After the Mexican Election, Where Does the #YoSoy132 Movement Go?

A Hidden Victory in What the Media Paints as a Defeat

By Isadora Bonilla
Special to The Narco News Bulletin

July 5, 2012

For many, the #YoSoy132 movement suffered a defeat on Sunday. One of its goals and a pillar of its platform was to impede that the mass media imposes a president through its brainwashing campaign.

The vote counting hadn’t yet finished and Peña Nieto had already boasted of having won the election. Well, we already knew that a fraud was coming and many of us are not surprised. We personally knew that the PRI party was capable of imposing electoral fraud, and not only by allowing the manipulation of the computers and the irregularities in each polling station. It had all the money in the country for its campaign of vote-buying and paternalism in a land where many become disillusioned because when the PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party) dictatorship fell in 2000 things did not get better. The regime of the PAN (National Action Party) brought 90,000 deaths and the new “left” proved to be as corrupt and yet less hopeful than the old one.

Better the devil one knows than the one yet unknown. While some get depressed and lose hope, or head off to a protest march to show their discontent, and feel defeated after participating in so many leaflet brigades, we think that what could seem like a grand defeat for the 132 movement can be converted into a victory.

One of the major demands of the movement was for the democratization of the media.

Given that reality – in spite of the challenge and recount of the electoral irregularities – the best that can be done is reinforce the image of fraudulent elections. It would be good to look ahead toward the panorama in which we already have, at least, a president who is clearly spurious once again.

Citizens support the march against the fraud of the elections from their balcony. DR 2012 Alejandro Meléndez Ortiz.

The great achievement of the movement has been to make enormously visible the role
of the powerful forces behind the TV networks. Yes, six years ago not all the current participants of 132 went out into the streets against the then-unanimously passed Televisa Law. Today, however, there is a critical mass that has lit up the slumbering public space and the rejection of the television duopoly in Mexico can finally be clearly seen.

This is not about “entertaining” a “working” and “festive” population as Televisa would like us to believe ever since it came out of its cradle of cheap and vulgar spectacle. It is about justifying through its news anchors and soap operas an economic and political system that values exploitation, looting and the implantation of a lifestyle that works perfectly for a small group of business magnates that, year after year, maintains its slaves in misery while it built its successful business to construct a telecracy. But we all already knew that.

The fact of having made visible a problem as serious as that of our country, where the majority is hypnotized by the idiot box, is a huge success. And it is an even greater achievement that the fraudulent elections and absolutely all the small and large events of July 1 have proved the 132 movement to have been right.

We are not merely protesters, nor are we solely against a Peña Nieto presidency (a cause that we view as lost and that we must rise above with inspiration). We are a critical mass that has been able to remove the blindfold from the eyes of many and we are capable of looking our adversary in the eye without being afraid.

The Telecracy is the new main target of the movement. We must be capable of acting in an organized manner and within our real possibilities. Strategy is, remember, acting with a cool mind.

They have the media of manipulation. We have a very big truth and a the creativity that can rise above the post-electoral depression and put new goals forward, always articulately and nonviolently. It doesn’t matter how long it takes; haste is not a good advisor. The PRI has spent years building its network, eyes and resources to be able to win its goal. It will likewise take us years and that’s the only way we will achieve anything. Making better media, better political conscience in society, demanding with teeth and claws a better educational opportunity and a long shopping list of demands.

If we act in a way that burns us out, with daily marches, without planning, for example, we will be giving them the victory of seeing us weakened when a movement principally made of students hits the wall of a monster that has been invisible up to now: the return of classes in the fall.

Peña Nieto stole the presidency, which shows that we were correct when we said he would. In that sense, we have gained respect and credibility, and we continue moving forward.

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