The Hot Land

The event that sparked the march was certainly real enough. On November 1, Carlos Manzo, the outspoken mayor of the town of Uruapan, Michoacán, was gunned down at a public event in the midst of Day of the Dead festivities. After being subdued, the assassin, a seventeen-year-old from the nearby town of Paracho, was then killed in mysterious circumstances by security forces.

Moving quickly, the federal government arrested the presumed mastermind, a member of a criminal cell linked to the Jalisco Nueva Generación cartel, together with seven of Manzo’s personal bodyguards under suspicion of complicity. President Claudia Sheinbaum also announced her “Michoacán Plan,” a MX$57 billion (US$3 billion) package of security, economic, educational, and cultural measures to aid the distressed state and its aptly named region, Tierra Caliente, or Hot Land.

Among all the opportunistic headlines spiraling out of the event, some brief context is important. Sheinbaum has succeeded in reducing the murder rate by an impressive 37 percent in her first year in office. Together with her sky-high approval ratings, a solid majority of voters approve of her handling of the security issue. According to at least one major poll carried out in the days after the shooting, her numbers actually went up.

All of this, of course, is cold comfort to those living in areas where organized crime-related violence remains a part of their daily lives. Manzo’s murder was certainly not an isolated case — rich in water, minerals, and export crops such as avocados and limes, the State of Michoacán has seen a staggering seven mayors assassinated since 2022 alone. Others, like the mayor of the town of Cuitzeo in the Bajío region, have faced multiple attempts on their lives. Making matters worse, Michoacán governor Alfredo Ramírez Bedolla has become distracted from the broader mission of restoring peace to the region, with his administration instead mired in personal scandals and political infighting.

Dramatized Destabilization

But how the crises of Michoacán boiled over into the Mexico City march is another affair entirely. Well aware of their profound unpopularity with voters, Mexico’s right-wing parties have become experts in dressing up highly partisan affairs as the nonpartisan manifestations of “civil society” speaking out. Case in point — the Marea Rosa, or Pink Tide, demonstrations held sporadically throughout the government of Sheinbaum’s predecessor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO).

This time around, the same interests decided to import the “Generation Z” package that has recently come to prominence in countries such as Indonesia, Nepal, and Madagascar, grafting it onto a previously announced “youth march.” One of the principal youth leaders of the march, however, turned out to be in the employ of the right-wing National Action Party (PAN) to the tune of over $2 million (US$115,000). As for the social media accounts, they were traced to a marketing agency in the State of Jalisco and from there to an ex-congressman from the other opposition party, the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI).

In the days leading up to the march, and with the excuse of simply playing off of pirate imagery from the One Piece manga series, these social media accounts engaged in a clear campaign of incitement to violence, with posters of Sheinbaum and AMLO captioned with “Wanted Dead or Alive” along with crude, AI-generated videos of the National Palace and Metropolitan Cathedral up in flames. (AI videos would also be used after the march to simulate the crowds the march failed to attract on its own.) Even a cursory look at the accounts made it abundantly clear that these “how do you do fellow kids”–style efforts were anything but the organic outpouring of a youth campaign.

Sure enough, on the day of the march itself, the relative absence of young people quickly became painfully clear. Indeed, the demographics of the march were pretty similar to those from the Marea Rosa marches of years past: middle to upper-middle class, middle- to upper-aged. Meanwhile, the murder of Manzo — in theory, the march’s raison d’être —wound up getting lost amid a whirlwind of insults directed at the president. Alongside this were the usual, now thoroughly recycled attacks on MORENA, President Sheinbaum and AMLO’s party, together with a fundamental confusion as to whether the protesters were facing a “narco-government” or — on the contrary — a “government overwhelmed by organized crime.” A capable speaker might have imposed some coherence on this jumble and found a way to channel the marchers’ demands into a more unified message. But as people entered into Mexico City’s main square, the Zócalo, neither stage nor speaker could be found.

Instead, a contingent of provocateurs armed with specialized tools and rope set to pulling apart the barriers protecting the National Palace and attacking the police line behind it. In one particularly gruesome scene, egged on by the far-right Argentine attack site La Derecha Diario, a policeman was surrounded, kicked, and beaten with those very same tools. Among the eighteen arrested for violent acts was a regional delegate for the PAN in the city’s Cuauhtémoc borough, whose borough head, Alessandra Rojo de la Vega, has been accused of financing the provocateurs.

Half a block down, unable to get to the doors of National Palace, neo-Nazis were busy painting “putia judía” (“Jewish whore”) on the doors of the Supreme Court instead. The ugliness had been unleashed and the desired effect obtained. “The populous revolution globally is unstoppable!” screeched Alex Jones. “I looked at Mexico City over the weekend; there are some big problems there,” said Donald Trump, adding that he was “not happy” with the country. Teasing the idea of an invasion, the US Embassy in Mexico — headed up by former Green Beret and CIA agent Ron Johnson — tweeted out the following message: “It will only happen if they [Mexico] request it.”

According to a report by the newspaper Milenio, some eight million bots paid for by party members and private organizations had been hard at work in the lead-up to 15N, occupying some 46 percent of the entire conversation on social media. It’s the largest such campaign in Mexico since the massive 2024 presidential campaign. And the effect wasn’t just seen among the far right.

From Reuters to the BBC and the Guardian, Anglophone media outlets uncritically lapped up the intended framing. An illustrative example was the Associated Press, whose Spanish-language article admitted in its opening paragraph that more critics of the government than youth attended the march, a fact excised from the article’s English version.

Billionaires Behaving Badly

Beneath this international media spectacle, more local interests were hard at work. Following the judicial reform amendment, ratified in September of 2024, direct elections were held in June of this year for half of the federal judiciary and the entire Supreme Court. On November 13, just two days before the march, the newly seated court tossed out the final attempt by magnate Ricardo Salinas Pliego to avoid the payment of back taxes for his Grupo Elektra in seven cases dating back to 2008.

The cases, which had been famously kept cooling in a drawer by former justice Luis María Aguilar, came to the eye-watering total of $48.3 billion pesos (US$2.6 billion). Salinas Pliego is also the head of Mexico’s second-largest television network, TV Azteca, which he has, with utter predictability, been weaponizing both against the new court and in favor of the most rancid far-right rhetoric. The day of the Supreme Court’s ruling, Azteca’s lead anchor intoned before a backdrop of a thunderstorm that it was “Black Thursday.” As for the march itself, it received wall-to-wall coverage. Now that the Mexican oligarchy no longer has the judiciary in its back pocket, and with the prospect of regaining the presidency and Congress currently remote, expect more of this kind of astroturf agitation in the months and years ahead.

Ultimately, however, it was all for naught. A redo march quickly called for November 20, the day which commemorates the start of the Mexican Revolution, received such scant attendance that journalists outnumbered marchers. The look of disappointment on the face of Ciro Gómez Leyva, host of Radio Fórmula’s Ciro por la Mañana program, summed up the reaction of an entire class. Their staged destabilization event had failed. They will no doubt try again.