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The month of March 2020 will be remembered as the moment in which the public perception of the Mexican Government of López Obrador changed due to its poor reaction to social movements that fall outside the framework of its elemental understanding of contemporary society and whose common denominator it is fed up in the face of violence and impunity. Not only the historical feminist mobilization of March 8 and 9 stands out, but also the least perceived national student mobilization against violence, which occurred on Thursday, March 5 in many cities of the country in protest against the murder of three medical students in the State of Puebla. These movements are added to the open field in the last ten years by the groups of relatives of victims of forced disappearance. Feminist movements, against forced disappearance and student movements, share their antisystemic character, horizontality in collective action, political autonomy and the lack of centralized leadership, all of which places them outside the clientelistic grammar and friendly logic. enemy that President López Obrador has defined as the only field of politics. The same applies to resistance movements against megaprojects, mining and predatory agriculture.
The feminist movement in Mexico is reaching the peak of its public role. The trigger for their action is fed up with gender violence, whose extreme manifestation is feminicide (which has been growing alarmingly), but also encompasses all forms of sexual harassment and persistent economic, political and access to opportunity inequality. labor and justice. It should be noted that for a couple of years the fight against gender violence in universities has reached a national dimension. The feminist strike on March 9 will mark a before and after in the history of this movement. The president's awkward reaction to a social initiative that escapes the monopoly of the "just" causes that the Government pretends to have and that is outside the political control of the 4T is an indicator of the limits of the concept of politics as a constant definition from friends and enemies, typical of any populist regime. The feminist movement is neither an enemy nor a friend of the Government. It is a civilizing movement, a historical fight against patriarchy that marks all social relations. The extreme violence suffered by women is the brutal manifestation of men's resistance to female empowerment. That violence is intolerable, as is the absolute impunity of the aggressors. The Government has no proposal to deal with this problem.
Student demonstrations against violence have long been taking place, in many ways, in almost the entire country and for various conjunctural reasons. Every month, for years, students have died from assaults, kidnappings, direct assaults and as collateral victims of criminal violence. In Mexico there is talk of "juvenicide" to indicate that the main victims of the generalized violence that the country suffers are young people. The recent murder of three medical students in a municipality of Puebla has been the trigger for a national student mobilization not seen since the marches demanding justice for the forced disappearance of students from the Ayotzinapa Normal School in 2014. Once again, This movement cannot be judged with friend-enemy logic. It is a movement articulated from the grassroots, via social networks, that channels a collective satiety with violence and with impunity for the violent.
The groups of relatives of victims of enforced disappearances continue their struggle demanding that the Government locate the 60,000 people officially recognized as disappeared. And although this month these groups will not have a special role, their members will be accompanying the feminist and student demonstrations, with which they coincide in demands. In their already long struggle, these collectives have also not fallen into the friend-enemy logic, nor have they managed to be clientelized, despite the efforts of all governments to divide and co-opt them. In addition, the groups refuse to accept the Government's intention to take the Ayotzinapa case as the only official concern, as if the attention of this case equaled the resolution of all other cases of enforced disappearance.
The peculiar form of populism of President López Obrador has been legitimized through the well-known formula of posing a friend-enemy conflict as the axis of politics. The "neo-liberal mafia", the "conservatives", are the enemies of the "good people". This town is represented by the president, and its enemies are incarnated in subjects that vary according to the conjunctural political needs. The feminist, student and family movements of the disappeared break that elementary dichotomy and raise demands for justice that the Government does not understand and does not respond to. All of them revolve around denouncing the persistence of impunity. This political blindness will have costs in terms of legitimation, and the lack of response can lead to a great national mobilization that articulates the various social movements.
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