A democratic dilemma in Mexico: social dissent against the promise of political change

Abstract

Here it was explored the problem of how a president who displays a democratizing change when his action and project are answered by citizens mobilized for legitimate causes. The study had an exploratory character, with a qualitative approach and based on the combination of documentary observation techniques from primary sources for the characterization of the three selected social movements, indigenous communities against the “Maya Train” infrastructure, six feminist mobilizations, and the National Anti-AMLO, developed in the first years of Amlo’s presidential term in Mexico. Semantic content was used to base inferences about the strategy that the federal government deploys in turn, with the aim to identify any patron of behavior of the president towards the mobilized political dissent. The presidential strategy was found to have four characteristic features: 1) to discredit any mobilization of political dissent and dissent, based on stigmatizing its protagonists; 2) to delay effective governmental responses to resolve the conflicts generated, given the inefficiency to implement them; 3) to shift the focus of the agenda and public discussion of collective issues, towards the politically directed and controlled sphere of the public media and turn them into an object of controversy between “political camps” ; 4) manipulate public opinion harassing critical journalism and using the state apparatus of public media to promote a favorable image of the president and the ruling party. It concludes that this strategy entails the risk of installing a kind of “tyranny of the majority” on dissident minorities, with undesirable consequences for the collective task of affirming a socially equitable and inclusive democracy.