The Interior Circuit: A Mexico City Chronicle (8 page)

That Peña Nieto seems to have a dark personal history—that is, there are many rumors—is not unusual for a Mexican politician, especially one who rose to power within the PRI. But even for a politician, he does seem unusually callow. He was especially mocked for his performance the previous November at the Guadalajara book fair: when asked which three books had most influenced him, he could name only the Bible and, after much stammering, the novel
The Eagle’s Seat
, which he misattributed to Enrique Krauze. He had probably never even read that, because the novel, by Carlos Fuentes, about the Machiavellian manipulations of a cynical Mexican PRI politician, suggests that Salinas, Peña Nieto’s supposed mentor, may have been behind the 1994 assassination of the reformist PRI candidate Donaldo Colosio. While Peña Nieto was being widely ridiculed for his gaffe at the world’s largest Spanish-language book fair, his daughter sent out a tweet describing her father’s critics as
pendejos
(assholes), and
proles
(proletarians), whose derision was motivated by envy. When that tweet provoked a further media uproar, the candidate, trying to win an election in a country with tens of millions of
prole
voters largely indifferent to his reading habits, was forced to publicly apologize for his daughter. The horrific violence of Mexico’s narco war is, of course, intimately tied to the political corruption that is the PRI’s seemingly ineradicable institutional legacy. To fight endemic lawlessness, Mexico needs leaders committed to lawfulness. Now Mexico has a president who has publicly defended murder and rape as legitimate uses of force.

Peña Nieto’s calamitous “Black Friday” visit to La Ibero made news all over Latin America, though on Televisa that night it wasn’t even mentioned. Almost immediately following the incident, spokesmen for the PRI and other allies began putting out the claim, widely publicized by their supporters in the media, that the young people who had rowdily repudiated the president-in-waiting had in fact been not Ibero students but outsiders:
porros,
trained agitators infiltrated by his leftist electoral opponent, López Obrador, and by the PRD. Of course the ordinary Mexican media consumer would have no reason to doubt such claims. In response, during the next few days, an Ibero student requested over social media that other students make videos, and instructed them on what those videos should say. He received 131 videos that he edited into one and posted on YouTube. The video showed Ibero students, one after the other, avowing that they’d participated in the protest; saying, “Nobody trained us for anything” and speaking their names, displaying their university ID cards, and enunciating their ID numbers. Students at other universities, already intrigued by the reports of the incident at La Ibero—nobody had expected such an outbreak from a
fresa
school (a “rich kid” school) without any history of political organizing or agitation—took notice, and the video spread swiftly throughout the student and academic communities of Mexico and beyond, even becoming a YouTube “worldwide trending topic.” Student bloggers pondered the meaning of what had occurred at La Ibero, and the opportunities it might offer. The July 1 elections were only a little more than two months away. Was there anything that students could do, with so little time left, to stop Peña Nieto from becoming president? And whom should the students prefer instead? Many of Mexico’s leading activists, in the student community and outside it—including Javier Sicilia, an eminent poet whose son was slain by narcos in Morelos and who afterward launched a popular civic crusade against the violence of Calderón’s war—had called on Mexicans to nullify their votes and turn in empty ballots, a position that made sense to many. The PRD’s Andrés Manuel López Obrador, “AMLO,” had barely lost the 2006 presidential election—he may actually have won it—and had stubbornly contested its outcome, vociferously alleging fraud, and then had finally had himself inaugurated as president in a ludicrous parallel ceremony that made him seem somewhat unhinged, or that at least made it easy for his enemies to portray him as unhinged. But heading into the summer elections of 2012, López Obrador remained the unchallenged leader of Mexico’s left, with millions of ardent supporters. It couldn’t be denied that his term as
