I remember the moment exactly.

We were in the restaurant, all posh menu and half-attentive service, talking about the election due on July 1st. The delicious guacamole had gone and we were surrounded by twenty five giant screens heaped high with lazy soap operas, old world cup goals and adverts showing white women making up. The staff held the remote control, bewitched, watching the latest while we waited for the bill. And waited. Everything was as normal.

It was May 12th 2012, seven weeks to the presidential election. Disillusion was spreading like glutinous fat on the waistline. Why were there no manifestos? Exactly, someone said. It’s all verbal. Promises. Wishes. Nothing concrete. Why were there no debates? In the towns, the municipios, the squares and parks – the stage was empty of politics. No public meetings? Ah, well, you see... Someone said that something like that had happened once.

Nowadays two channels control the freeview and they decide what is news for the majority. There had been the officially run and sterile presidential debate on the 6th May with pre-rehearsed segments from each candidate. No interrogation. One channel proposed showing a football match at the same time because it owns a club. The event itself was disrupted and distracted for 30 seconds by an Argentinean model, Julia Orayen, clad in a short white skirt who handed the question slips to the quiz master. Narco gangs doing torture and murder, police and judiciary facing corruption charges, half the population living in poverty, indigenous groups in Chihuahua starving, successful prosecution of crimes too low to measure.  Meanwhile, the top news was all about Julia: don’t we have a mexican model who can perform this role, how much was she paid?

We toyed with the last tacos and stared at the empty salsa bowl. The serviettes were on the floor. The bill had not arrived. The frijoles had done their bean-like duty, so, during the hiatus, I went to the toilet.

There it was!  Suspended beside the latrine - the front page of an innocuous local newspaper - a five line story. Students at the Ibero – a nice clean private university all fee-paying rich parents you would think – asked the candidate most likely to be the next president, Enrique Peña Nieto, some difficult questions. They demanded answers. Well that’s not fair! Pretty Enrique with his enhanced teeth, had married a soap opera star but can’t name a book he has read. His party, the PRI, has meticulously groomed him. It held power for 70 years until 2000, in what could be politely described as a constitutional dictatorship, and was now determined to get it back. So Enrique does not expect things like this to happen. Next day his party accused the audience of being troublemakers, infiltrators, not students at all.

That’s when it started.

By the time I got back to my seat we were ready to go. We passed the gawky pouting fish in the artificial rock pool. The trickling fountain muted the racket from the cars on the ring road. Obsequious staff bowed and declaimed as we departed. In my bum pocket was the tiny newsprint I had torn from the toilet wall. The cuttings folder started from there.

Within days the 131 students from Ibero had posed on YouTube holding their university registration card in front of them and gave their testimony. The plot cracked. The stage cleared. They demanded the media should be opened up. They demanded democracy. They started marching. Students in other parts of the country joined in: I am number 132 they said. A movement was being born in front of my eyes: #YoSoy132.

Party machines started cranking into reverse, searching on the back seat for some old box of usual responses. The media woke up from slumbering breakfast shows to find placards on the streets of Mexico City attacking television channels such as Televisa and TV Azteca. YouTube, for now, became an offensive weapon. Messages of support from other student protests starting arriving from Italy, Spain, Greece, Egypt and the USA.

A citizen movement starting with # has confounded more than the alphabetic order.

The newspapers began talking about the student spring but the future was still unclear. Enrique’s party said the left was running the whole thing. A splinter group broke away. The Guardian quaintly intervened with allegations of media irregularities – fiercely denied by Televisa – from the 2006 presidential campaign. History has bad stories to tell. Other civil movements have been captured by political parties, trade unions, the state machinery, or compromised by deals with criminal gangs. There is living memory of students massacred in the streets at Tlatelolco, just before the Olympics, in 1968.

Four weeks later I was in a cafe drinking chilled jamiaca water – potent as breakfast tea with the colour of red wine - reading the news. The streets had been cleared for a half marathon and there was the enticing aroma from the first corn of the season roasting on street side braziers. The report in La Jornada covered the first impromptu national assembly organised by #YoSoy132 on the 5th June. Representatives from 98 public and private universities attended. After 10 hours of debate it agreed its founding principles and a governing assembly. It affirmed it would continue to be an organisation independent from any political party. It would carry on beyond the election. #YoSoy132 promised to organise, produce and broadcast its own national presidential debate, collect questions on-line from the general public, and invite the four candidates to participate within the coming weeks. It seemed incredible.

A trumpet player started up on the corner and a pack of women and men in multi-coloured T-shirts hurtled along Madero, exhaling deeply in the morning sun. The cutting I stole from the posh restaurant was already crumpled and steeped in salsa stains but I was keeping it for now.

On the 19th June I was walking across the plaza on the way to the new indie music night. The sign propped up by the fountain announced: #YoSoy132. An excited crowd was gathering. The students strung up white sheets between the trees to make a giant screen. They set up speakers, hooked up projectors to laptops, and began showing the national on-line debate which they had organised on YouTube. Three of the four candidates had accepted the invitation, Enrique declined, and his seat was left empty throughout the debate. Students were chairing and contributing to the session and asking awkward questions.

I watched for a while until the numbers logging on around the country crashed the network into slow motion. There was no Argentinean model and the square was full of politics.

1. *Photo Credit: Cambio, 3/6/2012
   

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More information:

Review of #YoSoy132 by wikipedia [English]:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yo_Soy_132  

The students of Ibero respond [Spanish]:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P7XbocXsFkI&feature=related

The complete debate organised by #YoSoy132 [Spanish]:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9KGAQ4_n1E&feature=related

Some reviews [English]:

http://joannavandergrachtderosado.wordpress.com/2012/06/01/yo-soy-132-what-do-they-want/

PRI website [Spanish]

http://www.pri.org.mx/ComprometidosConMexico/index.aspx

Guardian allegations (denied by Televisa) and Guardian statement [English]:

Jo Tuckman ‘Computer files link TV dirty tricks to favourite for Mexico presidency: Network alleged to have sold favourable election coverage to top politicians’, The Guardian, Thursday 7 June 2012.  http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/jun/07/mexico-presidency-tv-dirty-tricks