Ricardo Pascoe Pierce
In terms of military manuals, an ambush depends on five interrelated factors: surprise, concealment, detailed planning, a favorable field of fire, and security. These elements were present in the operation prepared by the government to ambush the Generation Z mobilization. Since it was a meticulously planned operation, it took into account the political objective: to discredit the movement while simultaneously providing the government with an alibi to blame others for the event.
The preparation of public opinion before the event was carefully considered by the left-leaning government strategists. The movement was accused of having far-right origins, even with international ties. It was necessary to cast doubt on a supposed sinister intent behind the demonstration. Incidentally, it served to discredit the recently assassinated mayor of Uruapan, Carlos Manzo, and, incredibly, to implicate Ricardo Salinas Pliego in the conspiracy, thus introducing the new target of hatred for the Morena regime. The President used her daily press conference to include these arguments throughout the week leading up to the demonstration. The objective was to create an alibi that would distance the government from what it knew was coming.
Important in this process was the government’s call to the CNTE (National Coordinator of Education Workers) to start stirring things up in the plaza. Conveniently, they clashed with the riot police, but only briefly. This was an exercise in justifying the presence of an army of riot police in the plaza. The march proceeded along Reforma Avenue in an orderly fashion. However, it was accompanied by hundreds, possibly more than a thousand, riot police, ready for the operation to be carried out later.
Then came the trap, structured in such a way that the columns of people would inevitably fall into the ambush that had been set for them. The government blocked all avenues leading into the Zócalo, forcing the 200,000 people walking to a narrow bottleneck at the entrance on 5 de Mayo Street, near the corner of the cathedral. Entry was therefore slow and delayed the entire contingent’s arrival in the city center. Ultimately, many couldn’t even get in, as the next stage of the ambush began quickly, including the use of tear gas.
With a significant number of people already in the Zócalo, groups from the so-called Black Bloc, an organization fostered by members of the Mexico City police, began to act, attacking the barricades, with the intention of ensuring a continuous situation of violence and chaos. While the genuine attendees of the event called on the violent groups to cease their attacks, singing the national anthem, the Black Bloc escalated the violence. What was their objective? Obviously, it was to create the conditions for the police to intervene en masse across the entire Zócalo plaza to disperse the demonstration. It also aimed to prevent the remaining groups still outside the Zócalo from entering. In other words, to reduce the number of people present so they could claim, as the city government did, that there were “only 17,000 protesters,” as if that number justified the repression.
The ambush and the repression worked. The police literally evicted everyone from the Zócalo plaza with blows, behavior unseen in Mexico since the 1968 student movement and the Corpus Christi Massacre of 1971. When López Obrador occupied the plaza in the 1990s, he was treated so kindly that he was paid millions of pesos to go home.
The government’s anger with the protesters is understandable. They were shouting “narco-government,” “Claudia resign,” and “Carlos didn’t die, the State killed him.” But the preparation for the ambush and the repression began long before the march.
The organizers from Generation Z will have gained at least two valuable insights from this entire experience. First, they are facing a government willing to violently repress opposition movements to remain in power. The government has been exposed. And second, that there is a critical mass of millions of citizens throughout the country who are opposed to violence and government corruption, firmly supporting the idea of democratic change.
For these reasons, the march was a political success.
@rpascoep
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