Progressivism,Social mobilizations, and the World Cup
Diego Martín Velázquez Caballero
The recent social upheaval that shook Mexico during the World Cup, characterized by a choreography of protests that simultaneously challenged the neoliberal pension system, drug-related violence, patriarchy, global capitalism, and, stridently, Zionism, was not an anomaly in our political history, but rather the reactivation of its most archaic codes. The bewilderment sown by the deliberate absence of the President of the Republic from the opening ceremony, coupled with street mobilizations where genuine demands were diluted by provocations sponsored by the progressive regime itself, revealed a subtle strategy. Far from being an ungovernable explosion, the staging of a Mexico transformed into ungovernable chaos and a living monument to resistance against FIFA and the North American axis operates as a calculated geopolitical retreat mechanism. This dynamic, which draws directly from the traditions of Echeverría and Cárdenas embedded in the very fabric of the Mexican left, uses mobilization not to liberate, but to discipline. Beneath the masquerade of emancipatory and decolonial rhetoric, what truly persists and consolidates is the refined method of internal control that anthropologist Claudio Lomnitz termed antisemitism without Jews and, sometimes, without antisemites.
To unravel this cultural labyrinth, it is imperative to understand that Judeophobia in the Ibero-American context does not conform to the parameters of European biological racism, but rather functions as a sociopolitical technology inherited directly from the tribunals of the Holy Inquisition. In the mental architecture of the Habsburg Model, theorized by Howard Wiarda and Loris Zanatta, society is conceived as an organic, unanimous, and corporate body that must be preserved from any external contamination. In this theological-political matrix of national Catholicism, the Jew ceases to be a demographic or flesh-and-blood reality, becoming instead a metaphorical abstraction: the absolute symbol of dissent, the bearer of the virus of modernity, free trade, empirical science, and democratic individualism.
Historically, as Daniela Gleizer and Pablo Yankelevich document in their study of state racism in Mexico, accusations of Judaization or complicity with foreign agendas have served to purge and proscribe internal elements that attempted to break the monopoly of the colonial elites. This occurred with the liberal scientists of the Porfiriato and with the first social reformers; the religious stigma operated as a civil excommunication indispensable for safeguarding the status quo.
In the era of the so-called Fourth Transformation, this inquisitorial apparatus has been secularized and rebranded as anti-Zionist political correctness. When radical factions of the official progressive movement saturate the public sphere claiming that the international financial system, global sports institutions, and North American geopolitics are rigidly controlled by Zionism, they are not conducting a serious materialist or economic analysis, but rather resurrecting the old myth of a synarchic conspiracy. This outlandish cry of aggressive radicalism precisely fulfills the function of what nineteenth-century German sociology termed the socialism of fools: a crude simplification of the contradictions of capital that, instead of questioning the real structures of production and local corruption, personifies oppression in an invisible and absolute enemy.
By channeling social frustration toward this global phantom, the regime shields its own shortcomings and legitimizes the systemic rejection of liberal democracy, institutional capitalism, and economic integration with North America, presenting them as colonial traps set by the enemy.
When artists or opinion leaders of the cultural progressive movement adopt discourses in which Zionism is blamed for all global ills, they often do so from a legitimate empathy with causes like Palestine, but with a profound lack of historical rigor. Lacking nuance, they end up validating narratives that essentialize the Jew as the universal oppressor, unwittingly falling into the same prejudices that the most reactionary right wing has used for centuries.
The ultimate paradox of this phenomenon is that, while proclaiming a break with the neoliberal order, the use of abstract Judeophobia deepens and perpetuates internal colonialism. The Creole elites of Catholic nationalism and the political bureaucracies inherited from the old revolutionary nationalism do not attack the actual members of the Mexican Jewish community, with whom they maintain pragmatic economic alliances, but rather wield the stigma like an axe against anyone who tries to push Mexico toward an open, competitive modernity guided by the rigor of science, the market, or democratic freedom.
State anti-Zionism functions today as the great guardian of stagnation; it is the ideological checkpoint that punishes merit, demonizes institutional dissent, and justifies a hegemonic authoritarianism that returns us to the mental autarky of the viceroyalty. In the end, the folkloric mobilizations surrounding the World Cup and the rhetorical boycott against Western powers were nothing more than a modern-day version of colonial processions, a political charade designed to convince the population that isolation and poverty are mystical virtues in the face of external corruption. As long as the inquisitorial pyre of public discourse continues to burn the promoters of material progress, Mexico will remain trapped in the Habsburg labyrinth, condemned to stagnation by the crushing weight of its own myths.
