The document summarizes a protest march in Mexico City involving tens of thousands of people demonstrating against the disappearance of 43 students in Mexico. It describes the diverse groups involved in the march and notes tensions rising between the government and protesters. It also discusses the arrest of 11 protesters after police dispersed the crowd with violence, beating some of those arrested.

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NEWS DESK
DECEMBER 4, 2014
Crisis in Mexico: An Infrarrealista
Revolution
BY FRANCISCO GOLDMAN
The informal nationwide civic movement that has emerged in Mexico in response to the
disappearance of forty-three students is propelled by people and groups with all kinds of
agendas and ambitions.
PHOTOGRAPH BY ALEJANDRO ACOSTA / REUTERS
This is the fourth part in Francisco Goldman’s series on the recent upheaval
in Mexico. He has also written “The Disappearance of the Forty Three
(http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/crisis-mexico-disappearance-
I
forty-three),” “Could Mexico’s Missing Students Spark a
Revolution (http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/crisis-mexico-forty-
three-missing-students-spark-revolution)?,” and “The Protests for
the Missing Forty Three (http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/
crisis-mexico-protests-missing-forty-three).”
n mid November, three caravans converged on Mexico City, led by
family members of the forty-three students from the Ayotzinapa
Normal School whose abduction, in late September, has led to
nationwide protests. One caravan was coming directly from Guerrero
State, where the students disappeared, another from the state of

2. Chiapas, and another from the city of Atenco, in Mexico State, the
site of the most notorious act of violent government repression
committed by Enrique Peña Nieto, Mexico’s current President, in
2006, when he was governor there. The plan was for the caravans to
come together and for the travellers to lead a giant march on
November 20th.
The kidnapping is now known to have been carried about by the
municipal police of Iguala, Guerrero, on orders from the city’s mayor.
According to the government, the police handed the students over to
a local narco gang, which murdered them and burned their remains in
the Cocula municipal dump. This scenario is still awaiting forensic
confirmation, and the families of the missing students, and many
others, do not accept it. “They were taken alive, we want them back
alive!’ remains one of the most common chants at the marches. “It was
the state!” and “Peña Out!” are also staple slogans.
As the caravans approached Mexico City, President Peña Nieto, along
with members and supporters of his PRI government, began issuing
statements and warnings that seemed to signal an aggressive new
strategy to counter the protests. On November seventeenth, Beatriz
Pagés Rebollar, the country’s Secretary of Culture, published an
editorial on the PRI’s official website. “The chain of protests and acts
of vandalism—perfectly well orchestrated—replicated in various parts
of the country, demonstrate that the disappearances and probable
extermination of the 43 normal-school students were part of a
strategic trap aimed at Mexico,” she wrote. “All these activists and
propagandists have the same modus operandi.” Pagés included
opposition media on her list of these activists and propagandists,
accusing them of fraudulently confusing Mexicans into believing that
the students’ disappearance “was a crime of state, as if the Mexican
government gave the order to exterminate them.”
Two days later, Carlos Alazraki, a veteran PRI insider and an

3. Two days later, Carlos Alazraki, a veteran PRI insider and an
advertising executive who has worked on the election campaigns of
several of the party’s Presidential candidates, published an editorial
(http://razon.com.mx/spip.php?
page=columnista&id_article=236454) entitled “Open Letter to All
Normal Mexicans (Like You)” in the newspaper La Razón. “46 days
ago, two bands, students and Iguala narcos, got into a brawl,” he
wrote. “There are varying versions of what happened. . . . That one
[band] were guerrillas, the other narcos. One or the other wanted to
run the whole region.” Since the start of the “narco war,” in 2006,
equating victims’ criminality with that of narcos has been a routine
pro-government strategy. Such insinuations characterized many of
PRI supporters’ early responses to the crime in Iguala. Alazraki
closed, “Dear comemierdas. I curse the hour in which you were born.
You’re murderers. You hate Mexico. And to finish, let me remind you
that violence generates violence. Don’t be shocked if the federal
government responds.”
The day before, in Mexico State, President Peña Nieto said in a
speech, “There are protests that are not clear in their objectives. They
appear to respond to an interest in causing destabilization, generating
social disorder and, above all, in attacking the national project that
we’ve been constructing.” Just a few days before that, he’d warned
(http://revoluciontrespuntocero.com/el-estado-esta-legitimamente-facultado-
de-hacer-uso-de-la-fuerza-advierte-pena-audio/) that the
state is legitimately empowered to employ force to impose order.
Peña Nieto often speaks like an actor playing a stereotypical President
on a television show: talking about the legitimate use of force as
though phrases like that have a magical power to insulate him from
the squalid realities of authoritarian power brutally and lawlessly
wielded, and of a government hopelessly compromised. (Jon Lee
Anderson recently wrote about Peña Nieto
(http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/murder-moment-

