The informal nationwide civic movement that has emerged in Mexico in response to the disappearance of forty-three students is propelled by people and groups with all kinds of agendas and ambitions. Photograph by Alejandro Acosta / Reuters

This is the fourth part in Francisco Goldman’s series on the recent upheaval in Mexico. He has also written “The Disappearance of the Forty Three,” “Could Mexico’s Missing Students Spark a Revolution?,” and “The Protests for the Missing Forty Three.”

In mid November, three caravans converged on Mexico City, led by family members of the forty-three students from the Ayotzinapa Normal School whose abduction, in late September, has led to nationwide protests. One caravan was coming directly from Guerrero State, where the students disappeared, another from the state of Chiapas, and another from the city of Atenco, in Mexico State, the site of the most notorious act of violent government repression committed by Enrique Peña Nieto, Mexico’s current President, in 2006, when he was governor there. The plan was for the caravans to come together and for the travellers to lead a giant march on November 20th.

The kidnapping is now known to have been carried about by the municipal police of Iguala, Guerrero, on orders from the city’s mayor. According to the government, the police handed the students over to a local narco gang, which murdered them and burned their remains in the Cocula municipal dump. This scenario is still awaiting forensic confirmation, and the families of the missing students, and many others, do not accept it. “They were taken alive, we want them back alive!’ remains one of the most common chants at the marches. “It was the state!” and “Peña Out!” are also staple slogans.

As the caravans approached Mexico City, President Peña Nieto, along with members and supporters of his P.R.I. government, began issuing statements and warnings that seemed to signal an aggressive new strategy to counter the protests. On November seventeenth, Beatriz Pagés Rebollar, the P.R.I.’s Secretary of Culture, published an editorial on the P.R.I.’s official Web site.* “The chain of protests and acts of vandalism—perfectly well orchestrated—replicated in various parts of the country, demonstrate that the disappearances and probable extermination of the 43 normal-school students were part of a strategic trap aimed at Mexico,” she wrote. “All these activists and propagandists have the same modus operandi.” Pagés included opposition media on her list of these activists and propagandists, accusing them of fraudulently confusing Mexicans into believing that the students’ disappearance “was a crime of state, as if the Mexican government gave the order to exterminate them.”

Two days later, Carlos Alazraki, a veteran P.R.I. insider and an advertising executive who has worked on the election campaigns of several of the party’s Presidential candidates, published an editorial entitled “Open Letter to All Normal Mexicans (Like You)” in the newspaper La Razón. “46 days ago, two bands, students and Iguala narcos, got into a brawl,” he wrote. “There are varying versions of what happened. . . . That one [band] were guerrillas, the other narcos. One or the other wanted to run the whole region.” Since the start of the “narco war,” in 2006, equating victims’ criminality with that of narcos has been a routine pro-government strategy. Such insinuations characterized many of P.R.I. supporters’ early responses to the crime in Iguala. Alazraki closed, “Dear comemierdas. I curse the hour in which you were born. You’re murderers. You hate Mexico. And to finish, let me remind you that violence generates violence. Don’t be shocked if the federal government responds.”

The day before, in Mexico State, President Peña Nieto said in a speech, “There are protests that are not clear in their objectives. They appear to respond to an interest in causing destabilization, generating social disorder and, above all, in attacking the national project that we’ve been constructing.” Just a few days before that, he’d warned that the state is legitimately empowered to employ force to impose order.

Peña Nieto often speaks like an actor playing a stereotypical President on a television show: talking about the legitimate use of force as though phrases like that have a magical power to insulate him from the squalid realities of authoritarian power brutally and lawlessly wielded, and of a government hopelessly compromised. (Jon Lee Anderson recently wrote about Peña Nieto.) When a President like that speaks of the legitimate use of power and describes protesters as threats to a “national project,” what people hear are threats to wield that power violently and arbitrarily.

In the late afternoon hours of November 20th, people began to gather at various spots in Mexico City to meet the three Ayotzinapa caravans for the march that would converge in the Zócalo, the main plaza of Mexico City. That night, I went to the march with some friends and neighbors. By the monument El Ángel, I saw an elderly woman holding a hand-drawn sign that read, “Yes, I’m afraid! I tremble, sweat, turn pale, but I march! For Ayotzi, for me, for you, for Mexico.” As Ayotzinapa family members and students and other members of the Guerrero caravan were led to the front of the march, people chanted, “You’re not alone.” In the Ayotzinapa group was a young woman who held a swaddled baby and sobbing as she walked forward. There were machete-wielding peasant farmers from Atenco mounted on horseback. I saw many middle-class families, including children. Raucous contingents of university students joined too, of course. It seemed as if every imaginable group and sub-group, large and tiny, that exists in Mexico City was present. For a while, we marched between a contingent from a capoeira school and a marijuana-legalization group. I saw a nearly seven-foot-tall young man with long, blond hair, marching in the nude and holding up a sign that read “Sweden is Watching.” Many protesters shouted counts up to forty-three, followed by “Justicia!” “#YaMeCansé” was scrawled on countless signs, followed by whatever that marcher had “had enough” of. For instance, “#YaMeCansé of the war against those of us raising our voices. The criminals are the politicians!” Many chants were inventive or cheerfully obscene or sexual. The larger contingents, from universities and secondary schools, used rope barriers to cordon themselves off from infiltrators. People shouted at marchers wearing masks to uncover their faces. The masked marchers were presumed to be possible members of anarchist groups, or even provocateurs who would provide the police with a justification for responding with violence.

Usually, the main significance of a march is simply that it took place: that people took the time to walk in protest or support of something, because it felt like the right outlet for their indignation or approval. But sometimes a march makes concrete a moment of collective cultural expression that can be harder to put into words. This march was an expression of Mexico City—of a way its residents like to think of themselves—in full flower. But it was also a manifestation of a discernible change that seems to be taking place throughout Mexico. When a friend said that he “could feel Mexico on the move” at the march, he didn’t seem, to me, to be exaggerating. We didn’t reach the Zócalo until about three hours after the first marchers. By then, the podium where the Ayotzinapa family members had addressed the rally was dark and empty, and I saw no sign of the giant effigy of Peña Nieto that had been set aflame, photos of which were featured, the next day, in media reports all around the world.