Mexico Update

Time for another Mexico update.

On Saturday, a group of protesters in the Zócalo, Mexico City’s public square where the National Palace and the Supreme Court building stand, assaulted Mexico City police, deployed tear gas, and generally engaged in violence as part of what was originally billed as a “Gen Z” protest but was co-opted by the Mexican right wing. There’s something very similar to the Tea Party movement that’s happening in Mexico, and I want to drill in on that.

First, let’s start with the Rupert Murdoch analogue of this story: Ricardo Salinas Pliego. Salinas, a billionaire, owns the media company TV Azteca, among other things. He’s also been ordered to pay $2.8 billion in back taxes, from a court case that started in 2008, and was finally resolved by the Mexican Supreme Court after this summer’s judicial elections put a more Morena-friendly group of justices on the Court.

In her Monday mañanera (press conference), President Claudia Sheinbaum named Salinas as one of the instigators of the riot, which had very few Gen Z participants and mainly consisted of older rioters. She also showed footage of the crowds gathering in the Zócalo that showed that the size of the crowd was smaller than a similar gathering in 2023. And she showed footage of protestors attacking and kicking Mexico City police. Claudia pointed out that those police officers are armed with nothing but a shield.

Interestingly enough, some of the journalists at her Monday press conference added their observations from Saturday, when they were covering the riot. One had seen a protester deploying tear gas, another said that the TV Azteca reporters covering the riot stopped taping when protesters attacked police. I don’t know enough about Mexican politics to understand which media outlets are at the mañanera — perhaps its stacked — but there seemed to be a general sense of disgust and outrage at the violence by reporters who asked questions. Claudia hammered on how unacceptable the violence was.

My whole point in bringing up the Mexican experience is that the US will have to do something similar to what Morena has done in Mexico in the last 7 years if we are going to come back from the Trump era. Here are the key things that Claudia and her government do that Democrats would be wise to copy:

1. Her mañanera is a daily, 2+ hour event, and it blends a daily theme (transportation, social programs, etc.) with a Q&A run by Claudia. Each individual reporter gets multiple questions (and they’re very detailed). The infrequent, stilted press conferences we’ve had here must go — Trump gets it, because he’s always in the oval yakking to suck up all the media oxygen.

2. There’s no shyness about calling out media outlets who are telling lies — there’s a weekly “Lie Detector” segment where a slickly produced video, suitable for sharing on social media, picks a current lie and refutes it.

3. Her response to the protest strongly emphasized that this was not a popular movement, that the numbers were small (say 1/3 of the capacity of the Zócalo, which can hold 170,000 people). This is in strong contrast to the way that the Tea Party, a fringe movement, was coddled by our media.

4. She also called out the amount of money spent on social media by opponents to push their false narratives about the protest. We need to move from barely acknowledging social media to monitoring it and criticizing astroturf there.

5. She wasn’t in Mexico City on the Saturday of the protest — she was, as usual, out in the countryside, opening a hospital in Tabasco and handing out welfare cards and scholarships in Campeche. This woman doesn’t sleep when it comes to showing results.

Anyway, there are a couple of other interesting Mexican developments worth discussing.

After the assassination of the Mayor of Urupan, Michoacán, Carlos Manzo, Claudia announced Plan Michoacán, a combined security and general improvement program. On the same Sunday that our Senate was caving on the shutdown, she marched every one of her government ministers into a press conference where they reported on the week’s work of finding every god damned thing they could do for Michoacán. It was clear that they had done their homework. The presentation from the transportation ministry, for example, listed the dozens of stretches of roads they were going to fix. (She’s a scientist, and it shows: the numbers her government gives out aren’t rounded or approximate. It’s not 2,000 soldiers, it’s 1,980, and so on.)

She had announced the plan on the previous Tuesday, and by the end of the week every department presented, in minute detail, how they were going to spend $3.1 billion to improve the state. Again, not sleeping. If Democrats ever get power again, we can follow the Mexican example and sleep when we’re dead, to quote Tim Walz.

Finally, Trump is going to flail around and run his yap about invading every country south of the border since he’s desperate to avoid discussing his friendship with a pedophile. Here’s what he said the other day:

As usual, Claudia just dismissed this with little fanfare.

Here’s a Lie Detector video if you’re interested. I think I have it set to have the auto-translate caption, if not, hit the CC box and you should get subtitles: