#MexicanLivesMatterToo
When the video of George Floyd being held down on the ground by a police officer was released, the world nearly came to a standstill. Everyone watched in horror as Floyd told Officer Derek Chauvin “I can’t breathe” multiple times, as Chauvin held his knee on top of Floyd’s neck. An hour after, an ambulance arrived at the scene to help the then-unconscious man, he was pronounced dead.
Floyd is one of the many victims of police brutality; and as people in the United States started protesting both physically and online, a change happened here in Mexico too: people were joining in on the online protests. When I saw my peers starting to protest via Instagram, I’m not gonna lie; I was kind of bothered. Now, I’m not trying to say that I disagree with the Black Lives Matter movement; on the contrary, actually: I fully support it. I think that police violence should come to an end (seeing as we are all equal, regardless of skin color), and that the many officers responsible for the deaths of innocent black people should be charged for murder. What bothered me, though, was that everyone turned their gaze to the U.S, completely ignoring the problems that we have here in our own country. As people started posting black squares and stories about police violence, nobody seemed to even remotely care about the issues that surround us. We live in a country where 46.2% of the population- literally almost half of the entire country- lives under the poverty line; and where 21.5% of the population is indigenous- yet their lands are being taken away, and as they have to start adapting to modern society, over 60 of their languages are dying. And then, there’s the cherry on top: our president. Not only is Andres Manuel López Obrador completely useless, but he’s also worsening the state of our beautiful country- nuestro México Mágico. With ideas such as canceling the Nuevo Aeropuerto Internacional de México (which was already underway) and building another one at Santa Lucía- which, by the way, is an awful idea, as it’ll cost millions of pesos more to cancel the project and start a new one, rather than to finish the old one (which was actually half the price of the Santa Lucía airport); as well as canceling renewable energies and going back to using combustoleo, which will be administered by the ever-corrupt CFE, AMLO has made sure to screw us over once and again. And don’t even get me started on Afro-Latinos; people of African descent live in our own country, and also face racism and ridicule. Yet, nobody seems to care about this, and nobody seems to use their social media to talk about these problems; rather, they talk about problems that just aren’t relevant to us.
When people started posting more things about what us Latinos can also do, though, to help the BLM movement in our own country, I was pleased. The recognition of Afro-Mexicans and Afro-Latinos, as well as their problems with racism, was finally brought up. Though, all of this led me to think: will our community still care about this topic next month? And, unfortunately, the answer is most probably no.
Recently, though, another problem has caught the attention of our community; and finally; it’s something that directly affects us: the killing of Giovanni López. He was murdered by police for being out of his house while not wearing a protective face mask. This has enraged many Mexicans, and proven that police brutality happens here too. But it infuriates me that I’ve just seen a couple of my friends post about this- what about #JusticiaParaGiovanni? Does our community really not care about what happens to our fellow Mexican citizens? Everyone is out there posting black squares and long stories about why they think that police brutality in the U.S is horrible, while paying no mind to the fact that it also happens here in Mexico- and a lot more frequently than it does in the U.S.
We follow American trends mindlessly, and seem to mimic whatever they do and say; and by doing this, we ignore the many realities that surround us, and the problems just keep getting worse and worse. It’s time that we start to make a change in our own country- and that starts now.