Free The Interior Circuit: A Mexico City Chronicle by Francisco Goldman Page A

their votes and turn in empty ballots, a position that made sense to many. The PRD’s Andrés Manuel López Obrador, “AMLO,” had barely lost the 2006 presidential election—he may actually have won it—and had stubbornly contested its outcome, vociferously alleging fraud, and then had finally had himself inaugurated as president in a ludicrous parallel ceremony that made him seem somewhat unhinged, or that at least made it easy for his enemies to portray him as unhinged. But heading into the summer elections of 2012, López Obrador remained the unchallenged leader of Mexico’s left, with millions of ardent supporters. It couldn’t be denied that his term as jefe de gobierno of the DF, from 2000 to 2006, had been a significant success. Nor could it be denied that for years he’d been the only major political figure articulating a political agenda on behalf of Mexico’s poor, or that he is a tireless, grimly determined campaigner, endlessly visiting remote corners of the republic bypassed by other candidates. López Obrador had arisen from the PRI as a politician, and perhaps this was a source of his seemingly autocratic political personality. His speaking style is so ponderous that, after the first of the summer’s televised presidential debates, people joked that the on-screen interpreter for the deaf looked like someone practicing tai chi. Among students there was a widespread feeling that none of the three major presidential candidates offered a solution to Mexico’s problems and that all three represented only the continuation of an entrenched, corrupt, moribund political system. It was the political system, some students believed, and most immediately the electoral process, with its sinister and compliant relationship to the country’s dominant media powers, that needed to be challenged. Now those media powers wanted the restoration of the PRI, auguring a demoralizing step backward for Mexico. Guillermo Osorno, my downstairs neighbor and editorial director of the influential magazine Gatopardo, wrote a closely observed piece for it on the birth and struggles of the student movement. Osorno reported that the day after students had driven Peña Nieto from La Ibero, a student from another elite private university, Antonio Attolini, who would soon emerge as the movement’s most visible leader, had written a blog post, “Wake-Up Alarm: EPN [Peña Nieto] in LA IBERO.” In it, Attolini criticized those establishment political institutions that had given Peña Nieto a free pass for what had occurred in Atenco, rather than calling him to account for those crimes and even bringing him to justice. “The criticism should be directed not at the candidate, but at the formalisms employed by the supreme court in the Atenco case.” It was a student at the also private, elite Tec de Monterrey who posted a tweet reading, “#YoSoy132” (#IAm132). The still unorganized movement sparked by those 131 Ibero students, which came alive and spread with such extraordinary quickness, thus found a perfect name nearly as quickly, one that resonated and captured imaginations outside the student world. (Within weeks, wrote Osorno, marchers at Mexico City’s annual gay parade would be sporting the #YoSoy132 insignia, on armbands and posters, writing it across their bared chests and bellies.) #YoSoy132 would become Mexico’s first mass student movement since that of 1968, which came to a symbolic end on October 2 of that same year with the massacre by soldiers of peaceful protesters assembled in the plaza of the Tlatelolco housing complex, when a still unknown number of students and other citizens, including children, as many as four hundred, were murdered, though afterward the PRI went on murdering and repressing students for years. The PRI knows how to do what it knows how to do—twelve years out of power wouldn’t have erased that. The Ibero students who’d bravely indentified themselves in the YouTube video soon began receiving