A Rough Guide to Obama’s Mexico Visit

Dissident teachers hold mass protest in Guerrero State against President Nieto’s education reform.

CIP AMERICAS Obama last visited Mexico during the G-20 summit in Los Cabos last June. He and his entourage will touch down again today for talks with Mexico’s new president, Enrique Peña Nieto. Since his election, Peña Nieto’s team has worked to shift media focus away from violence related to the drug war and towards …

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40,000 Zapatistas March peacefully on Five Chiapas Cities

OCCUPIED TUCSON CITIZEN Tim Russo reported in Upside Down World that 40,000 indigenous people marched to five cities in the Mexican state of Chiapas on December 21, 2012. They marched in the unseasonable rain, masked and unarmed, out of the jungles, in silence. They occupied the city squares of San Cristóbal de las Casas, Ocosingo, …

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Mexico’s 30-day lesson in democracy

Protests in Mexico 2012

OCCUPIED TUCSON CITIZEN On June 10, at 11:30 in the morning, Mexico City’s Zócalo Plaza began to fill with people wearing creative outfits and carrying posters and signs. Yo Soy 132 academics, Yo Soy 132 artists, the “free journalists 132” and everyday citizens — retirees, children, mothers and entire families — arrived from every corner …

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A Mexican Spring begins to blossom

Student protesters in Mexico City holding signs, "Estudiantes Informados Jamás Manipulados #YOSOY132"

OCCUPIED TUCSON CITIZEN(?) In Mexico City’s daily life — in the shops, taxicabs, cafes and lines waiting for the bus — one could hear conversations between people of all ages saying that Enrique Peña Nieto would, without a doubt, win the presidential elections. “Either something huge will happen,” a taxi driver told me, “or he …

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