Mexico’s Youth Protest a Return to the Past

Every six years, Mexico goes through an extended period of political paroxysm called presidential elections. Campaigns hijack the routines of normal public life, the media are monothematic, political propaganda litters the streets of large cities and remote villages.

In a nation whose history has been marked by caudillos and defined by seventy-one years of one-party rule, presidential elections determine the political future. I’ve witnessed and written on five of them so far. In 1988, when the vote count showed a clear tendency toward victory for center-left candidate Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, the computer system “crashed,” interrupting the vote count and enabling the political system to install yet another candidate of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). While in office, the neoliberal reformer Carlos Salinas de Gortari faced two contradictory events that convulsed the nation on the same day—the country’s entry into NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement, and the launching of an indigenous armed uprising.