The Interior Circuit: A Mexico City Chronicle (9 page)

I’d covered the Chilean student movement as a journalist the previous fall and spring, and had spoken to Camila Vallejo a few times, and came to admire her, and the movement, with its numerous eloquent and courageous young student participants, representing all manner of sometime abstruse political tendencies. The example of Chile was with me during the #YoSoy132 marches and meetings I attended in the summer of 2012, when Mexican students were attempting, the eyes and hopes of much of the country now riveted to them, to invent in the space of two months a movement as potentially transformative and muscular as Chile’s. But the Chilean student movement grew from a foundation of a university federation that was more than a century old and had weathered the repression of the Pinochet dictatorship, and now regularly endured the brutality of the Chilean army and police. The first #YoSoy132 march I attended, a night march, began to gather on a gloomy, rainy weekend afternoon in the Tlatelolco plaza of Las Tres Culturas, where more than forty years before, in 1968, the PRI massacre of students and others that still so haunted Mexico had occurred. The plaza, a gleaming slate gray in the rain, was overlooked by a shabby-looking public housing building, which, on that October 2, had sheltered infiltrated snipers, and where some apartments had taken a great number of aimed and stray bullets from soldiers outside. On the opposite side of the plaza were the ruins of the pyramids and ceremonial buildings of Tlatelolco, which on August 13, 1521, had been the setting of the decisive battle in the conquest of the Mexicas, or Aztecs, by Hernán Cortés and his Spanish conquistadores and their indigenous, namely Tlaxcalan, allies. Near one flank of the plaza stood the Church of Santiago, also built in 1521, one of the first churches in New Spain, with homely walls of muddy-red
tezontle
brick. On the day of the 1968 massacre, that church had locked its doors to panicked protesters fleeing for their lives, but had sheltered military murder squads inside (these were revealed, years later, to have been linked to the CIA). A monument at one end of the plaza listed the names of known victims of the massacre. Vendors circulated selling cheap rain ponchos, candles, lanterns, food, T-shirts, and bandannas imprinted with the #YoSoy132 insignia.

I’d arrived early with América, a twenty-seven-year-old student at the UACM, a small public city university founded at the initiative of López Obrador when he was mayor. We’d become friendly over the several years that she’d worked at a bookstore in the Condesa. At first I felt disappointed in the turnout. But an hour or so later people began arriving, visible in streams down the long sidewalks leading past the ancient ruin site to the plaza, pouring in from metro stations or wherever they had gathered to organize themselves, groups of students with their institutional banners held aloft, some chanting school and other slogans, banging on drums, and blowing horns, many wearing costumes and masks. I have to admit, I choked up a little, watching all those young people arriving to join the march. But there were people of all ages, mere civilians as it were. There were no speeches, no visible leaders, no megaphoned marching orders. América and I found the students from UACM, among whom she had many friends. In the early evening, when the rain had stopped, we began to file out of the plaza as if by migratory instinct. The march proceeded down avenues through the working-class neighborhoods to the south of the plaza and Colonia Guerrero, headed toward Paseo de la Reforma. People lined the sidewalks, holding up signs; they cheered and pumped their fists from windows. Student percussion bands carried us along to a rousing beat; I wondered how much longer their arms could keep swinging and pounding those sticks and mallets. Students marched in contingents behind banners announcing their school or, in the case of the UNAM, the various departments in which they studied. Many of the noisy call-and-response shout-outs were school fight chants. The
Gooooooooooya, goooooooooya,


cachún, cachún, ra ra, cachún, cachún, ra ra,


¡Universidad!
with which UNAM students cheer the Pumas, the professional
fútbol
team affiliated with the university, rumbled up and down the length of the march. Most of the political chants and songs, some of them raunchy, mocked Peña Nieto. My favorite was the one, sung almost like a children’s song, that went,
Hay que estudiaaar, hay que estudiaaar, el que no estudie como Peña Nieto va acabar.
—You have to study, you have to study, if you don’t study you’ll end up like Peña Nieto.

