With the on-again, off-again war against Iran, Israel’s “ceasefire” slaughters in Gaza and Lebanon, the fact that everything is unaffordable and people can’t find jobs, and the nonconsensual foisting of an immensely inept Skynet on all of us, it’s hard to track – let alone process and still function – with all that is happening under the current worldwide regime of fascist terribleness. But in case the barrage of promotions hasn’t wormed its way into your brain yet, let us not forget that the World Cup is right around the corner, another Carnival of Capitalism to distract us.

In Mexico City, the head of the government, Clara Brugada, is preparing for the event by overseeing the spending of between 500 million and 3.2 billion pesos (29 to 185 million USD) to basically paint purple axolotls all over the city. Why fix crumbling infrastructure when one can just “axolotlify” it? Why attend to the fact that rent has increased 155% in the city and every 48 hours three houses are taken off the market and turned into vacation rentals as gentrification spirals out of control? Where social cleansing is not limited to painted axolotls but increased raids against migrants in the city? As expected, some of the populace has responded with memes. Others have taken to the streets, pointing to the deeper crises in Mexico, with the cry that “Behind the Cup are hidden graves and troops.”

For her part, President Claudia Sheinbaum thinks the “axolotlization” of Mexico City “looks pretty.” But she’s also got her hands full with CIA officers driving off cliffs in Chihuahua and blowing up narcos in the State of Mexico, not to mention her ally, Rubén Rocha Moya, the currently-on-sabbatical governor of Sinaloa being indicted by the United States for protecting the Chapitos faction of the Sinaloa Cartel in return for its help getting elected. This not only implicates a prominent member of the ruling MORENA party in organized crime, but also shows he is an active partisan in the Sinaloa Cartel’s internal war that has left more than 4,000 dead and 3,500 disappeared since September 2024.

Of course, violence from the state and organized crime and the grey area they coinhabit is not limited to Sinaloa. Despite their feminist discourse, both Brugada and Sheinbaum pay no mind to thousands of mothers marching on Mother’s Day to demand state action around disappearances – 133,601 people, according to official statistics – a phenomenon the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights recently described as a “generalized” and “serious human rights crisis.” Nor is there action to defend or support those who search for the disappeared, such as Patricia Acosta Rangel and Katia Citlalli Jáuregui Acosta, mother and daughter members of a searching collective who were killed in an armed attack on May 9 in Guanajuato. Where searching relatives doing the work the state refuses to do find 456 bags of human remains near Akron Stadium in Guadalajara, a World Cup site. Or 60 bags of human remains near the Guadalajara International Airport. Or yet another clandestine crematorium in Jalisco.

Those seeking new forms of life are also under sustained attack. On May 6, the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG) assassinated two members of the P’urhépecha community of Acachuén, Michoacán. When the community was attempting to defend itself from the attack, the municipal police intervened on the side of the cartel.

The CJNG attacked again on May 17, killing Jesús Álvarez Gutiérrez and Ignacio Campos Guerrero, two P’urhépecha members of the Communal Guard of Santa María Sevina, Michoacán, and seriously wounding a third. The community of Sevina belongs to the Supreme Indigenous Council of Michoacán (CSIM), an organization comprising dozens of Indigenous and Afro-Mexican communities seeking autonomy, which denounced the governor of Michoacán, Alfredo Ramírez Bedolla, for “the complete complicity of his government with the criminal cartels of any initial and most especially with the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG).”

Finally, on May 19, the CJNG launched one of its frequent assaults on the autonomous Nahua municipality of Santa María Ostula, Michoacán, which has lost dozens of community members to cartel and state violence over the years. The Communal Guard was able to successfully repel the attack without loss of life as the community denounced that, “We are speaking of an undeclared war against the first peoples of Mexico to displace them from their territories and to cause their death.”

Yet the most intense violence against Indigenous projects for autonomy has been unfolding in Guerrero. Beginning on May 6, the state-backed narco-paramilitary group Los Ardillos launched a wave of attacks against Nahua communities belonging to the Indigenous and Popular Council of Guerrero – Emiliano Zapata (CIPOG-EZ) in the Montaña Baja region of the state. (For background on the CIPOG-EZ, check out this extended interview from 2021.)

The attacks – involving drones and heavy arms fire – against the communities of Tula, Xicotlán, Acahuehuetlán and Alcozacán, has led at least 2,000 people to flee, adding to the crisis of displacement in Mexico, where “250,000 households were forced to flee their homes in 2024 alone to protect themselves from crime.” Some of those displaced were forced to flee a second time as the location they were sheltering in came under fire by Los Ardillos. In the midst of this violence, news also came out that Los Ardillos were attacking the Mephaá community of San Pedro Huitzapula, one that is not affiliated with the CIPOG-EZ, resulting in the killing of two community members. While the Regional Coordinator of Community Authorities – Community Police – Founding Communities (CRAC-PC-PF), a community police formation affiliated with the CIPOG-EZ, tried to defend the communities against the attacks, members of Los Ardillos managed to infiltrate the communities, burning houses, destroying belongings, killing animals, and more. Six members of CIPOG-EZ have been confirmed killed, adding to the 76 deaths and 25 disappearances the organization has suffered since its founding in 2014. In solidarity and mutual aid, the National Indigenous Congress (CNI) is raising funds for the displaced and organizing a Civil Observation Mission to the area beginning on May 22.

For its part, the state has consistently diminished the scale of the violence in Guerrero, labeling it a conflict between criminal groups, claiming only 90 people were displaced, and initially refusing to intervene, despite the presence of army installations nearby. For their parts, the CIPOG-EZ and CNI have condemned the state, noting that “Los Ardillos operate under the protection of the government of Evelyn Salgado Pineda and the complicity of the Mexican army and the various levels of government.” It is hard to deny when the municipal president of Atlixtac (the location of the community of San Pedro Huitzapula) is a member of Los Ardillos, or the municipal president of Chilapa (the location of the attacks on the CIPOG-EZ) is the sister-in-law of the leader of Los Ardillos. Or as the CNI puts it, “It is even more incredible that, despite knowing all this, the federal government continues to prop up this criminal structure. The Mexican government seeks to maintain its image of integrity and political correctness through lies and cover-ups; Guerrero is a clear example of this, where the state and municipal governments have been infiltrated by organized crime.”

Despite the violence, autonomous communities in resistance refuse to surrender or cede their prerogative of self-defense. The war against those who refuse both the state and organized crime continues. “While they get ready to watch the World Cup, we, the people, live amid bullets and bombs. It’s clear: the Fourth Transformation, just like the PRI, the PAN, the PRD, and all the other parties, is on the side of criminals, corporations, and dispossession. The capitalist system continues to impose its narco-paramilitary groups on our territories in an attempt to tear apart the social fabric of our communities and subject us to its barbarism,” writes the CIPOG-EZ.