Students Bring New Voices to Presidential Contest Sandra Dibble - San Diego Union-Tribune | |
go to original June 24, 2012 |
Tijuana students hold up protest signs and their ID cards during a recent demonstration in the city's Rio Zone. (Omar Martinez/Frontera)
TIJUANA — Their tools are Twitter, Facebook and YouTube — and in a matter of weeks, they have sparked widespread interest in what had been a fairly uneventful Mexican presidential campaign. A student movement that took off in Mexico City last month has won followers in Tijuana and other northern cities as the nation prepares for the July 1 election.
Participants are promoting the vote, lambasting Mexico’s powerful Televisa network and criticizing polls showing the person most likely to win is Enrique Peña Nieto, a member of Mexico’s Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). Many of them fiercely reject PRI’s portrayals of the 45-year-old candidate as an agent of change and fear a return of the party, which ruled Mexico for 71 years until losing the presidency in 2000, would represent a move back to the country’s authoritarian past.
Largely middle class and well-educated, members of the movement — known by the hashtag #yosoy132 — have also staged marches against Televisa, which they accuse of blatantly supporting the PRI's bid for the presidency. This week, they hosted a presidential debate broadcast live on the Internet; Peña Nieto declined to attend.
Mass events promoted by #yosoy132 have drawn crowds of tens of thousands in Mexico City, while far smaller groups of supporters have gathered in cities as far away as Ciudad Juarez and Monterrey. The largest event so far in Tijuana — a march on June 10 — drew fewer than 1,000 people. Despite their distance from the country's capital, participants in Tijuana say they are quickly linked through social media to a national cause.
In Baja California, as political parties make their final campaign push, brigades of #yosoy132 members plan to show up today at Tijuana’s busiest intersections to distribute information about the four candidates and urge voters to analyze the different options.
“What’s moving us is a feeling of being fed-up,” said Patricia Garibi, 21, a communications major at the Autonomous University of Baja California in Tijuana. She was interviewed with other #yosoy132 members before their live appearance last week on the TV station Sintesis.
“We need to break through this system of paternalism,” said Daniel Domínguez, 26, a computer engineer in Tijuana.
The movement is amorphous and fast-changing, and the message isn’t always the same: While many members openly oppose Peña Nieto and the PRI, others insist they are simply pushing for greater democracy and access to information.
The group has suffered internal disputes and been the target of outside criticism. Detractors said its participants are being manipulated by the country’s left — used to promote the candidacy of Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who has been running second in the polls.
Political analysts said it’s unlikely that Peña Nieto’s strong lead will be reversed. Still, pollster Roy Campos of Mexico City-based Consulta Mitofsky calls the rise of #yosoy132 “the most important event of this campaign.”
The movement mushroomed on the heels of Peña Nieto’s May 11 visit to the Jesuit-run Universidad Iberoamericana campus in Mexico City, where the candidate was jeered by students who accused him of backing police brutality during the 2006 Atenco protests while he was governor of Mexico state.
Read more at The San Diego Union-Tribune
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