CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

While FIFA Counts Goals, Mexicans Count the Disappeared

“Behind the Cup, graves and troops are hidden,” reads this placard, at a political action in Mexico City. Photo by Tamara Pearson.

From teachers to the mothers searching for the forcibly disappeared, Mexico will be holding numerous, massive protests against the 2026 Men’s World Cup as it kicks off in Mexico City on Thursday. This follows hundreds of protests and actions held over the past months as FIFA and governments prioritize tourists and corporations over urgent local needs and the environment.

The scoreboard and fouls:

Take FIFA to forget that there is empire – The World Cup, being held in Mexico, the US, and Canada, will “unite the people,” said Canadian soccer player, Jonatha Osorio. “The world will be invading Canada, Mexico and the USA with a big wave of joy and happiness,” said FIFA president Gianni Infantino, on a glitzy summer’s evening in New York.

The same countries are also currently holding talks to renew the USMCA North American free trade agreement for another 16 years. The USMCA, an update to the NAFTA, is codified empire, depriving Mexico of corn sovereignty, institutionalizing the US’s dominance and Mexico’s structural and economic dependence, while sacrificing Mexico’s rivers and soil to US and Canadian mines.

The giddy glamour of the World Cup spectacle is not unity but sedation, its stadium lights obscuring the negotiated details of imperialism and the unfestive realities of barbed borders, wage apartheid, and centuries of accumulated harm.

A corporate exploitation bonanza – The soccer ball is the pretext. The World Cup is actually a giant advertising campaign — experiential marketing designed to drive sales for the corporate sponsors and move mass amounts of merchandise.

Behind those sales there is extreme exploitation. Adidas and the company Someone Somewhere paid 150 Indigenous Nahua embroiderers in Naupan, Puebla, 36 pesos (US$2) an hour to hand-stitch the Mexico World Cup jersey — which Adidas then sold for 4,000 pesos. Diario Cambio reported that the women were also forced to abandon their traditional sewing techniques and use French knots and zigzag stitching instead to fill in commercial logos — a sidelining of cultural knowledge. The companies also promised the workers social security, in order to justify their “fair trade” branding (and pricing), but never kept the promise.

And while World Cup merchandise floods Mexico’s street stalls and shops, an estimated 70% of Mexicans will watch the matches on television, with a corresponding increase in junk food purchases to go with that. Inside statidums, FIFA has prohibited the use of reusable water bottles in the three host countries, meaning spectators must buy water or soft drinks, generating huge amounts of rubbish as well as profits for corporations.

Coca Cup: The Cup trophy arrived in a Coca-Cola plane at Mexico City’s airport in late February. The Mexican government rolled out the red carpet, with foreign affairs secretary Juan........

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