4. change-mexico).) When a President like that speaks of the legitimate
use of power and describes protesters as threats to a “national project,”
what people hear are threats to wield that power violently and
arbitrarily.
I
n the late afternoon hours of November 20th, people began to
gather at various spots in Mexico City to meet the three
Ayotzinapa caravans for the march that would converge in the
Zócalo, the main plaza of Mexico City. That night, I went to the
march with some friends and neighbors. By the monument El Ángel,
I saw an elderly woman holding a hand-drawn sign that read, “Yes,
I’m afraid! I tremble, sweat, turn pale, but I march! For Ayotzi, for me,
for you, for Mexico.” As Ayotzinapa family members and students
and other members of the Guerrero caravan were led to the front of
the march, people chanted, “You’re not alone.” In the Ayotzinapa
group was a young woman who held a swaddled baby and sobbing as
she walked forward. There were machete-wielding peasant farmers
from Atenco mounted on horseback. I saw many middle-class
families, including children. Raucous contingents of university
students joined too, of course. It seemed as if every imaginable group
and sub-group, large and tiny, that exists in Mexico City was present.
For a while, we marched between a contingent from a capoeira school
and a marijuana-legalization group. I saw a nearly seven-foot-tall
young man with long, blond hair, marching in the nude and holding
up a sign that read “Sweden is Watching.” Many protesters shouted
counts up to forty-three, followed by “Justicia!” “#YaMeCansé” was
scrawled on countless signs, followed by whatever that marcher had
“had enough” of. For instance, “#YaMeCansé of the war against those
of us raising our voices. The criminals are the politicians!” Many
chants were inventive or cheerfully obscene or sexual. The larger
contingents, from universities and secondary schools, used rope
barriers to cordon themselves off from infiltrators. People shouted at
marchers wearing masks to uncover their faces. The masked marchers

5. were presumed to be possible members of anarchist groups, or even
provocateurs who would provide the police with a justification for
responding with violence.
Usually, the main significance of a march is simply that it took place:
that people took the time to walk in protest or support of something,
because it felt like the right outlet for their indignation or approval.
But sometimes a march makes concrete a moment of collective
cultural expression that can be harder to put into words. This march
was an expression of Mexico City—of a way its residents like to think
of themselves—in full flower. But it was also a manifestation of a
discernible change that seems to be taking place throughout Mexico.
When a friend said that he “could feel Mexico on the move” at
the march (http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-11-
21/thousands-protest-in-mexico-city-s-streets-for-missing-students.
html), he didn’t seem, to me, to be exaggerating. We didn’t
reach the Zócalo until about three hours after the first marchers. By
then, the podium where the Ayotzinapa family members had
addressed the rally was dark and empty, and I saw no sign of the giant
effigy of Peña Nieto that had been set aflame
(http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2014/11/20/247619/protesters-firebomb-
police-try.html), photos of which were featured, the next
day, in media reports all around the world.
As had occurred at the end of the previous march, a small group of
anarchists (or perhaps government provocateurs) clustered in front of
one door of the National Palace, apparently battling a line of armored
riot police. From the distant, opposite end of the vast plaza, we could
hear and see explosions and flashes, presumably from Molotov
cocktails, perhaps also from tear-gas canisters fired by police. A dark
mass of thousands still mulled in the Zócalo, many slowly moving
toward the streets exiting the plaza. The reporter in me wanted to get
a closer look at the conflagration, but the people I was with didn’t
want to go any nearer. I left them waiting, and I’d walked perhaps

