The #YoSoy132 [literally, “I Am 132”] movement [1] that began just began just two months ago has grown from the first protest in May at the Ibero-American University to become a national movement, with chapters at more than 100 campuses. The students oppose what they see as the “imposition” [2] by the electoral authorities of Enrique Peña Nieto as president of Mexico. They have strongly criticized Televisa, the leading Mexican television broadcaster, for working with Peña Nieto to further his campaign. The students have both held several national conferences of their own movement, and inspired hundreds of other organizations to come together as the National Front Against Imposition.
On May 23, 2012 the movement released this “Manifesto” directed to the Mexican people, which explains their criticism of Mexico’s political and economic system, particularly the mass media, and puts forward their own program. We believe that this document of the Mexican student movement, a movement that has been compared to the Occupy movement in the Untied States, represents an significant step in the development of political consciousness in Mexico.
Introduction and translation by Dan La Botz
To the Peoples of Mexico:
When we arrived the world was there and we were a hungry people with centuries of oppression. We were a discontented mass, we were election frauds without revolution, we were Chiapas and 500 years without a name risen up in arms, we were the Aguas Blancas [massacre] and the assassinated people of the land, we were the crisis and the foreign debt, hands without work, we were the strike, and the crushed barricades, the Atenco and Oaxaca, women raped and murdered, victims of repression. We were slave labor, migrant families, bodies hung from bridges, martyrs (prey) of state terrorism, money changing hands in a campaign, murder as the free market.
We were not wanted, but we were the inevitable consequence of a past and a present plagued by truths that had been imposed.
We are not, but rather we have been. We are the result of death and indignation.
We take upon ourselves the dignity of the defamed and take up their struggle as our own. We said that we were not just numbers, and that we would not be just numbers, the silent servants of statistics and polls.
We said that to be #YoSoy132 means to stand up to the insult and to emphatically refuse to bow one’s head. It means to refuse to accept the representation that is imposed on us as a reality.
#YoSoy132 is a student and social, political, non-partisan, peaceful, autonomous, anti-neoliberal movement, independent of parties, candidates and organizations that represent an electoral program; a democratic movement where decision-making emanates from its local and general assemblies, that has gone beyond electoral situations and will continue organizing itself and struggling to profoundly transform Mexico, as a counterweight to any political decision that violates the rights and interests of our people.
We took the road and collided with monuments that to us are walls or limits, we find the wall of an economic system that is presented as inevitable, as an absolute duty to our lives. Its bricks are the poverty of more than half of all Mexican people and the obscene wealth of a few, where the wealth of the ten richest people in the country is equal to the income of the poorest 40 million, an abandoned field that only produces misery and migrants; the lack of opportunities that pushes the dispossessed into organized crime, the sale of the collective property for the benefit of the few, the favoring of megaprojects over environmental and community rights. On this wall the great powers placed, boldly, to captivate our aspirations, its opulence, the promise of progress, the dream of something of one’s own that always remains beyond us.
The wall of disinformation, where a minority controls public opinion and the truth is reduced to one more item of consumption, focusing on polls and advertising spots, on the soap operas’ vacuous characters, in a sad and cynical caricature of reality. It is on this wall that they put up our opportunity to vote, as if there really were an election, and it hadn’t already been decided before hand by the biggest investor.
The wall that protects the companies that poison our food and sicken our children; that turns health into a luxury item for the benefit of corporations and foreign laboratories; that abandon the sick and the need, the pregnant, the maimed, the handicapped, the suffering, the recently born and the old woman to satiate the anonymous avarice of the stock market profits.
We see the great wall put up to stop people who want to struggle by systematically isolating them. A budding hope forced us to shout into the void. From the glorious days of the Division of the North [of Pancho Villa] and the Liberating Army of the South [of Emiliano Zapata] to the petitions of the mothers whose daughters were murdered in the City of Juarez and in the State of Mexico, from the great mobilization of the students in 1929 and of their brothers in 1968, 1971 and 1991 [it is the same thing]. A people whose actions and struggle were fossilized and placed in a museum and whose significance was put aside so that nobody would ask, so that no one would know. Generations of Mexicans with legitimate demands whose only aspiration was to construct a worthy and free nation, without inequalities, [found themselves facing the wall] erected and opposing the right of each individual to exist, each one contemptuously ignored, as the lust for looting continued by those who want us to impose their wills on us.
