139 CONCLUSION On May 11, 2012, the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI, Institutional Revolutionary Party)’s telegenic presidential candidate Enrique Peña Nieto arrived at the Universidad Iberoamericana’s Santa Fé Campus in Mexico City for a stop on his ongoing campaign to win the Mexican presidency. Enjoying favorable press coverage from many media outlets, especially from the critically important television duopoly Televisa and Televisión Azteca, Peña Nieto had skillfully capitalized on the widespread horror that President Felipe Calderón’s bloody and militarized campaign against traffickers had generated among all levels of the Mexican population. There was also a broadly felt sense of deepseated frustration that twelve years of Partido Acción Nacional (PAN, National Action Party) administrations had failed to enact the political and fiscal reforms that Mexico desperately required. Peña Nieto had built an apparently insurmountable lead in the polls against a weak PAN candidate in Josefina Vázquez and the highly polarizing leftist candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador. Yet on that day, Peña Nieto’s well-oiled political machine suffered a rude awakening when the PRI’s presidential candidate was vociferously challenged by Iberoamericana students. The key issue raised on that day was Peña Nieto’s treatment of the rebellious community of San Salvador Atenco in 2006 during his term as governor of the state of Mexico. The villagers of Atenco exploded on the national political scene in 2002 when they waged a successful campaign to block the construction of a new international airport for Mexico City, 140 c o n c l u s i o n earning this peasant community the enmity of powerful political and economic forces. The 2006 police action ordered by the then governor Peña Nieto had resulted in a large-scale police action that ended in widespread human rights violations. In many ways, the Iberoamericana students’ fierce questioning of Peña Nieto’s actions at Atenco in 2006 were a reflection of the larger concern felt by many Mexicans at the prospect of the return to power of the PRI, a political party that had governed the nation in an authoritarian manner for seventy years until its electoral defeat in 2000 and that seemed destined to return to power in the 2012 elections. A video of this political confrontation between the 131 Universidad Iberoamericana students was uploaded to the Internet and became an instant national sensation. Seeking to minimize the damage generated by this bungled political event, Peña Nieto’s political handlers publically dismissed the students as operatives of his leftist rival López Obrador; this trivialization of the Iberoamericana students’ concerns generated outrage and led to the creation of the #YOSOY132 (I am 132) movement, whose supporters expressed their solidarity with the original 131 protesters. Using social media, the #YOSOY132 activists launched a national campaign that hounded the PRI’s candidate and called out the two major television networks for their perceived slanted news coverage in favor of Peña Nieto’s campaign. In the closing weeks of the campaign, López Obrador closed the gap against the frontrunner and finished much closer to Peña Nieto than what Televisa- and Televisión Azteca–commissioned polls had indicated before election day. While certainly not the only factor behind López Obrador’s momentum, the outbreak of the #YOSOY132 movement eliminated some of the triumphalist tone of Peña Nieto’s presidential campaign which had at that time had seemed more of a coronation than a highly competitive contest between three well-established political parties. The political activism demonstrated by the Iberoamericana students in the #YOSOY132 movement in the 2012 presidential campaign was an echo of previous generations of political activism by Iberoamericana students. And despite their deep ideological differences, it also marked a continuation of the legacy of activism that the #YOSOY132 movement inherited from their forbearers in the Asociación Católica de la Juventud Mexicana (ACJM, Mexican Catholic Youth Association) and the The Unión National de Estudiantes Católicos (UNEC, National Catholic [3.238.233.189] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 03:17 GMT) c o n c l u s i o n 141 Student Union). The #YOSOY132 movement contributed to placing the issue of Mexico’s monopolistic media industry as an important part of the national agenda, which the current president Enrique Peña Nieto was politically clever enough to partially address in his own recently passed telecommunications reform law. The #YOSOY132 movement has been the...