At this march, and at the other I attended a few weeks later, I broke away to walk its length, looking for blue-and-gold UNAM banners and especially for one spelling out
Facultad de Filosofía y Letras
, the department where Aura had studied and even taught for a while, and whenever I found one, I tagged along. I wondered what Aura would have thought about #YoSoy132. You couldn’t be much more UNAM than Aura was, though the student strike of 1999, initially over a proposed tuition hike, that had shut down and then paralyzed the university for nearly two years after it was hijacked by
ultra
radical groups and government infiltrators, had turned her into a political skeptic. She didn’t like López Obrador, or “El Peje” as he is also known, for
pejelagarto
, a freshwater gar with an alligator-like snout common to his native state of Tabasco. Once, after a 2006 presidential election debate, when I said something favorable about El Peje’s performance, she scolded me, said that I had no idea what I was talking about, and forbade me ever to opine on Mexican politics in her presence again. She didn’t seriously mean it, but it’s also true that I didn’t really know what I was talking about. I had never paid much attention to Mexican politics. For years, I’d considered the DF my place of escape from, or my neutral place between, the two bordering countries where before I’d spent almost all my adult life: the United States and Guatemala, countries whose politics are impossible to ignore if you live in either, and that can exhaust, sour, and depress anybody. “I fell in love with the girl next door,” I liked to tell friends when they asked how I’d become so attached to Mexico. I’d thought of my old apartment on Avenida Amsterdam as a refuge where, as others went to writers’ residences and colonies, I could hole up for months of long workdays and intense concentration. Often weeks could go by without my even opening a Mexican newspaper. I even used to boast about that. And in the years since Aura’s death, my indifference to Mexican politics had only grown. So why was I so interested in #YoSoy132 and in the Mexican elections now, in the summer of 2012? It was an aspect of that summer’s general awakening, I guess, but also of a specific awakening to what was happening in Mexico. Partly, too, it was a result of my encounter with the youthful energies of Chile after a magazine had unexpectedly sent me there to write about Camila Vallejo and the student movement. But it had something to do with my friendship with América too; we’d been meeting for evening drinks regularly throughout the summer. And it was also because of the UNAM and Aura, and my compulsion to try to imagine her participating in what she might have wanted nothing to do with. But, then again, she might have felt differently. In 2006, conveniently, Aura hadn’t been able to vote, because she’d lost her voter’s ID card. Who might she have voted for in 2012? Definitely not for Peña; nor for the PAN’s candidate, Josefina Vazquez Mota; and probably not for El Peje either. But wasn’t it because so many other young people felt the same way that #YoSoy132 had taken off? I knew that some of Aura’s friends from the UNAM, including her best friend Naty Perez, now working toward her PhD at Princeton, were enthusiastic about the movement and that some, including Gaby Jauregui, were going to the marches.

