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Is the US Trying to Set in Motion a Colour Revolution in Mexico?

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For the moment there is no smoking gun. But the US is clearly, wilfully destabilising the country. And this effort predates Trump 2.0. 

On Saturday (Nov 15), as NC’s well-attuned readers will already know, dozens of “Gen Z” protests took place across Mexico’s cities. A few of them — including the biggest one, in Mexico City — erupted into violence. Far-right voices on social media heralded the violent protests as an uprising against Mexico’s cartel-controlled government.

Meanwhile, many pro-government supporters as well as anti-globalist commentators have warned that another US-backed colour revolution could be in the offing.

Some of the demonstrators carried the “One Piece” pirate flag that has become a global symbol of recent youth protests, including in Nepal, which brought down the sitting government, Morocco, Paraguay and Peru.

The main event took place in Mexico City, where the protesters failed to come even close to filling the city’s main square, the Zocolo, that is home to Mexico’s seat of government, the Palacio Nacional. This is perhaps no surprise given Mexico City’s Zocolo is one of the world’s largest city squares with an estimated capacity of around 200,000 people.

Here’s a time-lapse video of the Zocolo for the entirety of the demonstration, from around 12 pm to around 5pm. Estimates suggest that a total of around 17,000 people, many of them not members of Generation Z, participated in the march — in a city with an estimated population of around 22 million. In many provincial cities, the relative turnout was even smaller.

In other words, the protesters currently represent a very small but extremely vocal minority. That does not mean the importance of these protests should be minimised. Mexico’s Gen Z, like young people everywhere, have genuine grievances, including high levels of unemployment, rising costs, particularly for housing, and, of course, crime and insecurity.

One of the main catalysts for the protest movement’s relative success, though it occurred days after the march was first called, was the assassination on Mexico’s Day of the Dead (Nov 1) of Carlos Manzo, the independent mayor of Uruapan, a small town in Michoacan, one of the country’s most dangerous states.

Before his death, Manzo had called for a more aggressive approach to the war against the drug cartels, including the shooting on sight of drug traffickers and the arming of the general populace. He had also warned of the proliferation of military training camps in the Uruapan region manned by Colombian and Venezuelan mercenaries.

Manzo had asked for more security from the federal government but none was forthcoming. This has prompted accusations, including from Manzo’s grandmother who was at the march, that members of the governing MORENA party, including the former governor of Michoacan of Leonel Godoy Rangel, were behind the assassination.

As I said, there are serious grievances. At the same time, five surveys conducted between January and October 2025 by three different institutions show that Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo’s approval rating among Gen Z citizens ranges from 71% to 86%. This suggests that, in general terms, the president enjoys the broad support of this age group.

As many have pointed out on social media, there was a disproportionately large number of grey-hairs at an event whose age range was supposed to be 13-28. They included the former president Vicente Fox, a fervent opponent of Mexico’s governing MORENA party who appears to have made a sharp exit when things got ugly. Here is Fox wearing his One Piece t-shirt: 

Violence, the Order of the Day

If the main goal of the march was to further destabilise Mexico and undermine its government’s authority, then one can argue that the mission was accomplished. As promised and feared beforehand, violence was to be the order of the day.

One of the most disturbing pieces of footage I have seen so far is of a tattooed individual repeatedly yelling at a line of lightly armed riot police officers as they enter the square: “You’re going to die, we’re armed! You’re going to die, we’re armed.”

The man in question looks more like a member of the so-called “Zetas”, the notorious, now-defunct paramilitary organisation whose explosion on the scene in the early 2000s significantly escalated the violence in Mexico, than Generation Z.

Much of the talk on social media before the protest was of storming the barricades and toppling the government. The protesters certainly stormed the barriers surrounding the palace, some even armed with metal cutters. Riot police officers were pelted with stones and rocks, and some, like the one in the video below, were even battered with metal poles, chains or other makeshift weapons.

The violence was met with more violence:

According to official figures that have been cited in global media outlets, of the 120 people who were injured, 100 were police officers, of whom 40 required hospital treatment for bruises and cuts. If these figures are accurate, they are the opposite of what one would normally expect from a large, violent protest: normally, it is the protesters who bear the brunt of the violence.

The Sheinbaum government and its supporters have tried to play down the size of the protests while emphasising the broad demographics of the protesters. However, by doing so it risks coming off as aloof and disinterested in the genuine grievances of the protesters and thus playing right into the organisers’ hands.

Presumably, their goal was to generate images of violence and repression that could be beamed around the world, especially in the US thus reinforcing the impression of Mexico as a lawless, ungovernable country. All it needs now is for the media to treat the so-called black block vandals as “anti-cartel rebels” and the narrative is set.

