Over the weekend, thousands gathered in Mexico City to protest against the left-wing government of President Claudia Sheinbaum and the ruling Morena party. These so-called Gen-Z protests, which featured violent clashes with the police, were animated by grievances including cartel violence, narco-corruption, and, for a smaller subset, extremist politics. The protests were larger and more violent than anyone expected, and they represent the largest show of public opposition towards Sheinbaum’s presidency to date.
Violent protest isn’t uncommon in Mexico, particularly from fringe radicals in the nation’s capital. The day after Sheinbaum’s 2024 inauguration, anti-government leftists and anarchists threw makeshift explosives at the presidential palace in commemoration of the 1968 Tlatelolco massacre of student protestors. In Mexico City that day, standing next to graffiti denouncing “Zionist Sheinbaum,” one protestor explained to me that Morena was bourgeois and not authentically left-wing. Mexico’s radical feminist movement has also been a perpetual thorn in the ruling party’s side, at times resorting to violence; earlier this year, feminist protestors beat male pedestrians that stumbled into a local square in Guadalajara after declaring it a female-only space.