I was also intrigued by the clusters of young people who marched behind banners identifying them as
los rechazados
, “the rejected,” who, though they were not students, had been invited into the movement. The UNAM accepts only one out of ten applicants, and the much smaller UAM is selective as well, and so tens of thousands of students who couldn’t afford private education, even many, according to the newspapers, with an A average in high school, found themselves without promising options to study for a career. Some of those young people had now organized themselves into
los
rechazados.
The problem of the so-called ninnies in Mexico, unemployed young people with no place to study, is a national scandal. The demand for greater government spending on public higher education seemed one issue that #YoSoy132 could adopt, an education agenda like Chile’s that might help it find another identity beyond its current focus on the looming election. But it was also hard to imagine a movement that could sustain itself on the indignation of students who were already on the inside over the plight of young people left out. In Chile, where everyone but the rich feels screwed by the cost of an education, there is nothing like the essentially free, massive UNAM. But the festive atmosphere of the Mexico City march did remind me of those I’d seen in Chile. It wasn’t until long after nightfall, when, candles lit, we entered a long, narrow, alley-like street leading to the Televisa headquarters in Cuahtémoc, that I sensed another big difference between the two movements. People at the head of the march kept ordering us to stop. It seemed that there were
porros
, a PRI mob of thugs, waiting up ahead to attack us. An unidentified group of men in red T-shirts had been spotted. I was sure that it must be true, because the fear that spread so quickly among the marchers was contagious. Men were ordered to link hands to form cordons on both sides and women were told to gather in the middle. A number of the male students, laughing, playfully self-mocking, announced that they didn’t want to fight anybody, that at the first sign of violence they were going to run, and kept themselves inside the cordons. We edged ahead, and were called to a halt again. Everyone was silent, straining to listen for a sign of what might be happening up ahead. Would there be screams, shouting, what? My candle had almost burned out but I managed to keep it lit and crooked inside my thumb even as I lightly clasped fingers with the man in front, telling myself, ridiculously, that the melting candle nub wasn’t a bad weapon. I imagined a
porro
rushing me, and jamming the hot wax into his eye. But the nervousness all around me also brought home to me that difference between the inexperienced Mexicans and their battle-hardened counterparts in Chile, where in march after march the students steadfastly endure clubbings at the hands of militarized police, tear gas, pluming jets of burning chemically treated water shot from water guns mounted atop armored trucks, arrests, beatings, and sometimes torture in police vans and jail. Even Camila Vallejo had once been tear-gassed, at close range, severely enough to require medical treatment. The Chilean student marchers expected violence, and never backed down. These Mexico City students didn’t seem at all ready for that, and most might never be. I wondered how many of them would come back again if this march or any subsequent one was met with violence. It turned out, though, that there were no
porros
; the men in red T-shirts were from a rural land-rights group that had traveled to the city to join the student march. The march went back to being a Mexico City march, yet another rather extreme form of fun, an almost all-night party. After some seven hours of marching, we, everyone who could, entered the Zócalo at a sprint.

The July 1 elections came too quickly. #YoSoy132 didn’t save Mexico that summer, and could never have been expected to, even if it had the time. López Obrador did not ride the surging student movement to an unexpected victory, though the final results were closer than anyone had expected earlier that year, and closer than the polls had shown throughout the summer. Thanks to its being a multiparty election, in a flawed electoral process that doesn’t require a runoff election between the top two candidates should neither reach 50 percent, Peña Nieto was elected president with only 38 percent of the national vote.

Though his claims had seemed more legitimate in 2006 because the margin in that election was razor-thin, López Obrador again refused to accept the results and demanded a recount, alleging fraud and media bias and manipulation. He was within his rights to do so. Although all of the parties engaged in some degree of vote buying, the PRI was reported to have committed 70 percent of it, mostly through mass giveaways of cards redeemable for purchases at a national superstore chain. That much was exposed largely owing to the pressures created by the successes of the student movement. #YoSoy132’s own commissions of academic and graduate student experts, juridical scholars, statisticians, and so forth turned out almost daily arguments and evidence that the election had been essentially fraudulent and rife with illegalities, and that Peña Nieto should be prevented from taking power. Now the movement aimed to rally Mexico against the “imposition” of Peña Nieto as president. Even if it seemed unlikely, it really did not seem impossible that they might succeed. The election tribunal was to rule on the legitimacy of the election on September 6. What if enough irrefutable evidence could be presented to the tribunal and somehow enough pressure brought to bear on that establishment entity to sway a majority of its members before they ruled?

#YoSoy132 was now made up of more than 150 universities whose autonomous chapters did not always agree on what course to follow, but its popularity and influence had grown far beyond the boundaries of the student world. In Mexico City, at least, it seemed that nearly everybody wanted to be a part of #YoSoy132. Student leaders—it wasn’t really clear, to those of us on the outside, who these even were—struggled to keep their movement at least tenuously under their own control. The question had arisen of what ties should be pursued with other civic opposition groups? To that end, #YoSoy132 agreed to participate in a national convention with the representatives of multiple civic groups called for the second weekend of July to coordinate strategies and actions over the coming months to stop the “imposition” before the December 1 inauguration. It was to be held in Atenco, the semirural town in México State where Peña Nieto had sent in his police to kill, beat, and rape civilians. América asked me if I wanted to go. We would have to sleep over, but she had a tent. I bought a sleeping bag, cans of sardines, and a bottle of
mezcal
. On Saturday morning I went to meet her on a corner so that we could catch a bus together. Waiting there also was a friend of hers, a young student from the UACM named Marcos.