Javier Sicilia, a poet who lost his son to drug war violence in March of 2011, catalyzed the Caravan for Peace — a coalition of victims and Mexican citizens fed up with the bloodshed that has claimed more than 60,000 lives and left tens of thousands more disappeared since former President Felipe Calderon launched the drug war five years ago.
Weeks after Mexico’s presidential elections, thousands of people have turned out to protest the declared winner, Enrique Peña Nieto, and the imminent return to power of the party that ruled Mexico for more than seven decades. The Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, which is slated to take office December 1, now faces increasing accusations of fraud, a legal demand to declare the elections invalid, and a youth movement that refuses to go away.
The word sounds like cracking something up inside your mouth, but it’s a poor suburb of Mexico City, and my Mexican friends tell me going there is like going to hell. That’s where I decided to observe the Mexican elections.
The United States recently announced that Canada and Mexico will join negotiations for the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP)—a secretive U.S.-led multinational trade and investment agreement currently being negotiated with eight other countries in the Pacific Rim region. On the other side of the Pacific, Japanese legislators are defecting in droves to try to stop the country’s entry into the negotiations. But the situation is much different in Canada and Mexico, which were admitted to the table with much fanfare during the G20 summit in June.
Drug traffickers in Mexico also do a brisk business in guns.
In December 2010, at the end of a study abroad semester in Puebla, some students and I organized a student expression project. Hundreds of students wrote complaints or ideas for their university, state, or country. Despite discouraging looks, I posted these note cards in a busy pathway at my public university the week that the campus was celebrating the centennial of the Mexican revolution.
For Enrique Peña Nieto, the leading candidate in Mexico’s upcoming election, the worst day of his presidential campaign was the day that sparked “#Yo soy 132” (I am number 132), a youth movement for social justice. When the candidate visited Iberoamerican University–a private, Jesuit-run college in Mexico City–last month, a crowd of young people stood up and called him “coward,” “liar,” and “assassin.”
The tired old Institutional Revolutionary Party was returned to power in Mexico.
Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO), the candidate of the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), lost Mexico’s presidency by only .56 of a percentage point in 2006. Fraud was widely suspected. Until recently, the media had anointed Enrique Pena Nieto, the candidate of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), as the certain winner in the July 1 election.
In the past month a student movement has arisen that has cast doubt on this electoral outcome.
Mexico’s military is crumbling under the weight of corruption.