In the days leading to President Trump’s Inauguration, most eyes in the United States were directed toward the spectacle of his transition, the confirmation process of his dubious appointments, and the drama of his incendiary rhetoric. The same was true for many residents below the southern border, where Mexicans were curious about what the new Administration would mean for their own country. But there was an even more immediate, and important, concern occupying Mexicans’ attention: the mass outcry over the dramatic rise in gas prices, called the gasolinazo, that accompanied the recent privatization of the oil industry. The government of President Enrique Peña Nieto, confronting a weakening currency and rising inflation, removed fuel subsidies in order to conserve funds and attract investment. Prices leaped up twenty per cent, and the country revolted.

Gasolinazo demonstrations throughout Mexico have at times turned violent, with at least four deaths reported and fifteen hundred arrests for alleged looting and other disturbances. At the U.S.-Mexico border, near Tijuana, one protester drove his truck into a line of federal police officers guarding a fuel-distribution facility. On the day that I arrived in Mexico City, over a week ago, protesters clogged traffic near the city center, holding up signs saying “No al Gasolinazo” and “Fuera Peña”—“No to Gasolinazo,” “Peña Out.” As I travelled through the south of Mexico, in the state of Guerrero, the resistance to Peña Nieto’s deregulation of the oil industry manifested itself in a myriad of ways. In tiny towns in the Sierra Madre del Sur mountains, farmers had pasted on their pickup trucks stickers proclaiming “¡Ya Basta!” (“Enough is Enough!”). In the seaside city of Acapulco, the teachers’ union had taken to the streets, days after taxi drivers in the town had blocked main roads in protest. Mexicans fear that the gasolinazo is just the beginning, and that next will be a rise in the prices of food and everyday goods.

After the U.S. Presidential election, the peso dropped twelve per cent against the dollar, amid worries about the future of Mexican exports like oil and cars. Trump’s campaign promise to guard the American automobile industry apparently played some role in Ford Motors’ decision to cancel a planned $1.6-billion plant in Mexico, and other companies, like Fiat Chrysler, are considering closing their plants if Trump enacts a high import tax, as he has threatened. The fall of the peso has been a blow to Mexicans, who were already bracing themselves for the financial losses resulting from Trump’s scaremongering protectionism. Much of Mexico’s fate lies in the hands of the United States, its top trading partner; its economy minister has said, defensively, that the government would impose mirror actions to reflect whatever taxes Trump introduced. The two countries, along with Canada, are preparing to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement.

Then there was the matter of the alleged misdeeds of Mexico’s own President. Since Peña Nieto took office, in 2012, he has been the locus of corruption scandals that have ensnared him, his wife (who purchased a seven-million-dollar mansion on credit through a company that has won favorable contracts from Peña Nieto’s government; she later returned the house), and his finance minister (who turned out to have bought a house from the same contractor). The President was also found to have been using, rent-free, a two-million-dollar apartment in Florida owned by a Mexican businessman. (They have all denied any wrongdoing).

Peña Nieto says that the changes to the fuel policy were necessary to help repair the government’s fiscal situation. “What would you have done?” he asked citizens in a YouTube video address on the gas-price rise. So, on social media, Mexicans offered him various alternatives by which he could save money: cut the bonuses, per diems, and salaries of high-level federal government officials; reduce his luxury travel with his family; get rid of his Presidential plane; and recover the money stolen by corrupt politicians.

On Sunday, demonstrators prevented traffic into Mexico on the highway from San Ysidro, in San Diego, for the third weekend in a row. Thousands marched in Tijuana on the same day. Some observers criticized the diffuse leadership of the protests—labor unions, businessmen, political parties like the leftist Party of the Democratic Revolution—noting that each had its own distinct interests. But the demonstrations recalled similar rallies and labor strikes that raged through Nigeria, in 2012, after the government there, which was also accused of misusing funds, removed its own fuel subsidies. Those protests, which propelled tens of thousands of people into the streets, were successful: the government quickly reversed its decision. In Mexico, most citizens are hoping for nothing less.