Mexico: Youth on the Front Lines of Protest Movement

By Daniela Pastrana
IPS via Upside Down World
December 28, 2011

http://upsidedownworld.org/main/mexico-archives-79/3379-mexico-youth-on-the-front-lines-of-protest-movement

"We need to be the ones to provide the answers to the
questions of our times, because we are the main victims
of the voracious policies of capitalism," says Alexis
Jimenez, a 23-year-old ethnologist who has spent the
last two months camping out in front of the Mexico City
Stock Exchange.

A native of the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca and an
active participant in social struggles since 2006,
Jimenez is now part of a pacifist movement headed up by
poet Javier Sicilia, aimed at demanding a change in the
military security strategy adopted by the government of
conservative Mexican President Felipe Calderon.

On Oct. 15, he and a group of other young Mexicans
joined the global Indignados/Occupy movement of
protesters who are "indignant" over the effects of the
economic policies that have led to the profound crisis
affecting much of the world, and particularly the
countries of the North.

"My family is ready to disown me because I didn't go
home for Christmas, but we need to be here," Jimenez
told IPS during a long conversation, surrounded by
mice, on a cold Mexico City night.

The camp, set up on the main avenue of the Mexican
capital, has attracted young people aligned with a wide
diversity of causes, including anarchists,
environmentalists, pacifists and members of the
Movement for National Regeneration, led by leftist
former presidential candidate Andres Manuel Lopez
Obrador.

Most are university students, but there are also staff
members from the Mexican Senate, located nearby, a
reporter from a local newspaper whose employers have
forbidden him from appearing in any protest-related
photographs or interviews, and a chef from a major
downtown hotel, who asked to take holiday leave in
order to serve as the camp's official cook.

But not everyone stays. Mexico City's "indignant"
movement is a floating population largely connected
through online social networks, with its base in two
protest camps.

One is the camp outside the Mexico City Stock Exchange,
where activities have a decidedly political slant, and
visitors have included renowned academics like
philosopher Enrique Dussel and Edgardo Buscaglia, a
United Nations adviser on security issues.

The other has been set up in the Coyoacan district of
Mexico City, historically a neighbourhood of artists
and intellectuals. Here the activities are more
"playful" and creative, such as the development of a
barter-based system.

"We are trying to build organisational alternatives
where the power truly lies with the citizens,"
mechatronic engineer Miguel Barousse, 26, told IPS at
the Coyoacan camp. "We don't handle money, we only
accept donations in kind, and we try to keep the camp
clean and orderly."

In Mexico there are more than seven million young
people who neither work nor study, and of these, 78
percent are women, according to figures from the
ministries of education and labour.

Mexico has the third highest rate of unemployment among
people aged 15 to 29, after Turkey and Brazil, among
all the member countries of the Organisation for
Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) - which
groups the world's industrialised nations - according
to the OECD report Education at a Glance 2011, released
in September.

But unemployment and a lack of educational
opportunities are not the only problems faced by
Mexican youth. They are also disproportionately
affected by the wave of violence sweeping across
Mexico.

Reports from the National Institute of Statistics and
Geography reveal that the number of male homicide
victims aged 15 to 29 increased 154 percent between
2007 and 2009, while the number of women murdered rose
by 89 percent.

Although these figures do not capture the even higher
number of violent deaths recorded in more recent years,
they nevertheless rank homicide as the main cause of
death for Mexicans in this age bracket, far ahead of
motor vehicle accidents, the second leading cause.

It is realities like these that have led young Mexicans
to begin to organise. Some have done so spontaneously,
like Aldo Garcia, a 24-year-old history student who got
together with a group of friends to travel around to
different city squares and collect proposals. Their
method is simple: they set up a blackboard and ask
people to write an idea or proposal, then take a photo
of it and post it on social network sites.

"The idea is to collect as many pictures as we can and
then display them in street exhibitions," Garcia told
IPS while passing through Mexico City, where he was
photographing a group of young people gathered at the
Monument to the Revolution.

The subjects of his photos were members of the Mexico
Toma la Calle (Occupy Mexico) collective, which was
formed before Oct. 15 and organises activities such as
public "hug days".

"We want people out on the streets to interact, not
just to consume," explained a young woman from the
collective's media team, who asked to be identified,
like the other members, as the character created for
the media: "Tomas Calles" (Occupy Streets), a play on
words based on the name of the group itself.

"There is massive indignation, which isn't expressed
through mobilisation, a time bomb that hasn't exploded,
in large part because the media have succeeded in
getting into people's heads and fragmenting efforts,"
said another group member.

As part of this movement, on Nov. 26 and 27 dozens of
university students, campesino (peasant farmer)
representatives, trade unionists and human rights
activists gathered in Mexico City to define a strategy
for joint actions.

The so-called Youth Camp on the National Disaster and
Emergency issued a declaration which established two
main priorities: the strengthening of social movements
in all regions and the creation of their own media.

"It is up to us not to replicate the practices and
means that have blocked social change," the declaration
states.

"We recognise as a basic form of coordination and
forging links with local populations the occupation of
public spaces to draw the community into debates, using
the tools of popular education and liberating art to
generate active hope, as an engine of human happiness,"
it adds.

The murder of two students in the southern state of
Guerrero at the hands of the police and the discovery
of the bodies of four high school students reported
missing in Jalisco were a dramatic illustration of the
threats faced by young protesters in this country.

"It's not easy. We're used to following figureheads, so
it's hard to understand a horizontal movement without
leaders, where all decisions are made by consensus. But
this is a process, and one we hope will continue to
grow and multiply," said Barousse at the camp in
Coyoacan.

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