Could #YoSoy132 Be The Start Of A Larger Movement In Mexico?
By Alan Lewis
28 July, 2012
Countercurrents.org
Incensed by widespread evidence of vote buying during the July 1st presidential election and what protesters are describing as corruption of leading media outlets, tens of thousands of people have rallied around the #YoSoy132 movement and joined protests throughout Mexico.
Protests against the winning candidate, Enrique Peña Nieto of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), began in early May when 131 students heckled then candidate Peña Nieto at an event at the Ibero-American University in Mexico City. The protesters where quickly dubbed by mainstream media outlets and PRI officials as paid outside agitators. In response, all 131 of the students posted online testimonials that they were students, including pictures of themselves with their student IDs.
#YoSoy132 sprang up as the student protesters' message spread through the use of social media platforms. 'Yo Soy 132'- which translates into 'I am 132'- is meant to represent everyone beyond the 131 students who supports the movement.
Prior to the election, widespread allegations began to surface that PRI distributed pre-paid supermarket gift cards as individual bribes. Protesters accuse Mexico's mainstream television networks like Televisa and Azteca TV of accepting payments in exchange for favorable coverage for PRI candidates as well as enforcing a media black-out against their movement.
The country first witnessed large-scale protests on July 7th, with ten of thousands marching in Mexico City and organizers demanding a stop to the "imposition" of Peña Nieto's presidency. Organzers are planning further actions, including a national-wide picket of Televisa on July 27th, and a strike on August 8th, the birthday of the legendary hero of the 1911 Mexican Revolution, Emiliano Zapata.
Unlike previous political protest movements in Mexico's recent history, this one has been organized mostly through emerging digital and social media platforms like Twitter and not by one of the country's political machines. The center-left candidate of the Revolutionary Democratic Party, Andres Manuel Lopez Obredor- who gathered 31% of the vote against Peña Nieto's 38%- has yet to come out fully in support of protests to "overturn the election results," and many protesters have publicly noted that their movement is not about a single candidate or party but the political fate of the whole country. Following the 2006 presidential election, Obredor, who ran in that year's election as well, led protests and charged that voter fraud was responsible for his loss to Felipe Calderon.
While most analysts doubt the #YoSoy132 Movement will be able to stop Peña Nieto's presidency, the current wave of grassroots, social media-connected protests sweeping across parts of Mexico may lead to larger, better organized, and more determined movements down the road. For now protesters will likely continue to focus on Peña Nieto and media enterprises like Televisa, but the future shape of the movement as well as its overall effect on Mexican politics is still up in the air.
Alan Lewis is a radical academic and reconquista supporter living in Denver, Co. He regularly blogs at Ghosts of the Future and Stuff.
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