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Resisting the Empire Next Door, Protests in Mexico Grow

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24.01.2026

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An anti-imperialist movement is building in Mexico, where the U.S. invasion of Venezuela has been seen as an act of intimidation for all of Latin America. Protests are swelling in response to this latest blow after decades of political and economic subjugation by its neighbor to the north.

Across the country, larger-than-usual marches on January 3 and 10 condemned the U.S. attacks on Venezuela. The marches included some pro-Morena groups (the governing party) as well as students, workers, farmers, and Indigenous groups that are critical of Morena.

Over a hundred organizations met in university union offices in Mexico City and collectively

condemned the U.S. intervention in Venezuela, calling for anti-imperialist action around the continent, as “Latin American sovereignty is at stake.” The Zapatistas also released a statement, supported by around 170 organizations in Mexico, in solidarity with the Venezuelan people and denouncing “big capital’s wars of conquest.”

In Mexico City, unions, environmentalists, feminists, sexual diversity activists, students, movements for housing rights, and anti-racists chanted “Yankees out of Latin America” and held banners that read “Down with the Monroe Doctrine.”

Here in Puebla, thousands of street vendors, small farmers, university workers, students, solidarity groups, and revolutionary organizations chanted, “We don’t want to be a colony.” The local anti-imperialist front was created on January 12.

“The day the U.S. bombed Venezuela, we mobilized in Puebla … and we condemned the aggression and denounced that this would be the start of something bigger,” Rubén Sarabia Sánchez, known as Simitrio, tells Truthout. The founder and general advisor of the UPVA 28 de Octubre, which organizes thousands of market and street vendors in Puebla, he has been a political prisoner twice and his daughter was murdered in 2017 as part of the repression of the group.

The front also called for another protest on January 21. That day, some 10,000 people shut down a major highway and marched along it for six kilometers (3.7 miles). “We’re not heard unless the circulation of goods are affected,” Simitrio said.

Unions, environmentalists, feminists, sexual diversity activists, students, movements for housing rights, and anti-racists chanted “Yankees out of Latin America”

Other fronts have been formed around the country, including in Guanajuato, where civil society groups are calling for the withdrawal of all U.S. troops from Latin America. In Sinaloa, the new front has held protests in Culiacán, rejecting the U.S. attacks on Venezuela and defending self-determination throughout the continent.

“The sentiment in the marches has been ‘if it happens to them, it could happen to us.’ It seems like the U.S. president has no limits now,” Axel Hernández tells Truthout. He is part of the Journalism Cooperative in Mexico City, which has been documenting police abuse at protests and observing movements against gentrification, for water rights, and against the upcoming World Cup to be held in Mexico City, among other venues.

“With the supposed ceasefire in Gaza, the mobilizations for Palestine became smaller, but now we are seeing huge numbers of people coming into the street, for some of the biggest mobilizations in the past year … including unions, housing organizations, and even some members of Morena, and some of its leaders like the writer Paco Ignacio Taibo,” Hernández said. Formal political parties like Morena, PRI, PAN, etc. aren’t typically welcome in most mobilizations, such as demonstrations for women’s rights or for the forcibly disappeared.

Mexico’s National Education Workers Union (CNTE), with an estimated 350,000 members, condemned the attack on Venezuela, saying it confirmed Trump’s “monopolizing ambitions towards Latin America” and his “determination to use his military power for the capitalist interests of his empire.” Rural Indigenous organizations also released statements of solidarity, noting “Trump thinks the whole world is his........

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