The “official nonpartisan Generation Z movement,” says one person who identifies as an organizer, was formed and continues on Discord, a digital chat platform. But, she acknowledges, she was infiltrated by a PRI member. Then characters like Salinas Pliego hung themselves and amplified it with the help of the right-wing international network. For their part, young people who identify as anti-capitalists are also marching to demand labor and housing rights.
Mexico City, November 15 (However).– Unlike what they do in their virtual meetings in Discorda chat platform about video games, anime, technology, fandom and more, Leonardo connects his microphone, but also his camera for the Zoom interview. On the other side of the screen he shares that the call to demonstrate this Saturday arose in a community on that digital platform, but A young man from a PRI family sneaked in and finally leaders from the PRI, the PAN and even Ricardo Salinas Pliego they were robbed of their movement that they started, he claims, against the insecurity and corruption in Mexico.
“The official movement is very organic. There is going to be everything. That is, people with left-wing ideas as well as right-wing ideas and we are Mexicans. What we want is for all corruption and crime to end in this country. I am willing to put my face forward and lead the movement of the March of 15 so that this Government of damned corrupt people leaves, they are thieves, with the issue of the fiscal huachicol, La Barredora; it is a narco-government involved in organized crime. I want to be part of the opposition to this Government and the parties that are currently sitting within the Senate Chamber and the Supreme Court,” he said.
Leonardo is a 39-year-old Italian-Mexican. He laughs when he admits that he is not from Generation Z (born between 1996 and 2010), but he became the spokesperson for the march of the November 15 because, he says, no one else of the more than 2 thousand users in that group on Discord dares to show their real face beyond avatars and aliases. To enter that server you need an invitation link. So far, they have not met in person, they have only met through the chat-server microphone. This Saturday they will see each other.
At the same time, young people who describe themselves as anti-capitalists who demand labor rights (#40HorasYa) and decent housing instead of a Soccer World Cup, marched on November 8 in cities like CDMX and Guadalajara. They express their positions of class struggle and party anti-binaryism with memes, music and illustrations and come together – from the anarchists to the less radical – in the Memero Subversive Front.
They question that the November 15 march was co-opted by the international business right and, they criticize, it uses an anti-system symbol (the pirate flag from One Piece) to see if it works as it did for the far-right Argentine Javier Milei when he appropriated the anime character Pochita, a chainsaw, in his presidential campaign.
“That caught on there in Argentina and One Piece also came out in Nepal, well let’s see if it catches on here in Mexico. That international right hand in hand with Salinas Pliego, with Verástegui, they want to appropriate and instill these types of issues and they want to win over young people,” commented Carlos, from the Memero Subversive Front. “They are already strong right-wing, anti-immigrant, anti-social rights, against the LGBT community, against young people, against the most impoverished, most precarious sectors.”
Leonardo, from the 15N march, also went to the 8N march in CdMx just to see what was happening. He considers them “radical left” and says that this anime symbol was decided upon by the marches seen in Nepal.
The secret PRI member
In Mexico, this march of One Piece and artificial intelligence is one more attempt by the opposition bloc to adapt an international idea against the 4T Government that they conceive as “communist.”
In 2019, at the beginning of the Government of Andrés Manuel López Obrador, they tried with the French “Yellow Vests” movement and its spokesperson Alejandra Morán, but from France they distanced themselves from them. Then they jumped into the marches against the electoral and judicial reform with spokespersons such as the former president-adviser of the INE, Lorenzo Córdova or the historian Enrique Krauze. Then they tried with the pink tide led by Claudio X. González and, for now separated from the PRI and the PAN, the efforts are concentrated in the MAAC of Salinas Pliego; all of this amplified on social networks from trollcenters, half of them located and financed abroad as they are part of an international right-wing network.
“I’m not from Generation Z, but I got together with other young people, people younger than me, online, on Discord. So, we don’t know each other in person like that, well, live, and well, everything was organized through chat, that is, we should put an online ad, that’s how easy it is. And that’s how the movement began, it was founded, it went viral. The march started as non-partisan,” said Leonardo.
It is questioned that the Discord platform was used by Charlie Kirk, the Trump influencer murdered by another Trump supporter. But he says that there is everything on that platform and reiterates that they, the organic ones whose idea was stolen, are non-partisan.
“We want to create a horizontal citizen movement that has nothing to do with the current parties, they are all rotten to the core. We have nothing to do with Morena or with PRIAN or PRD or Movimiento Ciudadano. Obviously Salinas Pliego is going to try to use the movement for his interests, but we have absolutely nothing to do with Salinas Pliego, he is trying to bring people to do propaganda,” he says in a video call.