jefe de gobierno
of the DF, from 2000 to 2006, had been a significant success. Nor could it be denied that for years he’d been the only major political figure articulating a political agenda on behalf of Mexico’s poor, or that he is a tireless, grimly determined campaigner, endlessly visiting remote corners of the republic bypassed by other candidates. López Obrador had arisen from the PRI as a politician, and perhaps this was a source of his seemingly autocratic political personality. His speaking style is so ponderous that, after the first of the summer’s televised presidential debates, people joked that the on-screen interpreter for the deaf looked like someone practicing tai chi. Among students there was a widespread feeling that none of the three major presidential candidates offered a solution to Mexico’s problems and that all three represented only the continuation of an entrenched, corrupt, moribund political system. It was the political system, some students believed, and most immediately the electoral process, with its sinister and compliant relationship to the country’s dominant media powers, that needed to be challenged. Now those media powers wanted the restoration of the PRI, auguring a demoralizing step backward for Mexico. Guillermo Osorno, my downstairs neighbor and editorial director of the influential magazine
Gatopardo,
wrote a closely observed piece for it on the birth and struggles of the student movement. Osorno reported that the day after students had driven Peña Nieto from La Ibero, a student from another elite private university, Antonio Attolini, who would soon emerge as the movement’s most visible leader, had written a blog post, “Wake-Up Alarm: EPN [Peña Nieto] in LA IBERO.” In it, Attolini criticized those establishment political institutions that had given Peña Nieto a free pass for what had occurred in Atenco, rather than calling him to account for those crimes and even bringing him to justice. “The criticism should be directed not at the candidate, but at the formalisms employed by the supreme court in the Atenco case.” It was a student at the also private, elite Tec de Monterrey who posted a tweet reading, “#YoSoy132” (#IAm132). The still unorganized movement sparked by those 131 Ibero students, which came alive and spread with such extraordinary quickness, thus found a perfect name nearly as quickly, one that resonated and captured imaginations outside the student world. (Within weeks, wrote Osorno, marchers at Mexico City’s annual gay parade would be sporting the #YoSoy132 insignia, on armbands and posters, writing it across their bared chests and bellies.) #YoSoy132 would become Mexico’s first mass student movement since that of 1968, which came to a symbolic end on October 2 of that same year with the massacre by soldiers of peaceful protesters assembled in the plaza of the Tlatelolco housing complex, when a still unknown number of students and other citizens, including children, as many as four hundred, were murdered, though afterward the PRI went on murdering and repressing students for years. The PRI knows how to do what it knows how to do—twelve years out of power wouldn’t have erased that. The Ibero students who’d bravely indentified themselves in the YouTube video soon began receiving phoned threats and reported ominous unknown persons watching their homes. Many of those students, most probably from Mexico’s economic elite, were still adolescents, living with their families in the very sorts of neighborhoods populated by the likes of Peña Nieto, his political and business allies, and Televisa executives.

