The Year of 'Mexico's Moment': Citizens Step Up and Demand Security Kate Kilpatrick - Al Jazeera
go to original December 17, 2014

After the suspected massacre of 43 missing Mexican students, demonstrators protest government inaction and impunity, in state of Guerrero in Mexico. (Ronaldo Schemidt/AFP/Getty Images)

After signing sweeping energy, telecommunication, education and banking reforms into law in 2014, President Enrique Peña Nieto’s “Mexico moment” was eclipsed in September by the disappearance — and probable massacre — of 43 teaching students in Iguala in Guerrero, a poor rural state in southern Mexico. The shocking brutality and clear signs of government collusion captured the world’s attention, sparked massive protests and cemented security and federal government accountability as concerns that will dominate Mexico’s agenda in 2015.

The year started with two momentous 20th anniversaries — of the signing of the controversial North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which has boosted trade among Mexico, the United States and Canada to $17 trillion annually, and of the EZLN (Zapatista Army of National Liberation) uprising, when Mayan peasants in Chiapas, led by the enigmatic Subcomandante Marcos, donned black ski masks and rifles and demanded their right to indigenous self-government in response to the NAFTA signing. Their memory was also invoked this year when as many as 20,000 farmers, ranchers and professionals from Michoacán state organized themselves into vigilante militias, or self-defense groups, to expel the Knights Templar criminal organization from their towns. The tense standoff in Michoacán, while no longer in the international headlines, still needs a resolution.

The breakup of Mexico’s state-run oil company, Pemex, after seven decades is nothing short of revolutionary. Late this year Pemex opened up bidding for the country’s oil and gas fields to foreign and private investors. Oil revenue makes up a third of the federal budget. But mass protests inspired by Iguala, perhaps the largest since the Mexican Revolution, will likely overshadow any credit Peña Nieto will take for privatization. Meanwhile, plummeting oil prices — which experts predict to stagnate through the first half of 2015 — will restrict the government’s operating budget and Peña Nieto’s plans to modernize the country.

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