Youth. Spontaneous. Apolitical. Crime and Corruption. Narcos. Those are the keywords of the coverage. And as the LA Times reported on Sunday, the “Gen Z” protests are “gain[ing] momentum”.

Imagen

But Who Is Actually Behind the Protests?

The Gen Z Mexico movement has been treated by many international media as a spontaneous movement similar to those that have already shaken Nepal, Madagascar or Morocco. However, an investigation by Infodemia – the Mexican government unit dedicated to analysing disinformation – believes it was an “articulated digital strategy” funded by domestic and international far-right organisations.

Interestingly, the Twitter/X account that became one of the main social media channels for the march, @GeneracionZmx_, was initially set up in August 2024 and was more or less inactive until November 13, when it began promoting the protest. In the preceding 14 months, it shared a grand total of just five posts, four of which were about Venezuela’s contested elections. One shared an interview with the US’ current regime change agent, Maria Corina Machado: 

From El País (machine translated):

The [Infodemia] report points to influencers, opposition figures and accounts linked to Atlas Network, an ultra-capitalist US-based lobby founded in the early eighties that now has a presence in more than 100 countries. According to the report, in the last month and a half, more than 90 million Mexican pesos (about five million dollars) have been invested in promoting [last Saturday’s] march.

The official investigation also indirectly points to the owner of the TV Azteca television station, Ricardo Salinas Pliego. This Thursday, the Supreme Court ruled against him after years of litigation, ordering him to settle an outstanding tax bill of around 50 billion pesos (around $3 billion). The setback intensified the debate over Salinas Pliego’s alleged role in funding digital campaigns criticising President Claudia Sheinbaum.

Salinas Pliego is the closest thing Mexico has to a Trump-like figure — someone in the billionaire class with a gargantuan ego who aspires to become president of the nation one day. Like Trump, he’s had his fair share of brushes with the law, including the US justice system where he is under investigation for the unpaid debts of his Mexican banking group, Banco Azteca.

Through his TV channels, Salinas Pliego is now presenting the Gen-Z march as a spontaneous, youth-led, apolitical movement that ended in a brutal crackdown by a “narco state”.

It’s also worth noting that key opposition figures in Mexico have also called for violence or a “dirty war” against Sheinbaum. During the run-up to last year’s presidential elections, Jorge Romero, the national coordinator of the National Action Party, or PAN, said the following:

We in the opposition are very conscious that we have in front of us someone who is two metres tall… What we need in the opposition is violence.

Meet Mexico’s Machado

Another prominent figure in Mexico’s “resistance” movement is Senator Lilly Tellez, who, like Maria Corina Machado, has repeatedly called for US intervention in Mexico. Here she is telling FOX News that “help from the United States to fight the cartels is absolutely welcome, and that is how the majority of Mexicans feel.”

However, as the Mexican journalist Jesus Escobar Tovar notes, people like Salinas Pliego and Tellez are merely useful idiots serving the interests of the United States. And the ultimate goal of the US is to create an atmosphere of “controlled chaos” in Mexico, and one could also argue, Colombia (translated by yours truly):

What the system wants to create is controlled chaos, not a people that rise up. A people that rise up is not controlled chaos, it’s a genuine threat to the State. That’s why there are not going to provoke such a scenario; but they can generate a level of instability that can lead the population itself to seek to topple a government. That’s what we’re seeing…

These useful “idiots play” into the US’ hands by creating an atmosphere of chaos, of uncontrolled violence, a situation in which people think they living through the worst of times… These groups begin to operate locally, they try to convince the people that Sheinbaum is a failure,… that the government is incapable of dealing with the challenge in front of it.

This plan is not created by someone like Salinas Pliego or Lilly Tellez; it is created by an ambassador like Ron Johnson who is well-versed in these sorts of things.

From Green Beret to CIA Agent, to US Ambassador

As readers may recall, Ron Johnson is the former CIA agent and Green Beret who is currently serving as US ambassador in Mexico. During his military service (1984-98), Johnson led combat operations in El Salvador during the 1980s, serving as one of 55 U.S. military advisers to the Salvador Army during the Salvadoran Civil War. Here are the sort of things the Salvadorian death squads used to do under US supervision during the war:

During the first Trump administration, Johnson returned to El Salvador as US ambassador where he struck up a very close friendship with the country’s strongman President Nayib Bukele.

At the end of his two-year tour, Johnson was presented with the National Order of José Matías Delgado, one of the country’s highest decorations. He also became the first person to receive the Grand Order of Francisco Morazán, an insignia created expressly to distinguish his brief stay in the country.

