In 1986, Mexico was experiencing profound social discontent that was seen in protests surrounding the 1986 FIFA World Cup, scheduled to take place between May and June of that year. The atmosphere was still fresh from the social response to the 1985 Mexico City earthquake. The National Coordinator of the Popular Urban Movement (CONAMUP), founded in 1980 to coordinate the struggles for housing, was one of the key players in those protests. It should not be forgotten that also in April 1986, the rector of UNAM, Jorge Carpizo, presented the document “Strengths and Weaknesses of the National University” to the University Council, thus opening a period of criticism and debate within the university that later led to the creation of the University Student Council. While the protests against the 1986 World Cup in Mexico were relatively small and concentrated mainly in the central part of the country, those protests served as a barometer of what was to come. “We don’t want goals, we want beans!” and “We don’t want a World Cup, we want a salary increase!” were among the slogans chanted that year.
Much has changed since then. The 2026 World Cup will be the first to be held in the three North American countries: the United States, Canada, and Mexico, as if it were a new chapter in the North American trade integration sealed with the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). As in that treaty, Mexico faces the most disadvantageous situation: it will be the only one of the three countries to grant FIFA “general tax exemptions.” Much has changed since that Mexico of 1986: some of those who protested against the World Cup back then now govern the city and the country.
The arrival of the self-proclaimed Fourth Transformation to the Mexican presidency in 2018 occurred amidst a profound political crisis and high social expectations. Decades of plunder, dispossession, corruption, violence, and impunity led millions to backed those who promised change. However, eight years later, and now in the “second phase of the Fourth Transformation,” many of the most important changes have not materialized, and worse still, some problems have worsened.
These “changes that have not arrived,” combined with “the problems that have worsened,” have placed the entire country in a complex situation: throughout the nation, thousands of mothers and families continue to denounce and search for their disappeared relatives, and also denounce the forensic crisis, clandestine graves, recruitment camps, areas of disappearance, slave labor, and countless other horrors that grow daily and are not being addressed as the true national emergency they represent. In addition to the above, there is also the violence against Indigenous peoples, who in different parts of the country have organized to resist criminal organizations. The cases of the Nahua people in the Lower Montaña region of Guerrero and the Nahua and Purépecha people in Michoacán, which recently received national press coverage, exemplify a situation that extends throughout the country.
Despite so much violence, the people resist; as do the teachers of the National Coordinator of Education Workers (CNTE), who, with the slogan “whoever governs, rights must be defended,” have not stopped mobilizing and demanding better working conditions, facing not only stigmatization from the press and official discourse, but also resisting the armed attack led by Esaú López Quero, mayor of San Pablo Villa de Mitla. To the turbulent social scenario must be added the mobilizations of the students of the National Polytechnic Institute, of the Autonomous University of Mexico City, of the sex workers subjected to social cleansing policies, and the complaints of various social organizations that from Mexico City denounce the increase in the cost of housing and services, as well as the terrible conditions of public transport.
In an already tense political context, fueled by pressure from the United States, exacerbated by the ever-consolidating power of conservative elites, and further exacerbated by internal divisions within the ruling party and the costs of its pragmatic alliances, we must not ignore the legitimate and simmering social discontent that is resurfacing from below. These are not “agents of the empire” or “puppets of the right wing”; they are people fed up with so much violence, working people demanding better working conditions, young people demanding decent housing. They are also mothers and families still searching for their disappeared relatives, and today they cry out a terrible but powerful slogan: “Behind the World Cup lie the mass graves.”
Original article by Raúl Romero, La Jornada, June 1st, 2026.
Translated by Schools for Chiapas.