6. fifty yards when I suddenly heard loud bangs and screams and sensed
panic surging through the crowd. I turned around and walking back,
as swiftly as I could, to where I’d left my group. When I reached
them, Nayeli, a twelve-year-old girl who is our upstairs neighbor,
grabbed my hand. All around us, people were now running out of the
plaza, faster and with growing panic. The situation was rife with all
the danger of becoming a stampede
(http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/02/07/crush-point). We
made our way through the darkened streets, navigating down the
blocks that seemed emptiest, until we finally found a taxi.
It wasn’t until the next morning that I began learning about what had
happened that night in the Zócalo and the surrounding streets,
including those we’d fled through. A large number of Mexico City
police had suddenly emerged from the shadows on the Cathedral side
of the Zócalo and charged the protesters. All around the plaza, they
blocked off streets, trapping thousands inside a circle that, it turned
out, we’d just escaped. Eventually, eleven protesters were arrested, but
many more were beaten, clubbed, and kicked. It seems that none of
the eleven who were arrested were among those who’d been attacking
the palace, hurling Molotovs, or otherwise battling the police. Some
were arrested while fleeing the plaza, and others in the streets around
it. Witnesses used smart phones to film some of the arrests. Most of
the arrested were university students. Most had begun to run from the
Zócalo, like so many others in the crowd, swept up in the panic. A
thirty-one-year-old named Liliana Garduño Ortega, who had been
photographing the protest, fell down in the stampede. The next
moment, police began clubbing her and kicking her in the head, and
then arrested her. Hillary Analí González Olguín, a twenty-two-year-old
university student at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de
México (UNAM), was also beaten and arrested after falling down. An
art student named Atzín Andrade, twenty-nine, had become
separated from his friends and was waiting for them by a flagpole
when police grabbed him. Luis Carlos Pichardo, a fifty-five-year-old

7. filmmaker, and Laurence Maxwell Ilaboca, forty-seven, a Chilean
doing postgraduate studies in the Department of Philosophy and
Letters at UNAM, were among the arrested. None of the eleven had
any previous record.
The Mexico City police turned them over to federal authorities, and
they were formally accused of attempted homicide, criminal
association, and rioting. They were then transferred to federal prisons
in Veracruz and Nayarít. According to their lawyers and human-rights
A
groups, the eleven were beaten, tortured, and denied due
process. José Alberto, a twenty-one-year-old merchant, didn’t even
know (http://www.animalpolitico.com/2014/11/20novmx-era-manifestante-
pero-la-policia-lo-detuvo-golpeo-y-abandono-inconsciente-
en-la-calle/) that there were going to be protests in the
Zócalo that night when he arranged to meet his wife, Tamara, there.
They became caught in the crowd that was charged by police. Both
were beaten (his beating was especially bad) by at least ten police; he
was taken to a police bus, beaten some more, and received ten or
fifteen shocks, he said, from an electric prod, after which he lost
consciousness. He was found lying unconscious in Corregidora Street
in the early morning hours, and was then taken to a hospital.
The day after the march, President Peña Nieto thanked Mexico City’s
mayor, Miguel Ánhel Mancera, and his police for their coöperation
with federal authorities in upholding order in the Zócalo.
few days later, an old friend of mine, Paloma Díaz, contacted me
because one of the eleven, Atzín Andrade, is one of her students
at La Esmeralda, the public national arts university. She drove me out
to the campus, south of the city. Paloma and the school’s director,
Carla Rippey, whom I’d never met, were close to the Chilean writer
Roberto Bolaño during the years he spent in Mexico City in his
youth; probably there is nobody now living in the city who knew him
better. Bolaño wrote infatuated infrarrealista poems for a teen-aged