In September, a report in ProPublica alleges that Ambassador Johnson helped to shield Bukele from homegrown investigations into an agreement he had struck with senior gang members of MS-13. The US diplomat also played a key role in “elevating Bukele’s status among Republicans and thus preparing the ground for deporting immigrants to a Salvadoran prison”.

We are only now beginning to see the fruits of that endeavour:

 

So, is the US organising a full-blown colour revolution in Mexico, as it has done in other countries?

It is as yet too early to tell. There is for the moment no smoking gun. As far as I’m aware, neither Victoria Nuland nor Samantha Power have paid Mexico an unscheduled visit in recent months. There are no videos of cookies being handed out at the protests.

Also, colour revolutions — the most famous arguably being the Maidan Square protests of 2014 that ended up leading to war between Ukraine and Russia — tend to succeed when the sitting government is weak. For the moment, Sheinbaum continues to enjoy strong levels of support (70-80%), at least according to most domestic polls. According to US pollster Morning Consult, her approval levels have fallen roughly 20 points over the past year to 43%.

The jury may still be out on whether Washington is trying to set in motion a colour revolution in Mexico but it is clearly, wilfully destabilising the country. And this effort predates Trump 2.0.

As readers may recall, it was US media outlets The New York Times and ProPublica that accused outgoing President Andrés Manuel López Obrador of receiving drug money during last year’s presidential election campaign. Despite presenting no solid evidence, the allegations, from unnamed DEA agents, seem to have stuck. Opposition candidate Xochitl Gálvez even began calling Sheinbaum a “narco presidente“.

Since then, the US, under Trump 2.0, has repeatedly threatened to attack Mexico; it has renamed the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America; it has imposed a 3.5% tax on all remittance payments sent by US-based migrants, many of them Mexican, back home; it has sanctioned two Mexican banks and one brokerage house, resulting in their emergency intervention by the Mexican authorities; and it has designated Mexican drug cartels as terrorist organisations.

There was also the recent allegation (covered here) from an anonymous US official that Iran had planned to assassinate Israel’s ambassador to Mexico, Einat Kranz Neiger. The source said Mexico’s intel services had foiled the plot before it could be carried out yet according to Mexico’s government, there are no official reports of said attack.

Was this an attempt by the US and Israel to start building the case for another Israel-US war against Iran? To complicate, or even poison, Mexico’s relations with Iran? To further tie long-time US adversary Iran to left-wing, progressive governments in Latin America?

We don’t know, indeed may never know. The story has already gone cold.

Meanwhile, Trump yesterday announced once again a willingness to launch airstrikes against targets in Mexico, the US’ next door neighbour and largest trading partner:

One Silver Lining

As if that wasn’t enough, we were also treated to the spectacle of US Rep Carlos A Gimenez calling for the immediate release of all the “political prisoners” unjustly detained by the MORENA government in Mexico for expressing their discontent with the current administration.

This is the same Rep Gimenez who a couple of days ago warned about Venezuela’s Maduro government’s plans to sabotage its own key infrastructure, just like Russia did with its Nordstream pipelines.

The one silver lining in all this is the news that an overwhelming majority of Ecuadorian people just voted against their US-born President Daniel Noboa’s proposal to rewrite the country’s progressive to allow US military bases back into the country.

After the Noboa government declared an internal armed conflict against narco-terrorist organisations in January 2024, Ecuador is now suffering the worst wave of violence in its history, as we warned would happen. Sunday’s vote is a stark and timely reminder that the people of even one of the most violence-plagued countries in Latin America do not want the “assistance” of the US military or CIA. That is why said assistance is so rarely put to a vote.

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10 comments

  1. amfortas

    once again, i am resisting the urge to just go on and put the 80’s music folder on repeat.
    ive never understood why so many folks look back so fondly on the 80’s,lol.
    reaganism, trickle down, cold war, drug war, iran-contra…how can folks long so for a return to that mess?

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  2. lyman alpha blob

    Excellent rundown again Nick. Too bad it’s the same old story we’ve been seeing for decades now when the US wants to overthrow some foreign leader. We always hear from the US spooks about the “Russian playbook” which is another case of projection since it’s the US who runs these operations as if it picked up the directions off the back of a cereal box. These ops are run by increasingly stupid people on the US side which just goes to show that the Bearded One was right again in noting how history repeats itself first as tragedy, then as farce.