It is twelve years since many of the Mexican people gave their greatest longings to a man and he [Vicente Fox] committed one of the greatest crimes against the nation: he ignored and trampled on their hope. He, they, a system that believe and we can’t look over the walled city that they have wanted to impose on us.
We walked a while and ran into the cold structure, is dark ignorance, where they decide which of the factory workers will have a chance to go to school, where public education is the education of the soap opera, where the goal of teaching is not real career training but rather the production of cheap labor for the multinational corporations. They put here, as if it were a gift, the modernization of education and the logic of the survival of the fittest, the standardized exams, the teacher who has become a poorly paid worker as the student’s model.
And finally, if we still have faces and hands, a checkpoint blocks our way, the steel and concrete walls, stone walls and bullets, the walls where they killed your sister, enforced disappearances, the collateral damage that blurs the faces, the walls of fear and heads hung up, of powerlessness, where dead children are presented as gang leaders, where there is no voice to protest, much less the will to desert. The wall of correct strategy where you were shot so that you could be protected from crime and from its horror.
We have walked, run into these walls, and looked for a way out, but when we see them all connected altogether, we find ourselves face to face with an edifice, with a structure that sustains a society designed for the benefit of the few. Where up on top their businesses function perfectly and where down below we are all crushed. An abandoned building, where the hinges and doors creak, made up to look young. We don’t want old buildings, we don’t want, buildings dilapidated by corruption, we don’t want walls that crush us. We, the youth, men and women, want virgin buildings.
We have taken the path of struggle and we decided to go forward and never turn back. With our fists we will tear down the walls, our cries will resound in its deaf ears and shake the foundations of its structure. We who have taken to the streets, by making people aware, politicizing and organizing them, with the power of cohesion and unity, we will fight, fight to bring down their pillars, and above all to build genuine democracy in Mexico and our own future, and this is the program of struggle that we propose:
Democratization and transformation of the media, of information and of its dissemination. We believe that only through the socialization of the media and through the model of public media, will be able to achieve a real opening of the media and be able to ensure the right to information and freedom of expression.
Change in the education system, in science, and in technology. We seek a system of education that is free, scientific, multicultural, democratic, humanist, popular, critical, reflective, and which has high academic standards, guaranteed by the State at all levels and a Constitutional obligation.
Change in the neoliberal economic model. Experience and history have convinced us that the market is not a panacea that can solve the problems of society and government. Society should play a fundamental role in resolving economic problems the country endures. That’s why we fight for a human, just, sovereign, sustainable, and peaceful economy.
Change in the model of national security. In order to restore peace, it is imperative to withdraw the armed forces from their role as police; as well as to stop the criminalization, repression, and harassment of social protest and the population in general. We demand the clarification of the murders, such as those of social activist Carlos Sinuhé Cuevas and declare that we stand for: Stopping the killing of women and hate crimes! At the same time, we support autonomous community safety programs and organization against mega-projects.
Political transformation and connection with social movements. In order to promote and strengthen participatory democracy in the making of decisions, the construction of public policies, and the support of autonomous and self-managed projects we propose the enrichment and creation of district, municipal, communal, local, and neighborhood assemblies. All of this in order to construct popular, citizen power to oversee government agencies and to implement on the part of society mechanisms for meeting its demands. We embrace the voice of social organizations and movements, connecting ourselves in solidarity in the search of alliances that are based on respect for autonomy, the construction of a horizontal relationship, and we recognize ourselves with humility as one of many social actors expressing social discontent.
Health. We will struggle for the complete fulfillment of the right to health consecrated constitutionally in Article 4 and in general observation 14 of the Committee for Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (CESCR) of the United Nations. We oppose the neoliberal health care scheme adopted in recent decades by the Mexican state and we declare ourselves in favor of a multidimensional and interdisciplinary health care system.
If we want an authentic democracy, the democratization of the media is absolutely necessary. Among all of the defects of our poor democracy, the concentration and manipulation of information is an inheritance of the old (pre-2000) regime that has persisted despite the supposed change.
