violence

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Meanwhile, in Mexico: Axolotls and attacks on autonomy

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.

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Incomplete thoughts on ICE and harm

The actions of ICE around the so-called United States are deeply troubling on several levels. One is the violence and terror of their actions themselves. Another is the fascist, white supremacist ideology dictating and justifying those actions. A third, perhaps underexamined, is the impact those actions have on us as targets, resistors, or merely observers.

The deployment of unaccountable, masked mercenaries whose sole purpose is to kidnap, terrorize, and murder people of color and those in solidarity with them has appropriately sparked outrage. Their mission is to rend the social fabric of families and entire communities. The newest ICE recruit, the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, and everyone in between deserve nothing but our opprobrium, condemnation, and rejection. Their mythical palingenetic vision of a pure nation to be achieved through ethnic cleansing and mass violence is unequivocally fascist. They must be countered. There is no grey area: they have made their agenda and ambitions clear. To support ICE is to support fascism. To support fascism is to be a fascist. These are the terms of the debate. And there is no debate with fascism. It is only to be defeated. That millions of U.S. citizens continue to back the activities of ICE gives it no more legitimacy than did the 43% of Germans who voted for the Nazi Party in March 1933 give legitimacy to its platform. When the mandate for one’s existence – be it an individual, a party, an ideology, or a government – is to cause harm, then one has forfeited any claim to legitimacy.

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Insumisión: Reclaiming Life in a Panorama of Death

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Originally posted on It’s Going Down
By Scott Campbell

As the violence and repression instigated, permitted and perpetrated by the Mexican State continues to grow, it can become overwhelming to summarize it in these pages in a way that does justice to the victims and survivors of state terror and impunity. Yet as the grim tallies multiply and impact more and more lives, so does the clarity that what the state offers even in its best moments is no solution at all, and from that point resistance flourishes. The sparks of refusal and defiance despite the odds ignite around the country, making meaning out of that which seems so senseless, breathing reclaimed life into a panorama of death. As América del Valle of Atenco said earlier this month, “Even with everything they did to us, we don’t come here today as martyrs. We don’t come to cry…We’ve come here to say NO!” Lxs insumxs. Let’s see what they’ve been up to over the past two weeks.

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