"We are the children of the ideals you couldn’t kill.”
A young woman carried the hand-lettered sign as she marched with tens of thousands of people in Mexico City last July 22. Twenty-something, with long black hair and jeans, her message captures the spirit and sense of history of Mexico’s new movement for real democracy. At the same time, it reveals the resentment that especially youth feel about the presidential elections and a new government that for them representsan era of manipulation and repression.
Weeks after Mexico’s presidential elections, thousands of people have turned out to protest the declared winner, Enrique Peña Nieto, and the imminent return to power of the party that ruled Mexico for more than seven decades. The Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, which is slated to take office December 1, now faces increasing accusations of fraud, a legal demand to declare the elections invalid, and a youth movement that refuses to go away.