8. Paloma; in “Savage Detectives
(http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/03/26/vagabonds),”
Rippey is the inspiration for the character Catalina O’Hara, a
beautiful United States-born artist living in Mexico.
Bolaño was a leftist who disdained the established left, its
orthodoxies, politicians, and political parties. In the early nineteen-seventies,
he led a group of poets who believed that life in Mexico and
in the rest of Latin America was so violent and absurd that poets
needed to subvert reality and realism—as well as élitist literary
hierarchies—even more than the surrealists had. That attitude has
been very much in the air since the Ayotzinapa incident. Indeed,
in Reforma
(http://www.reforma.com/aplicacioneslibre/preacceso/articulo/default.aspx?
id=51174&urlredirect=http://www.reforma.com/aplicaciones/editoriales/editorial.aspx?
id=51174) earlier this week, the anthropologist and writer Roger
Bartra, who is relatively conservative among Mexico’s most prominent
public intellectuals, christened “the heterogeneous and radical protest
movement that has unleashed massive marches in Mexico City” as
“the infrarrealista left.” He chose that name, he writes, “not
pejoratively,” but “because this left seems to flow beneath political
realities, carving tunnels to topple the government and undermining
the cement of a system it considers corrupt and repressive,” just as, he
writes, Bolaño and his compatriots sought to “subvert a literary order
they considered oppressive.” Mexico’s most lauded group of young
journalist-writers—a group (nominally led by Diego Osorno
(http://www.diegoeosorno.com/)) who have stripped away the
reportorial clichés of the narco war and brought its previously hidden
human realities to readers—also refer to themselves
as infrarrealista journalists.
The protests over the missing Ayotzinapa students, Paloma told me,
were the first in recent memory in which students of the highly
selective Esmeralda had fully participated. In the past, she said,

9. postmodern ironies and theorizing have engaged them far more than
political involvement. She added that it was amusing to see art
students who have devoted their nascent careers to conceptual
performance and technological videos struggle to paint posters and
banners, many of them reading “43 + 11.” Rippey said that the arrest
of the easy-going Atzín Andrade—who had been attending his first-ever
protest march and who was being held in a federal prison on
charges of “attempted homicide”—had driven home to the students
that what had happened to him could happen to any of them. Rippey
said that it was important, too, to temper her students’ passions. “This
is a free public university,” she said, “and that was a great
accomplishment. There are things in Mexico to be grateful for.”
Frida Mendoza Chavez, a bright and energetic twenty-four-year-old
student leader, told me, “As a student at this school, I belong to a
structure that the government created and that allows me to believe in
a sense of community inside of it. Allowing us to have that place in
society also provides us with critical criteria to support institutional
legality. From here we have a right to say that we can’t permit any
more societal injustice, any more injustice toward humanity. But real
reforms have to come from the trenches, where we know where we
stand as a country. How can they come from the corridors of power?
How can [the President] clean up anything when he himself is a
product of corruption and impunity?”
Mendoza’s eloquent speech (“That came out sounding good!” she
exclaimed happily) reflected what, to me at least, is one of the most
important and overlooked aspects of this so-called “Mexican
moment.” The informal nationwide civic movement that has emerged
is, undoubtedly, infrarrealista in many ways; it is propelled by people
and groups with all kinds of agendas and ambitions, including the
most intransigent or irrational ones. But, from what I’ve observed, it is
incorrect to portray it—as the government’s supporters, and some
eminent intellectual observers, do—either as a movement for radical

10. or violent Communist revolution or else as an unfocussed mass of
rabble-rousers who think that merely marching constitutes a
movement.
In recent days, a group of Mexican artists released a video
(http://revoluciontrespuntocero.com/artistas-mexicanos-piden-al-mundo-
suspender-tratados-con-mexico-hasta-que-cumpla-sus-obligaciones-
fotos-y-video/) called “What’s Happening in Mexico.
Why We Say #YaMeCansé,” which powerfully condenses the causes
and aims of the emerging movement. A written statement
accompanying the video describes it as a response to “the critical
situation in which the lives of so many Mexicans have fallen, who
have to deal every day with the impunity, impotence and danger that
comes with living in a country that doesn’t provide security, governed
by a state that, far from preoccupying itself with imparting justice,
colludes closely with organized crime and, on top of everything else,
is determined to hide the truth of these facts.” The artists suggest the
creation of a “Citizens Institute empowered to audit the state and
begin creating the conditions that can bring justice to the citizens of
Mexico.”
Nearly a year ago, in February, after Joaquín (El Chapo) Guzmán
(http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/05/05/the-hunt-for-el-chapo),
the drug lord at the head of the powerful Sinaloa cartel, was
captured, Edgardo Buscaglia, a Mexican security expert and senior
research scholar at Columbia Law School, commented, “El Chapo
and his people in Sinaloa had hundreds of Mexican politicians in
their pockets. Let’s see if they arrest any of them now.” Of course they
haven’t. Buscaglia said that as long as the chains of complicity
between politicians and narco lords weren’t interrupted, the narco war
could be considered lost. The Ayotzinapa tragedy made those chains
starkly clear.
Meanwhile, the clearest example of corruption in Mexico at the

