¡YA! Youth Activism Mexican Youths Mobilize

...President Vicente Fox and members of his National Action Party (PAN) joined with the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) to strip the Mayor of his immunity from prosecution...

...Armendáriz proudly takes note of the student groups and other youth-centered organizations in the United States that have made the youth-oriented component of the anti-desafuero campaign transnational...

...The process of stripping the immunity afforded to all holders of public office in Mexico is called a desafuero...

...Despite the fraud, it was a close race, and it instilled in Mexicans a glimmer of hope that a non-PRI candidate could be elected...

...I mean, it’s true, youths have always been very excluded, and they are spontaneously trying to reinsert themselves politically into society...

...The Mayor’s opponents accused him of ignoring a court order restricting the city’s power to build a hospital access road through disputed land...

...With a successful desafuero and an indictment, López Obrador would most likely have been legally barred from running for president...

...The “funeral” procession ended on the steps of the consulate, where they left the coffin...

...People mobilized against the desafuero, because they plainly saw it for what it was—a grave injustice,” contends Armendáriz...

...says Armendáriz repeating the Zapatistas’ insurgent motto...

...The grassroots activism that emerged from the rubble is widely credited with helping edge forward the country’s nascent civil society...

...As Armendáriz suggests, however, recent events signal an undeniable sea change in the participation of youths in determining and charting the future course of politics in Mexico...

...We participated and made our contribution just like every other sector,” he emphasizes...

...When a young child dies in Mexico—like our young democracy, in this case—it’s customary to use a white coffin for the burial,” explains Magallán...

...I think recent events have really helped this along...

...Consequently, younger Mexicans are less tolerant than older generations of the machinations typical of their country’s notoriously corrupt political system...

...Still, Armendáriz views their participation with great optimism, and his group will continue to bring attention to youth-specific problems, particularly regarding access to quality education and jobs...

...In New York City, Tepeyac joined with Mexican student groups from local universities to demonstrate against the desafuero...

...The government eventually scrapped the move amid widespread indignation and relentless demonstrations throughout the country...

...He’s alluding to the aftermath of the earthquake that rocked Mexico City in 1985 when demonstrations erupted against the government’s ineffectual response to the disaster...

...Armendáriz is the national coordinator of the Red Nacional de Jóvenes con AMLO (National Network of Youths with AMLO), an independent citizen group formed by Mexico City youths in August 2004 in the wake of the first protests against government efforts to block the Mayor’s candidacy...

...Direct comparisons have been made to the turbulence of the 1960s during which students and workers militantly called for political reforms...

...Particularly in reference to youths, Magallán notes, “Back then, students were fighting for democracy, but they lost because they were killed...

...The presidential election of 1988 was another watershed moment in Mexico’s contentious democratic development...

...This was exemplified most forcefully during a nationwide campaign against a political ploy by the government and its allies to prevent the most popular politician in Mexico, center-left Mexico City Mayor Andrés Manuel López Obrador—locally referred to by his initials as “AMLO”—from running in the 2006 presidential elections [See Desafuero...

...What we are witnessing here is a phenomenon of the ongoing transformation of the role played by youths in Mexican society,” says 28-year-old Ernesto Armendáriz, “because traditionally, young people are stigmatized in Mexico as a sector that is politically immobile or a sector that is politically apathetic...

...The overtly political maneuver elicited widespread repudiation from a broad swath of Mexican society that has grown tired of the unabashed politicking and corruption plaguing governmental institutions...

...The victory of the PRI candidate, Carlos Salinas, against left-wing candidate Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas is still regarded as markedly fraudulent...

...Although he notes that young people constitute a majority of the country’s population, he prefers to mark the victory as one shared by all Mexicans...

...Much like their counterparts north of the border, young people in Mexico are generally disregarded in national affairs due to the perception by their society that they are politically mute and complacent...

...The group’s first goal, explains Armendáriz, was to defend the Mayor by “linking together organized and non-organized groups of youths for the purpose of joining the nationwide campaign of civil resistance...

...Whereas those who left a long time ago sometimes think the PRI is still in power,” he adds only half-jokingly...

...For Mexicans living abroad, the battle over the desafuero had particular salience because the 2006 elections will mark the first time they will be able to cast ballots from abroad...

...We’d never in any way consider ourselves to be some kind of vanguard or give more merit to our participation...

...But again, he’s careful to emphasize that although the participation of youths has been a unique factor in the campaign, young people only make up one sector of the larger struggle for Mexico’s budding democracy...

...Joel Magallán of Tepeyac cited this as an important factor that led to high turnouts at protests held at Mexico’s diplomatic missions in the United States...

...The youth who have come to us in recent years are much more familiar with the struggle for democracy,” remarks Magallán...

...Armendáriz also points to the massive protests in 1994 against the government’s military offensive against Zapatista rebels in southeast Mexico as a formative moment for social mobilization and democratic participation...

...their political formation occurred within this context of widening democratic spaces...

...The flashpoint of this activism was the 1968 massacre of more than 250 student-protestors in the Tlatelolco building complex in Mexico City by the PRI government with Washington’s support...

...I think this all speaks very well of young peoples’ greater degree of political consciousness and their desire to participate,” he says...

...Armendáriz of the Red Nacional believes that since 1968, all of Mexican society has been slowly recovering a sense of power through social mobilization, which increasingly helped loosen the PRI’s ironclad hold on government...

...Magallán has noticed that the involvement of young Mexican immigrants in the campaign against the desafuero as well as their general interest in the politics of Mexico partly depends on how recently they migrated to the United States...

...Many analysts have placed the latest wave of political invigoration sweeping Mexico squarely within the trajectory of ongoing efforts to push the pace of the country’s slowly developing democracy...

...About the Author Teo Ballvé is a NACLA editor and a contributing news editor for the Resource Center of the Americas http://www.americas.org...

...Now they’re doing the same thing, but in this case the government tried to use legal means—the desafuero...

...Joel Magallán, executive director of the Asociación Tepeyac de New York, a Mexican immigrant advocacy group, acknowledges the differing historical contexts, but notes some similarities with 1968...

...On top of recovering that historical agency of previous struggles, the people have again told the government, ‘¡Ya basta!’ (enough already...

...At one march, they carried a small white coffin with white flowers to the Mexican consulate signifying the pending death of Mexico’s young democracy were the desafuero to succeed...

...In the 2000 presidential election, this became reality with the election of Vicente Fox, ending over 70 years of one-party rule by the PRI...

...As a generation, Mexicans now in their teens and twenties witnessed these profound changes in politics and society firsthand...

...The motivation to come out into the streets now is in an entirely different context,” says Armendáriz, “but comparing the sense of indignation felt by the Mexican people, I think, is correct … not just with 1968, but other events as well...

...An April 24 march in Mexico City drew an estimated 1.2 million people...

...Youths mobilized in great numbers against the desafuero, but Armendáriz plays down their role...

...Fr...