The USA faces a high-stakes, weighty-consequences election in the fall — Obama or Romney. I believe the results will affect me very directly.
But there’s another consequential election close by. And it’s this summer — on July 1. I believe its results will affect me quite directly, albeit not as much as so as the Presidential election here in the States.
With signs shouting “No to repression!” and “Down with the PRI!” the angry students who have taken the streets of Mexico with flash protests have become the most visible face of youth in this election.
They have challenged the presidential candidates to debates, urged others their age to pay attention to the campaign, and sought to fight off the return of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, which held power for 71 years until its ouster in 2000.
The college students marching in the protests are among the most privileged of the 24 million young people registered to cast ballots on July 1. At the other end of the spectrum sit the majority of Mexico’s young who live in poverty, did not graduate from high school, and earn less than $10 a day.
But unlike the elections of 2000, when a majority of young voters agreed that the PRI had to go, this election season has seen a sharp division among youth along class lines. Educated voters in this demographic are opposed to the return of the PRI, while the rest of the voters aged 18 to 29 prefer the candidacy of Enrique Pena Nieto over his two major rivals. […]
Though they lack consensus over who to choose for president, Mexican young people have much at stake. They suffer from the nation’s highest rates of poverty and unemployment, and are the main victims of the six-year-long war against drugs that has left some 50,000 people dead.
“I think they have higher expectations that they deserve better than this,” said Rodrigo Aguilera, the Mexico analyst for the Economist Intelligence Unit.
The protesters reject Pena Nieto for his party’s past. But like young people in general, they are also disillusioned with the ruling National Action Party, or PAN, which launched the drug war that has become frighteningly brutal. Nor have they been swayed by the position of the left, led by Lopez Obrador, the former Mexico City mayor.
“Now you don’t even know who to root for,” said Mario Luna Perez, a 27-year-old father of two who quit school after sixth grade and lives in an economically depressed town on the outskirts of Mexico City. “It’s all the same, no matter who the president is.” […]
“The time PAN was in power, there were a lot of deaths. When PRI ruled, we didn’t see that.”
Two big nations, two close neighbors, two sinking societies, two high-impact elections, two seemingly-dreary sets of choices — how should I pray?