11. Meanwhile, the clearest example of corruption in Mexico at the
moment seems to be President Peña Nieto himself. He cannot
credibly explain how a relatively young civil servant from a middle-class
family has managed to accumulate as much wealth as he has.
The most publicized (though not the only) evidence of this wealth is
the seven-million-dollar mansion that the President says belongs to
his wife, a soap-opera star who hasn’t worked since 2007. The title on
the house is owned by a construction corporation that has won
contracts (some of them controversial) from Peña Nieto’s
administrations during both his governorship and his Presidency. Last
week, when given an award by the Committee to Protect Journalists
for his lifetime contribution to the freedom of the press, Jorge Ramos,
the Univision broadcaster, spoke about Peña Nieto in a way that no
broadcaster, and very few Mexican politicians, has dared. “Can you
imagine what would happen here in the United States if a
government contractor secretly financed the private home of Michelle
Obama? Well . . . that is what’s happening in Mexico and, believe it or
not, there’s not even one independent investigation being held to look
into this matter,” he said. “That’s not saving Mexico. That’s
corruption.”
On November 27th, Peña Nieto announced ten measures intended to
pull Mexico out of its current crisis. He suggested disbanding the
country’s municipal forces and uniting them under the control of state
police. He suggested a national emergency telephone number. He
revived the idea of strengthening the anti-corruption prosecutor. The
proposals, however fell flat, and were mostly derided in Mexico and
abroad. If state police are corrupt, too—and so are the federal police
—what good can it do to put them under the same command? As the
popular radio host Sopitas commented, “If first you don’t effectively
clean up corruption, uniting the police is the equivalent of
institutionalizing the narco police.” Others said that a national
emergency number, because of organized-crime corruption, would
only serve to alert narco groups of actions being taken against them.

12. Peña Nieto’s measures admitted no culpability on his government’s
part, and no member of his cabinet was made to resign over the
handling of the crisis. No concrete anti-corruption measures were
taken against top-tier politicians. Then again, how can Peña Nieto
take on government corruption and impunity when he has become
the most obvious symbol of those ills?
On Saturday, November 29th, a federal judge freed the eleven people
arrested on November 20th, saying that there was absolutely no
evidence to support the charges against them. It was a sharp rebuke to
the government, and a victory for all those who had protested and
denounced the arrests. On December 1st, the second anniversary of
his Presidency, Peña Nieto was greeted by a poll that showed his
approval rating at thirty-nine per cent, the lowest for any Mexican
President since 1995, following Mexico’s disastrous peso devaluation.
That night, there was another massive protest in the capital. To avoid
the police trap provided by the geography of the Zócalo, the usual
direction of the march was reversed, to proceed from the Zócalo to El
Ángel. It seemed that it would be easier for crowds to disperse from
the multi-spoked traffic rotary surrounding the monument, with
streets leading into a busy commercial and tourist zone. Violent
anarchists, about thirty in number, showed up again, providing police
with pretexts to attack non-violent bystanders. A smart-phone video
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I3t3-rfc9JI) shared on social
media shows a police commander using violent language and ordering
his men to grab anyone they see running. A number of people,
including women, were beaten. Maps of the surrounding streets,
marking in red areas that protestors heading home should
avoid, circulated on Twitter. A crowd of about a hundred protesters
was about to be engulfed by police when a group from the city’s
human-rights commission showed up and formed a human cordon to
protect them. The protesters chanted against violence while the
human-rights workers walked them to a subway station.

13. FRANCISCO GOLDMAN
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