd. I turned
around and walking back, as swiftly as I could, to where I’d left my group.
When I reached them, Nayeli, a twelve-year-old girl who is our upstairs
neighbor, grabbed my hand. All around us, people were now running out of the
plaza, faster and with growing panic. The situation was rife with all the
danger of becoming a stampede. We made our way through the darkened streets,
navigating down the blocks that seemed emptiest, until we finally found a taxi.
It wasn’t until
the next morning that I began learning about what had happened that night in
the Zócalo and the surrounding streets, including those we’d fled through. A
large number of Mexico City police had suddenly emerged from the shadows on the
Cathedral side of the Zócalo and charged the protesters. All around the plaza,
they blocked off streets, trapping thousands inside a circle that, it turned
out, we’d just escaped. Eventually, eleven protesters were arrested, but many
more were beaten, clubbed, and kicked. It seems that none of the eleven who
were arrested were among those who’d been attacking the palace, hurling
Molotovs, or otherwise battling the police. Some were arrested while fleeing
the plaza, and others in the streets around it. Witnesses used smart phones to
film some of the arrests. Most of the arrested were university students. Most
had begun to run from the Zócalo, like so many others in the crowd, swept up in
the panic. A thirty-one-year-old named Liliana Garduño Ortega, who had been
photographing the protest, fell down in the stampede. The next moment, police
began clubbing her and kicking her in the head, and then arrested her. Hillary
Analí González Olguín, a twenty-two-year-old university student at the
Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), was also beaten and arrested
after falling down. An art student named Atzín Andrade, twenty-nine, had become
separated from his friends and was waiting for them by a flagpole when police
grabbed him. Luis Carlos Pichardo, a fifty-five-year-old filmmaker, and
Laurence Maxwell Ilaboca, forty-seven, a Chilean doing postgraduate studies in
the Department of Philosophy and Letters at UNAM, were among the arrested. None
of the eleven had any previous record.
The Mexico City
police turned them over to federal authorities, and they were formally accused
of attempted homicide, criminal association, and rioting. They were then
transferred to federal prisons in Veracruz and Nayarít. According to their
lawyers and human-rights groups, the eleven were beaten, tortured, and denied
due process. José Alberto, a twenty-one-year-old merchant, didn’t even know
that there were going to be protests in the Zócalo that night when he arranged
to meet his wife, Tamara, there. They became caught in the crowd that was
charged by police. Both were beaten (his beating was especially bad) by at
least ten police; he was taken to a police bus, beaten some more, and received
ten or fifteen shocks, he said, from an electric prod, after which he lost
consciousness. He was found lying unconscious in Corregidora Street in the
early morning hours, and was then taken to a hospital.
The protests
over the missing Ayotzinapa students, Paloma told me, were the first in recent
memory in which students of the highly selective Esmeralda had fully
participated. In the past, she said, postmodern ironies and theorizing have
engaged them far more than political involvement. She added that it was amusing
to see art students who have devoted their nascent careers to conceptual
performance and technological videos struggle to paint posters and banners,
many of them reading “43 + 11.” Rippey said that the arrest of the easy-going
Atzín Andrade—who had been attending his first-ever protest march and who was
being held in a federal prison on charges of “attempted homicide”—had driven
home to the students that what had happened to him could happen to any of them.
Rippey said that it was important, too, to temper her students’ passions. “This
is a free public university,” she said, “and that was a great accomplishment.
There are things in Mexico to be grateful for.”
Frida Mendoza
Chavez, a bright and energetic twenty-four-year-old student leader, told me,
“As a student at this school, I belong to a structure that the government
created and that allows me to believe in a sense of community inside of it.
Allowing us to have that place in society also provides us with critical
criteria to support institutional legality. From here we have a right to say
that we can’t permit any more societal injustice, any more injustice toward
humanity. But real reforms have to come from the trenches, where we know where
we stand as a country. How can they come from the corridors of power? How can [the
President] clean up anything when he himself is a product of corruption and
impunity?”
Mendoza’s
eloquent speech (“That came out sounding good!” she exclaimed happily)
reflected what, to me at least, is one of the most important and overlooked
aspects of this so-called “Mexican moment.” The informal nationwide civic
movement that has emerged is, undoubtedly, infrarrealista in many ways; it is
propelled by people and groups with all kinds of agendas and ambitions,
including the most intransigent or irrational ones. But, from what I’ve
observed, it is incorrect to portray it—as the government’s supporters, and
some eminent intellectual observers, do—either as a movement for radical or
violent Communist revolution or else as an unfocussed mass of rabble-rousers
who think that merely marching constitutes a movement.
In recent days,
a group of Mexican artists released a video called “What’s Happening in Mexico.
