This article by Hermann Bellinghausen originally appeared in the November 16, 2025 edition of La Jornada, Mexico’s premier left wing daily newspaper.
Yesterday in Mexico City the ended with a shock group tearing down barriers and attempting to enter the National Palace. The march had been labeled as a “Gen Z” march, but was quickly revealed to be an astroturfed project by the usual group of right wingers from the dejected opposition parties of PAN, PRI and PRD. The organizers banned Palestinian flags and demands for the 40 hour work week. Consequentially, the actual march, which began at the Angel of Independence, was dominated by the upper middle class and the very elderly, Catholic iconography and anti-Communist signs and ranchers’ hats. The outright violent tactics appear to mark another degenerative lurch for Mexico’s opportunistic right wing, which despite dominating corporate media and the business sector, has been unable to attract anyone but
Mexico City. People were furious, no doubt about it. But it’s still surprising that an explicitly right-wing and defiant march, carrying images of Our Lady of Guadalupe and white banners, provided the impetus and context for attacking—with firecrackers, rockets, stones, and smoke bombs—the Metropolitan Cathedral, which, like everything else in the perimeter of the Plaza de la Constitución, was protected by a high iron wall, eloquent in itself.
The most striking thing was that the same protesters who were shouting “we want peace” were celebrating the violent harassment of the Catholic church and the National Palace.
In the square, it was all insults. Some might say that’s just how political protests are, although the tone here was quite personal, expressing visceral hatred for the President with fantasies of humiliation.
One of the more prominent wranglers of yesterday’s geriatrics, who appears to be about 70 years old.
“Bring her out and strip her naked!” shouted a man next to his wife. “Her breasts are jiggling in there!” yelled another gentleman, wearing a white shirt and a rancher’s hat (a boss’s hat, that is). With little sisterhood, some women rudely mocked the president’s thinness.
61 year old Guadalupe Acosta Naranjo, owner of many curiously expensive properties.
The hats were selling for 150 pesos on a makeshift stall. The vendor made a killing. Television reports insisted there were children and families present, but I honestly saw very few minors. Thankfully. There was a lot of hostility in the air.
With calls for “unity” against the “fucking narco-government,” thousands of protesters, some dressed in white and others in all black (as if they couldn’t agree on the color), marched from the Angel of Independence to the Zócalo. The main organizer had suggested days earlier on his television station that they should seize the National Palace “like in Nepal” (where the government palace was set on fire). Several groups of young people, let’s say a few dozen, wanted to take him up on his suggestion, pushing against the barricades as soon as the plaza began to fill with protesters.
Slogans against “the parties” were shouted. Some signs equated the PRIAN, Morena, and MC parties. As is often the case in these marches, they didn’t appear to belong to grassroots organizations. If one were to ask a sociologist, one could identify a class-based content, from the middle class and up, which is assumed to represent “the people” that the government “refuses to listen to.”
Successive, well-organized groups of masked individuals attacked the fences surrounding the National Palace. Using hammers and sledgehammers, they broke up cobblestones and hurled them at the fences. They also ripped out heavy drain covers for the same purpose. The firecrackers, some of them very loud, sent the frightened crowd fleeing, but the people in the plaza cheered with each attack.
Fernando Belaunzarán (55), Lourdes Mendoza (a lady never tells), and Emilio Álvarez Icaza Longoria (60).
The police, still hidden behind the wall, began responding to the firecrackers with stones and tear gas. The makeshift firework set up by the protesters on the south corner of the Palace billowed out a lot of smoke. I saw a news report on a screen accusing the protesters of “repression and provocation of Generation Z” even before the police came out to repel the attackers with shields and batons, and eventually clear the plaza.
The crowd was overjoyed when, after nearly an hour of siege, the young men managed to pry a couple of iron blocks loose. At another point, they hooked a chain onto the barrier, and dozens of people joined in to pull, without success. A few steps away, peaceful protesters watched, took pictures, and applauded, while accusing the government of cowardice for not coming out.
Generation Z was outnumbered by their elders, but parents, grandparents, and uncles dedicated the march to them, as if to offer encouragement. “Oppressor,” “murderer,” and other such epithets were accompanied on Cinco de Mayo by the nostalgic ballads of Molotov—pretty cool. National flags overlapped, and the skull with a hat from the anime One Piece was carried by adults who are unlikely to be familiar with the epic comic about Monkey D. Luffy.
“Claudia is worse than Trump!” an elderly woman shouted. An older gentleman waved a large Hispanic flag, longing for “Vasconcelos, who was a true humanist” and asserting that “these people are worse than the Jew Calles, who outlawed religion.” A young woman, on the verge of tears, with more words than ideas, denounced “the lack of freedom of expression” before the cameras of a commercial television channel. It was all so bizarre.
We went to the Generación Z demonstration to see what the younger generation had to say… pic.twitter.com/7hScdEkcp7
— Soberanía: The Mexican Politics Podcast (@SoberaniaPod) November 16, 2025
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