For the moment there is no smoking gun. But the US is clearly, wilfully destabilising the country. And this effort predates Trump 2.0.
On Saturday (Nov 15), as NC’s well-attuned readers will already know, dozens of “Gen Z” protests took place across Mexico’s cities. A few of them — including the biggest one, in Mexico City — erupted into violence. Far-right voices on social media heralded the violent protests as an uprising against Mexico’s cartel-controlled government.
Meanwhile, many pro-government supporters as well as anti-globalist commentators have warned that another US-backed colour revolution could be in the offing.
Some of the demonstrators carried the “One Piece” pirate flag that has become a global symbol of recent youth protests, including in Nepal, which brought down the sitting government, Morocco, Paraguay and Peru.
The main event took place in Mexico City, where the protesters failed to come even close to filling the city’s main square, the Zocolo, that is home to Mexico’s seat of government, the Palacio Nacional. This is perhaps no surprise given Mexico City’s Zocolo is one of the world’s largest city squares with an estimated capacity of around 200,000 people.
Here’s a time-lapse video of the Zocolo for the entirety of the demonstration, from around 12 pm to around 5pm. Estimates suggest that a total of around 17,000 people, many of them not members of Generation Z, participated in the march — in a city with an estimated population of around 22 million.
In other words, the protesters currently represent a very small but extremely vocal minority. That does not mean that the importance of these protests should be minimised. Mexico’s Gen Z, like young people everywhere, do have genuine grievances, including high levels of unemployment, rising costs, particularly for housing, and, of course, crime and insecurity.
One of the main catalysts for the protest movement’s relative success, though it occurred days after the march was first called, was the assassination on Mexico’s Day of the Dead (Nov 1) of Carlos Manzo, the independent mayor of Uruapan, a small town in Michoacan, one of the country’s most dangerous states.
Before his death, Manzo had called for a more aggressive approach to the war against the drug cartels, including the shooting on sight of drug traffickers and the arming of the general populace. He had also warned of the proliferation of military training camps in the Uruapan region manned by Colombian and Venezuelan mercenaries.
Manzo had asked for more security from the federal government but none was forthcoming. This has prompted accusations, including from Manzo’s grandmother who was at the march, that members of the governing MORENA party, including the former governor of Michoacan of Leonel Godoy Rangel, were behind the assassination.
As I said, there are serious grievances. At the same time, five surveys conducted between January and October 2025 by three different institutions show that Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo’s approval rating among Gen Z citizens ranges from 71% to 86%. This suggests that, in general terms, the president enjoys the broad support of this age group.
As many have pointed out on social media, there was a disproportionately large number of grey-hairs at an event whose age range was supposed to be 13-28. They included the former president Vicente Fox, a fervent opponent of Mexico’s governing MORENA party who appears to have made a sharp exit when things got ugly. Here is Fox wearing his One Piece t-shirt:
Violence, the Order of the Day
If the main goal of the march was to further destabilise Mexico and undermine its government’s authority, then one can argue that the mission was accomplished. As promised and feared beforehand, violence was to be the order of the day.
One of the most disturbing pieces of footage I have seen so far is of a tattooed individual repeatedly yelling at a line of lightly armed riot police officers as they enter the square: “You’re going to die, we’re armed! You’re going to die, we’re armed.”
The man in question looks more like a member of the so-called “Zetas”, the notorious, now-defunct paramilitary organisation whose explosion on the scene in the early 2000s significantly escalated the violence in Mexico, than Generation Z.
Much of the talk on social media before the protest was of storming the barricades and toppling the government. The protesters certainly stormed the barriers surrounding the palace, some even armed with metal cutters. Riot police officers were pelted with stones and rocks, and some, like the one in the video below, were even battered with metal poles, chains or other makeshift weapons.
The violence was met with more violence:
According to official figures that have been cited in global media outlets, of the 120 people who were injured, 100 were police officers, of whom 40 required hospital treatment for bruises and cuts. If these figures are accurate, they are the opposite of what one would normally expect from a large, violent protest: normally, it is the protesters who bear the brunt of the violence.
The Sheinbaum government and its supporters have tried to play down the size of the protests while emphasising the broad demographics of the protesters. However, by doing so it risks coming off as aloof and disinterested in the genuine grievances of the protesters and thus playing right into the organisers’ hands.
Presumably, their goal was to generate images of violence and repression that could be beamed around the world, especially in the US thus reinforcing the impression of Mexico as a lawless, ungovernable country. All it needs now is for the media to treat the so-called black block vandals as “anti-cartel rebels” and the narrative is set.
Youth. Spontaneous. Apolitical. Crime and Corruption. Narcos. Those are the keywords of the coverage. And as the LA Times reported on Sunday, the “Gen Z” protests are “gain[ing] momentum”.