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  3. Carolinian

    Thanks. Yves has mentioned the umbrella protests in Hong Kong and at the time there were suggestions by some (MOA) that those too were a CIA involved “regime change scenario.” We here in SC have no info on this but did raise eyebrows about the HK protestors singing songs from Les Miserables. B’way on the road? Down here in the rabbit hole it’s hard to know what is real and what is not so perhaps all suspicions–at least–are justified.

    What does seem clear would be that any professions of good intentions by Trump or his minions are false. “Kick their ass and take their gas” is where he lives.

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    1. Yves Smith

      The Hong Kong protests were organic. People in working class parts of Kowloon were helping protestors escape, FFS, pulling them inside and then showing how to proceed out their back doors through alleys.

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      1. jrkrideau

        I cannot find it but I seem to remember a picture of Joshua Wong being received by official Washington during the Umbrella protests. These are poor optics for a patriotic Chinese citizen.

        I have always assumed the protests were US inspired. IIRC, Beijing only interfered in internal Hong Kong affairs because the HK Council had failed, possibly from the handover , to introduce its own security legislation.

        Colour? Almost certainly.

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        1. Yves Smith

          *Sigh*

          The US does not have enough of a network in HK to enlist even a modest number of native Hong Kong Cantonese speakers. This was always UK territory.

          And the tactics the protestors used were novel and ones the US would not be keen to see adopted in the US.

          I have personal contacts in HK who are dismissive of the idea that the US did anything more than cheerlead at a remove.

          And this reading borders on racist, that non-white people don’t have agency. It is particularly bizarre here given that Hong Kong had been self governing and its population had overwhelmingy been leery of the mainland Chinese takeover, and then China got aggressive in taking political control. A rebellion was pretty predictable.

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  4. Nat Wilson Turner

    Thanks for this. I wish the US government would stop its international antics, but they might be the last capacity lost.

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  5. Huey

    I know this is not the biggest issue but I hate that the One Piece flag has been co-opted for this movement.

    One Piece is, actually, about a world where a small group of persons militarily and politically assumed control, wiping away inconvenient history and killing dissenters so they could cement themselves as “gods’ chosen” rulers who actually have everyone’s best interest at heart.

    They run a govt overseeing all countries, deciding who is allowed in vs. relegated to slave away and they wipe out any who starts leaning away from total servitude.

    Then there’s the spies embedded in every nation, the corrupt news agencies, the warlords who are tacitly allowed to exist so long as they’re more or less convenient, especially as an nice excuse for maintaining a military for ‘security’.

    Did I mention that the whole world is gradually sinking underwater because of fuel use that the govt is still trying to pursue?

    The thing is, the franchise is directed at children and only gradually revealed all of this over decades. I’m not surprised it helped persons growing up to look at events around them through a more critical lens but my worry is that that the flag of the anti-monarchy characters is going to become a real-life symbol of the same corruption it is supposed to be against.

    I’ve seen people comment that the flag is goofy and it is, it’s supposed to represent a more innocent rejection of the status quo vs. more mature, possibly disillusioned and less genuinely altruistic causes by people with personal motivations. I’m not saying I don’t get the idea behind using it but it’s also somewhat antithetical to what it was supposed to represent.

    Admittedly, I can’t deny that I am concerned this will affect the franchise and its messaging going forward as well. Even if that is somewhat selfish of me, I don’t think this problem was necessary.

    One final piece of irony – the Netflix live adaption, almost universally lauded, maintained the nationally diverse cast of the original.

    The actor for the main character on the Netflix show – Mexican.

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  7. Don

    From where I am typing, in El Bajío, it is hard to envisage a US engineered colour revolution here. Morena is enormously popular on all levels. Culturally it is in some ways very traditional — 600-year-old cathedrals packed on Sundays and Saint’s days — but at the same time, culturally open and diverse (our town’s Morena mayor is gay and widely admired, big jazz and blues scene, etc.), English-speakers a tiny minority, the music you most often hear on the radio is Latino. It’s prosperous and proud, and has a strong economy; the Peso is soaring (in 2022, a Cdn$ bought you 18.5 pesos and it now gets you 13.1). And man, is this part of the country industrialized compared to Canada — auto industry, aerospace, you name it — they make stuff here. If you drive through the countryside for a few hours you will encounter thousands of tractor trailers in the course of and hour or so, freight trains rolling down the track (high-speed passenger rail coming next year), and scattered amongst the prosperous-looking farms, huge, modern factories. Of course, it is not the same in the inland South.

    Every town has streets named for heroic battles with invaders from the north, and the military in all its forms is omnipresent and appears to be quietly tough, confident, well equipped and at one with the population — the US would be well advised not to FAFO.

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