You can listen to excellent analyses of Yo Soy 132 and Mexican media and politics by Ian Masters, Pau Santoyo, André Dorcé, and Anne-Marie O’Connor here [ht: tm].
Toby Miller provides some background:
Mexico’s presidential elections were held on Sunday. During the campaign, the frontrunner, and eventual winner, Enrique Pena Nieto was shouted down while speaking at the Universidad Iberoamericana. The crowd objected to his authoritarian past as a state governor.
Pena Nieto left in a rush and his aides claimed the hecklers were not students but agitators paid by a leftist opponent to disrupt proceedings. The bourgeois media reported this claim as fact and declared the visit a triumph.
So what did the allegedly faux students do?
In best new media fashion, 131 of them appeared on YouTube brandishing student IDs and denying they had been paid or encouraged to protest. Pena Nieto’s apparatchiks, and leading journalists, looked like amateurs.
And so was born the Twitter hash tag #yosoy132: “I’m 132″.
Number 132 refers to anyone moved to participate by the example of the 131.
It’s like that moment in Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus when the slaves are asked to identify the leader of their revolt? Each one replies “I’m Spartacus”.
Students from 119 universities, both private and public, have joined the campaign, along with artists, professors, and journalists.
So have veterans of the Tlatelolco massacre, when protesters were mowed down by the military just before the 1968 Olympics.
Yo Soy 132′s June rallies in Mexico City attracted tens of thousands of people.
Reblogged this on NonviolentConflict.