Report
Mexico suffers from a resilient tradition of impunity: the propensity of rulers and contenders alike to place themselves above the law. The student movement of the 1960s and 1970s carried the torch against impunity, but was brutally repressed. In 1989 the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) was formed to carry on the struggle, but by 2008, as the party’s “tribes” vie for power, the PRD itself has reverted to the tradition of impunity within its own internal politics.
Elaine Carey and José Agustín Román Gaspar
Gerardo Rénique and Deborah Poole
Following a brutal attack on an encampment of striking schoolteachers in the city of Oaxaca, Oaxacans came together to demand the resignation of Ulises Ruiz Ortíz, the latest in a series of famously corrupt governors from the Institutional Revolutionary Party. Although Ruiz remains in power, the movement that took shape in the summer of 2006 continues to thrive in the form of recurring mobilizations, collective initiatives, and political debates.
In the face of Mexican authorities’ indifference to the serial murders of young women in Ciudad Juárez, mothers of the victims have formed organizations devoted to recovering the bodies of their daughters and seeking just punishment for those responsible. Two of those organizations are Justice for Our Daughters and Our Daughters Return Home.
After breaking with longtime allies, Subcomandante Marcos and the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) no longer rally widespread support. The breach has grown since 2001, when the Mexican Congress, with support from the left, passed a law that stopped short of recognizing full indigenous autonomy. Marcos called leftist politicians “traitors” to the indigenous cause, while many on the left saw Marcos as suffering from “radical self-importance.”