Presented as a spontaneous youth-led uprising against corruption, violent protests that erupted across Mexico this month were backed by local oligarchs and an international right-wing network determined to topple the popular President Claudia Sheinbaum.
Mexico does have a higher proportion of conservatives in Gen Z than any other demographic, but they’re still not a majority.
The reason that is, is because of our proximity to the US and its huge propaganda machine as well as concerted efforts by our media to paint conservatism as the real principled rebellion yadda yadda.
This has also been largely successful due to morena’s milquetoast succdem fence-sitting bullshit giving plenty of ammunition to the propagandists regarding issues which are important to young people, such as housing, reasonable working hours, quality public services (especially transportation) and a livable wage, most of which have been addressed with the standard “we can’t fix it unless we make sure the private sector can gouge us for it”. The issues of organized crime and their stranglehold on local economic activity (with near total impunity) have been better addressed than they were during Calderon’s term, but they’re still full of half measures at the best of times and young people are legitimately tired of the glacial pace of this administration.
There comes a point where cautious incrementalism reveals itself as stalling, darnos atole con el dedo, so to speak. That’s the reason the left wing protests a week prior were more succesful but they were just as much a protest against the US as they were about discontent with the Mexican government.
i troubles me when the mexican genz influencers on social media speak as neutrally as possible when talking about either morena or pan/pri/moviemento.
i get that they’re not trying to offend (and most of them say exactly this) but i wish they would adopt a more honest/genuine take like their mexican-american cousins do because they make their biases clear, where it’s easy to mistake the biases of the mexicans.