Throughout almost the entire twentieth century, the PRI co-opted the unions, business and social movement, corrupting their leaders and integrating them into their patronage system.
Under the PRI regime, businesses ingratiated themselves with the state in order to obtain privileges and thus the state extended its power over all aspects of public life in Mexico, political, economic, and social. The control of the dissemination of information and thee means of communication were fundamental for controlling opposition current and social movements.
The collusion between Televisa and the PRI existed for more than 60 years. Emilio Azcárraga Vidaurreta, the grandfather of the current president of Televisa, founded Channel 2 in 1951, six years after the creation of the PRI. Azcárraga Vidaurreta, with the help of the government, managed to bring channels 2, 4 and 5 together under one company, Telesistema Mexicano, consolidating the television monopoly of the epoch, and broadcasting only what the PRI wanted, distorting information, and ignoring social movements that questioned government policies.
The most notorious manipulation was in 1968, the year that the student movement was attacked, minimized, and censored by the television monopoly that at that time produced 28 soap operas, among them one cynically titled “People without Hope...” On October 2, the day of the Tlatelolco massacre, Jacobo Zabludowski’s principal news story was that it was a “sunny day.”
Who? Who? No one. The following day, no one.
In the morning, the plaza had been swept; the newspapers
head lines
gave the weather.
And on television, on the radio, and in the movie theaters
there were no program changes,
no interruptions to bring a special news update,
no minute de silence at the banquet.
(Well the banquet went on.)
[From Rosario Castellanos’ Memorial de Tlatelolco]
One of the blackest pages in the history of world communication, violating the human right to information, appeared during this alliance between the Azcárraga family and power. Gustavo Díaz Ordaz, desperate to keep the population in the dark about what had happened, permitted the creation of two more channels: 8 and 13.
In 1972, at the initiative of Luis Echeverría, channels 2, 4, 5 and 8 merged, taking the name Televisa, under the direction of the son of Azcárraga Vidaurreta: Emilio Azcárraga Milmo, alias “the Tiger,” who proclaimed himself a “soldier of the PRI and of the president,” and who said that he would make “television for the fucked up because Mexico was a fucked up country.”
In 1993, Salinas de Gortari gave to Ricardo Salinas Pliego the Imevisión television network with channels 7 and 13. In 2002, Salinas Pliego took over the installations of Channel 40 by force, an event known Chiquihuitazo. Vicente Fox, who was then president, upon being asked about the responsibility of the government in these illegal actions, made his cynical remark, “And I, why?” Fox, who after decades inaugurated the supposed transition to democracy, knelt down before the real powers of the country, whose most visible face was the media that disseminated information. “And I, why?” said the brave man who promised to drag the PRI out of Los Pinos [the Mexican presidential residence] by its ankles. “And I, why?” said the leader of the useful vote, he of the great promises.
Shortly before finishing his term in 2006, Fox gave a favor to the television duopoly, approving a seven-minute discussion in Congress of the “Televisa Law” which allows the use of spectrum consortia radio without any charge and regulation, depriving the Mexican people of a public good that belongs to them. Two months later, the media monopoly encouraged the brutal repression suffered by the residents of San Salvador Atenco, orchestrated by the federal government and the then Governor of the State of Mexico, Enrique Peña Nieto, in which our friend Alexis Benhumea was killed. All information on rape, murder, insults and outrages was concealed by the various media.
The real power is concentrated in these media. Of the ten richest men in Mexico, five are on the boards of the television. Ricardo Salinas Pliego is the second richest man in Mexico and nearly doubled his fortune last year alone. Grupo Salinas has companies like Elektra, Salinas y Rocha, Banco Azteca, TV Azteca, and Italika, among others.
Pedro Aspe, who was Secretary of the Treasury under President Salinas and said that poverty in Mexico was a “great myth,” is on the Board of Directors of Televisa, along with four of the ten richest men in Mexico with interests in all sectors of the economy.
Alberto Bailleres is the third richest man in Mexico and owns Palacio de Hierro. Penoles owns the second largest mining company, and shares of FEMSA, which controls Oxxo’s, the brewery of Cuauhtemoc-Moctezuma and Coca-Cola Mexico.