Why We Say #YaMeCansé,” which powerfully condenses the causes and aims of the
emerging movement. A written statement accompanying the video describes it as a
response to “the critical situation in which the lives of so many Mexicans have
fallen, who have to deal every day with the impunity, impotence and danger that
comes with living in a country that doesn’t provide security, governed by a
state that, far from preoccupying itself with imparting justice, colludes
closely with organized crime and, on top of everything else, is determined to
hide the truth of these facts.” The artists suggest the creation of a “Citizens
Institute empowered to audit the state and begin creating the conditions that
can bring justice to the citizens of Mexico.”
Nearly a year
ago, in February, after Joaquín (El Chapo) Guzmán, the drug lord at the head of
the powerful Sinaloa cartel, was captured, Edgardo Buscaglia, a Mexican
security expert and senior research scholar at Columbia Law School, commented,
“El Chapo and his people in Sinaloa had hundreds of Mexican politicians in
their pockets. Let’s see if they arrest any of them now.” Of course they
haven’t. Buscaglia said that as long as the chains of complicity between
politicians and narco lords weren’t interrupted, the narco war could be
considered lost. The Ayotzinapa tragedy made those chains starkly clear.
Meanwhile, the
clearest example of corruption in Mexico at the moment seems to be President
Peña Nieto himself. He cannot credibly explain how a relatively young civil
servant from a middle-class family has managed to accumulate as much wealth as
he has. The most publicized (though not the only) evidence of this wealth is
the seven-million-dollar mansion that the President says belongs to his wife, a
soap-opera star who hasn’t worked since 2007. (A Peña Nieto spokesman has
claimed that the house was not as expensive as reported and that the
President’s wife earned enough to afford the house.)* The title on the house is
owned by a construction corporation that has won contracts (some of them
controversial) from Peña Nieto’s administrations during both his governorship
and his Presidency. Last week, when given an award by the Committee to Protect
Journalists for his lifetime contribution to the freedom of the press, Jorge
Ramos, the Univision broadcaster, spoke about Peña Nieto in a way that no
broadcaster, and very few Mexican politicians, has dared. “Can you imagine what
would happen here in the United States if a government contractor secretly
financed the private home of Michelle Obama? Well . . . that is what’s
happening in Mexico and, believe it or not, there’s not even one independent
investigation being held to look into this matter,” he said. “That’s not saving
Mexico. That’s corruption.”
On November
27th, Peña Nieto announced ten measures intended to pull Mexico out of its
current crisis. He suggested disbanding the country’s municipal forces and
uniting them under the control of state police. He suggested a national
emergency telephone number. He revived the idea of strengthening the
anti-corruption prosecutor. The proposals, however fell flat, and were mostly
derided in Mexico and abroad. If state police are corrupt, too—and so are the
federal police—what good can it do to put them under the same command? As the
popular radio host Sopitas commented, “If first you don’t effectively clean up
corruption, uniting the police is the equivalent of institutionalizing the
narco police.” Others said that a national emergency number, because of
organized-crime corruption, would only serve to alert narco groups of actions
being taken against them. Peña Nieto’s measures admitted no culpability on his
government’s part, and no member of his cabinet was made to resign over the
handling of the crisis. No concrete anti-corruption measures were taken against
top-tier politicians. Then again, how can Peña Nieto take on government
corruption and impunity when he has become the most obvious symbol of those
ills?
On Saturday, November
29th, a federal judge freed the eleven people arrested on November 20th, saying
that there was absolutely no evidence to support the charges against them. It
was a sharp rebuke to the government, and a victory for all those who had
protested and denounced the arrests. On December 1st, the second anniversary of
his Presidency, Peña Nieto was greeted by a poll that showed his approval
rating at thirty-nine per cent, the lowest for any Mexican President since
1995, following Mexico’s disastrous peso devaluation. That night, there was
another massive protest in the capital. To avoid the police trap provided by
the geography of the Zócalo, the usual direction of the march was reversed, to
proceed from the Zócalo to El Ángel. It seemed that it would be easier for
crowds to disperse from the multi-spoked traffic rotary surrounding the
monument, with streets leading into a busy commercial and tourist zone. Violent
anarchists, about thirty in number, showed up again, providing police with
pretexts to attack non-violent bystanders. A smart-phone video shared on social
media shows a police commander using violent language and ordering his men to
grab anyone they see running. A number of people, including women, were beaten.
Maps of the surrounding streets, marking in red areas that protestors heading
home should avoid, circulated on Twitter. A crowd of about a hundred protesters
was about to be engulfed by police when a group from the city’s human-rights
commission showed up and formed a human cordon to protect them. The protesters
chanted against violence while the human-rights workers walked them to a subway
station.
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