In the days after “Black Friday” students took their first steps toward organizing and defining their fledgling movement. Small protest marches tellingly targeted various Televisa offices and studios around the city, as would many of the later mass protests. A coordinating committee was formed. The original core of the movement was in a few private universities—La Ibero, the ITAM, the Mexico City campus of Tec de Monterrey—but students from public universities and other schools began to reach out, seeking ways to become involved. Poor public education students from the DF and México State ventured by metro, buses, and
peseros
all the way across the city to attend coordinating meetings at La Ibero, whose immaculate landscaped campus looks like a high-tech college in Silicon Valley, with multiple parking garages and only one pedestrian entrance where security guards register the comings and goings of all visitors; SUVs carrying bodyguards pull up in front of that entrance to collect the fashionably dressed students—all girls, the day I was there—who hurry out through the gates to climb into held-open passenger doors.

Informal meetings were spontaneously organized around the city, often in parks or in Starbucks franchises, where students who ordinarily would never meet each other—“those with and without Internet in their homes, those with and without smartphones,” wrote Osorno, incisively—came face-to-face. Looming over all these discussions was a single question: what degree of involvement could be expected, or should be desired, from the UNAM? With more than 200,000 undergraduate and graduate students, and a third as many more enrolled in its high schools, the UNAM has always assumed the protagonists’ role in Mexican student political activism. The participation of UNAM students would certainly add muscle to the movement, but the great university was known for often recalcitrant and belligerent radical politics, and there was a fear that UNAM students could also seize the movement and make it their own. But the UNAM students who turned up at those first meetings, some of whom would soon hold leadership positions in the movement, turned out to be unaffiliated with their university’s
ultra
groups, hard-line Communists, Trotskyites, anarchists, and the like. Over the next month those spontaneous meetings evolved into interuniversity assemblies, the first, in fact, held in University City, at the UNAM. Carlos Brito, a master’s degree candidate at an elite research institute, was one of the leaders who presided over that first assembly, and he told Osorno that as he sat on the auditorium stage looking out at the students who had come from all over the country, from every economic class, from every kind of educational institution, he saw that many had tears in their eyes, or were outright crying, and he felt just as moved himself. That assembly session, like all of those that followed, lasted all day and well into the night and often grew chaotic; as might be expected students proposed wildly differing and sometimes incoherent, overlapping, or frivolous agendas. Countless committees and task forces were formed. Web sites, Facebook pages, and twitter accounts speaking for #YoSoy132 or claiming to speak for it soon proliferated.

What finally emerged from all those student assemblies and plenary sessions, in which professors also participated, was a charter that defined #YoSoy132 as a movement in which each university or school would have autonomy, sending its own elected leaders to future interuniversity assemblies, where decisions would be made. #YoSoy132 was to be nonviolent, and politically unaffiliated, despite the general and, of course, not inaccurate perception that abhorrence of Peña Nieto’s candidacy had sparked the movement and quickly swelled its ranks. When #YoSoy132 sponsored its own presidential debate, with questions asked by students directly over the Internet, Peña Nieto was the only major candidate who refused to participate. The issue of how to vote in the elections was also debated at the assemblies, with students finally rejecting arguments to cast null votes in favor of “the useful and well-informed vote.” A long declaration of principles submitted jointly at a plenary session debate by students from the ITAM and the UNAM Law School included a paragraph that expressed the movement’s youthful defiance:

“We prefer ridiculous youth to the seriousness of old fogy youth; tweets and universities to universal news; count us at marches rather than counting us in other statistics. We prefer social networks to being tied in knots; we prefer to march than to be marched away. . . . We’re not just one, or a hundred: sellout media, count us well: because united we’re more than 131, that’s how #YoSoy132 was born.”

#YoSoy132 took off. Soon there were marches, especially in Mexico City, that stretched for three miles through the city streets, drawing as many as half a million people. In the city of Colima and elsewhere, the PRI, or mobs organized by the PRI, or the police in states and cities governed by the PRI, repressed some of those protests with violence, and arrested students. Following at least some of the Mexico City marches, as if to mark their difference from the ordinary citizens’ perception of student protesters as insolent vandals, #YoSoy132 sent out squads to clean graffiti off buildings and monuments. Meanwhile Televisa, Television Azteca, and other pro-Peña media, which in much of Mexico, though not in the capital, are the only available news sources, continued to report that the movement was controlled, was funded by, and existed on behalf of López Obrador and his allies, airing one conspiracy theory and false allegation after another. In the middle of June the international rock star of student leaders, Camila Vallejo, until recently the president of the Confederation of Chilean Students, came to the DF, hosted by the Universidad Metropolitana Autonoma (UAM), the second most important of Mexico City’s public universities. The now twenty-four-year-old Vallejo, brilliant, charismatic, and famously beautiful, a member of the Communist Youth of Chile, had led the Americas’ and probably the world’s most successful student movement through the so-called Chilean Winter of 2011. The Chilean student movement, originating in demands for an overhaul of the country’s increasingly and unfairly privatized educational system, through a year and more of nearly weekly marches, occupations, strikes, and often cleverly staged events and flash mobs, had provoked and inspired many Chileans to question other aspects of their famously neoliberal society, leading to calls for other reforms as well, including reform of Chile’s flawed electoral system; during that year, the rightist president Santiago Pinero’s approval rating had dropped to 19 percent. During her visit to the UAM, Vallejo participated in panel discussions and gave a few interviews to the press, and throughout was careful to convey the impression that she was not interceding in the Mexican movement by advising it on how to proceed. “Education is the antechamber to democracy,” she said, in one of her most quoted public statements. But Mexican student leaders, in whatever private conversations they had, must have listened closely whenever she shared her thoughts and experiences.