Larrea, the fourth richest man in Mexico, is the owner of mines like Cananea and Pasta de Conchos. In 2006, because there were not adequate security measures at the Pasta de Conchos mine, 65 miners were killed, and six years after the incident, only two bodies have been recovered.
Roberto Hernández, the second largest shareholder of Televisa, is the ninth richest man in Mexico. This character benefited from the privatization of banks during the presidency of Salinas and later from the bank bailout that began during Zedillo’s presidency. Finally, having broken Banamex, a century old bank in Mexico, he sold it to the American-owned Citibank, earning huge profits without paying taxes.
Emilio Azcarraga Jean, the president of Televisa and scion of the dynasty that always benefited from its relationship with power, is the sixth richest man in Mexico and owns football clubs as well as having interests in various banks. Now his family monopoly is allied with Iusacell through its supposed competitor, TV Azteca.
Televisa and TV Azteca are the most visible faces and the principal instruments of the oligarchy that governs this country. They are companies that produce and disseminate manipulated information, confused and falsified, so that what passes for public opinion is agreeable to the economic and political regime, in order to impose rulers who carry out the neoliberal projects of the great capitalists, both national and international.
Since 2005, Jenaro Villamil, writing in Proceso magazine, denounced the media strategies promoted by Enrique Peña Nieto, the new representative of the real powers and of the neoliberal economic project, used to forge the process of imposition which they planned to carry out this year. This was corroborated last month [June 2012] when the English newspaper The Guardian revealed that a secret Televisa unit sold a promotional strategy to the PRI candidate, based on “favorable coverage” in its principal news shot and principal entertainment programs, as well as the dissemination of videos by email accounts, Facebook, and YouTube. The newspaper claimed to have examined the documents which formalized the sale made by Televisa to the PRI candidates, as well as a list of payment that Televisa charged Peña Nieto in exchange for constructing a national image of the Governor of the State of Mexico from 2005 to 2011, by way of promotional videos and the display designed to sink his opponents.
So, on Election Day, profoundly anti-democratic practices prevailed, such as state violence, the buying of votes, coercion of voters, media manipulation, rigged political polling, and other illicit practices that altered the essence of free, informed, reasoned, and critical suffrage. These facts were never made public; rather on the contrary, the president and the electoral institutions shamelessly qualified the election as transparent, exemplary and peaceful.
These facts clearly show that the process of imposition of Peña Nieto as president has its origins back in 2005, and that companies like Televisa had played a determining role in the imposition.
We warned that in the event that the imposition was carried out it would restore the old regime that practiced the state violence, repression, authoritarianism, generalized corruption, cover-ups, opacity in public decision making, coercion of elections and more undemocratic practices. Enrique Peña Nieto should not be president, not only because of the corrupt regime that he represents and for his collusion with and subordination to Televisa, but also for the threats that loom over our country: the privatization of petroleum for the benefit of U.S. transnationals, the raising of taxes on the people, labor reform that legalizes brutal exploitation of workers and the loss of indispensable labor rights, finally, the privatization of the health sector and of workers’ pensions, all will be promoted and backed up by the media, such as we are protesting against today.
Given this danger, we call for the unity and organization of the social forces around our point of agreement: the transformation of the actual Mexican state. We know that we students alone can’t bring that about, and that’s why we call upon all social movements, civil and political organizations, as well as the people in general to join the democratic project of social transformation and national reconstruction by way of active participation, discussion, coming to agreements, organizing activities, and joining in the actions that we will carry out as agreed upon in the National Convention [Against Imposition].
People of Mexico: Today we have much to do! Organizing ourselves will be the first step. From our cause, our indigenous community, our cornfield, our plaza, our jungle, our beliefs, we make an invitation to adhere to our manifesto and actions, that from your locations, your organizations and histories that we hope to make ours, we can enter together into contact, we can join in mutual confidence, to fight and transform our Mexico.
We were silence, we were pain, we were oppression.
They wanted to take everything and the only thing we lost was fear.
Now we will no longer be a voice silenced. We came here with bodies that cry out: Enough!!!
#YoSoy132