The user from a PRI family who sneaked in, he said, was expelled. But by then the X (formerly Twitter) user, Vato Montés, had already revealed it. On the social networks of “Generation Z Mexico” they were invited to join the Discord group, where they published the manifesto in pdf format, whose metadata showed that was created by Monetiq, an agency that helps monetize far-right media, which shares tax domicile with the former deputy of the PRI, José Alfredo Femat Flores.
On November 10, the X account “Generation Z Mexico” reported that the movement no longer had any group on Discord. “Any server that is circulating does not belong to this movement,” he published on
But Leonardo, who presents himself as one of the organic organizers of the 15N march, affirms that the official non-partisan movement continues on the Discord chat platform.
–Currently we only have, we use Discord. There are like 2,500 people, well, 2,200. We have not met live, that is, we communicate through Discord, we hold meetings only through microphone. Only one person showed his face, I don’t know his name, I only know him by his nickname. The people in there don’t want to show their faces because they know the risks.
–This “Generation Z Mexico” account that I see on Twitter, are you behind that one? –he was asked.
–One of the people who created the original Discord page and that Twitter page was not nonpartisan, he was a PRI infiltrator. Well, from a PRI family and, as we realized, we excluded him from the group. He has his page on X, but the official nonpartisan movement is on Discord. This person asks for the same thing, that the Government resign, but we do not trust people who are involved in parties, so we isolate him.
–I ask because on this Twitter account, if you go to the beginning, before they only tweeted things against Venezuela, Maduro and so on. And starting in October he starts publishing things from here in Mexico.
-Clear. We are not involved with them. We have nothing to do with politics, with the country’s foreign policy. It is a movement that was born entirely in Mexico, we are not involved, we do not receive funds from any foreign organization or anything – he insisted when referring to the initial movement before it was stolen.
March of 8N and 15N
Both Discord users and anti-capitalist young people have a common position: acting against structural and partisan violence that violates human rights such as a living wage with non-slavery working hours, as well as against insecurity and narcopolitics. They see them as “the enemy” (neofascists), they see them as “a mafia” (“narcoterrorists”).
But among them they see differences: those of the November 15 demonstration, say those of 8N, act more out of anger against the federal government, which was capitalized by the international business right “to use young people as cannon fodder.”
Those of 8N, which those of 15N see as radical left, criticize certain points of Claudia Sheinbaum’s Government, such as extending the reduction of the working day from 48 to 40 hours until 2030 at the request of businessmen, but they do not have the international networks that finance trolls to amplify their messages.
“The parties that are already in the Government are going to try to appoint one of their own and the situation is not really going to change,” says Leonardo of the 15N march. Paula, a young woman from Guadalajara who defends the class struggle, says for her part: “What is at stake are the structures and not fashion, they do not want to let the old fall, because otherwise how are they going to continue having all this control.”
Leonardo adds: “Let’s see if something can be done (he proposes the revocation of the mandate) so that not the same parties as always, the PRIAN, Morena and all the others stop controlling the country because it is literally a mafia, that is, the level of impunity is very high. Something has to be done for the country (…) The criticism of Artificial Intelligence is the Government that is only trying to throw dirt on the movement, but we know that is not true, you will see it on the 15th,” concludes the user of Discord.
Carlos, co-founder of Marxismo Ilustrado who marched on Saturday the 8th, adds from CDMX: “We have no affinity with the federal government, but we are not like the march they are calling for on the 15th, which is like ‘we are going against Claudia Sheinbaum’, ‘we are going against the federal government’, ‘we are going to attack or seek its revocation’ or burn down the Palace; all these quite visceral ideas do not fit there. Without a doubt we have criticisms of the Government such as the 40 (working) hours are being extended until the end of the six-year term with the permission of businessmen; we complain that social programs are not enough, they have to be more; we complain that housing is sky high, against gentrification. We demand all of this from the 4T, from the federal government, state or local governments.
From Guadalajara, where on November 8 about 150 young people marched between antigenrification cumbias and ska music towards the historic center, Paula highlights that it was without money involved and with a call a few days in advance. That Saturday at the Parque Rojo kiosk they gathered with an open microphone to read their petition and vent their demands.
He agrees: “what the march of the 15th calls for is to use us as cannon fodder, to send us nothing more to do their job because if they are so worried about the future, as many media mention, why from the beginning Ricardo Salinas or the media that are calling them are saying that they are not going to go, because they know the danger that entails. Apart from the fact that there is a plan behind and the only thing they are using is the anger of the young people and they are holding on to it, but no “They are having a clear position. They just say that enough is enough with the violence and the revocation of Claudia Sheinbaum’s mandate, but they are not even having slogans, they are not informing young people more and they are all repeating the same speech.”