But Who Is Actually Behind the Protests?
The Gen Z Mexico movement has been treated by many international media as a spontaneous movement similar to those that have already shaken Nepal, Madagascar or Morocco. However, an investigation by Infodemia – the Mexican government unit dedicated to analysing disinformation – believes it was an “articulated digital strategy” funded by domestic and international far-right organisations.
Interestingly, the Twitter/X account that became one of the main social media channels for the march, @GeneracionZmx_, was initially set up in August 2024 and was more or less inactive until November 13, when it began promoting the protest. In the preceding 14 months, it shared a grand total of just five posts, four of which were about Venezuela’s contested elections. One shared an interview with the US’ current regime change agent, Maria Corina Machado:
From El País (machine translated):
The [Infodemia] report points to influencers, opposition figures and accounts linked to Atlas Network, an ultra-capitalist US-based lobby founded in the early eighties that now has a presence in more than 100 countries. According to the report, in the last month and a half, more than 90 million Mexican pesos (about five million dollars) have been invested in promoting [last Saturday’s] march.
The official investigation also indirectly points to the owner of the TV Azteca television station, Ricardo Salinas Pliego. This Thursday, the Supreme Court ruled against him after years of litigation, ordering him to settle an outstanding tax bill of around 50 billion pesos (around $3 billion). The setback intensified the debate over Salinas Pliego’s alleged role in funding digital campaigns criticising President Claudia Sheinbaum.
Salinas Pliego is the closest thing Mexico has to a Trump-like figure — someone in the billionaire class with a gargantuan ego who aspires to become president of the nation one day. Like Trump, he’s had his fair share of brushes with the law, including the US justice system where he is under investigation for the unpaid debts of his Mexican banking group, Banco Azteca.
Through his TV channels, Salinas Pliego is now presenting the Gen-Z march as a spontaneous, youth-led, apolitical movement that ended in a brutal crackdown by a “narco state”.
It’s also worth noting that key opposition figures in Mexico have also called for violence or a “dirty war” against Sheinbaum. During the run-up to last year’s presidential elections, Jorge Romero, the national coordinator of the National Action Party, or PAN, said the following:
We in the opposition are very conscious that we have in front of us someone who is two metres tall… What we need in the opposition is violence.
Meet Mexico’s Machado
Another prominent figure in Mexico’s “resistance” movement is Senator Lilly Tellez, who, like Maria Corina Machado, has repeatedly called for US intervention in Mexico. Here she is telling FOX News that “help from the United States to fight the cartels is absolutely welcome, and that is how the majority of Mexicans feel.”
However, as the Mexican journalist Jesus Escobar Tovar notes, people like Salinas Pliego and Tellez are merely useful idiots serving the interests of the United States. And the ultimate goal of the US is to create an atmosphere of “controlled chaos” in Mexico, and one could also argue, Colombia (translated by yours truly):
What the system wants to create is controlled chaos, not a people that rise up. A people that rise up is not controlled chaos, it’s a genuine threat to the State. That’s why there are not going to provoke such a scenario; but they can generate a level of instability that can lead the population itself to seek to topple a government. That’s what we’re seeing…
These useful “idiots play” into the US’ hands by creating an atmosphere of chaos, of uncontrolled violence, a situation in which people think they living through the worst of times… These groups begin to operate locally, they try to convince the people that Sheinbaum is a failure,… that the government is incapable of dealing with the challenge in front of it.
This plan is not created by someone like Salinas Pliego or Lilly Tellez; it is created by an ambassador like Ron Johnson who is well-versed in these sorts of things.
From Green Beret to CIA Agent, to US Ambassador
As readers may recall, Ron Johnson is the former CIA agent and Green Beret who is currently serving as US ambassador in Mexico. During his military service (1984-98), Johnson led combat operations in El Salvador during the 1980s, serving as one of 55 U.S. military advisers to the Salvador Army during the Salvadoran Civil War. Here are the sort of things the Salvadorian death squads used to do under US supervision during the war:
During the first Trump administration, Johnson returned to El Salvador as US ambassador where he struck up a very close friendship with the country’s strongman President Nayib Bukele.
At the end of his two-year tour, Johnson was presented with the National Order of José Matías Delgado, one of the country’s highest decorations. He also became the first person to receive the Grand Order of Francisco Morazán, an insignia created expressly to distinguish his brief stay in the country.
In September, a report in ProPublica alleges that Ambassador Johnson helped to shield Bukele from homegrown investigations into an agreement he had struck with senior gang members of MS-13. The US diplomat also played a key role in “elevating Bukele’s status among Republicans and thus preparing the ground for deporting immigrants to a Salvadoran prison”.
We are only now beginning to see the fruits of that endeavour…
Nick Corbishley 