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.