At UNAM’s Rectory Tower, students from the Interuniversity and Popular Assembly in Solidarity with Palestine set up their encampment to protest the ongoing genocide in Gaza.

Student organizers see López Obrador’s response as “tepid” given the level of brutality Israel has employed. The students are calling on the Mexican government to break diplomatic relations with Israel and for UNAM to break all academic ties with Israeli institutions. 

The Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) campaign affiliate in Mexico set up a tent near the student encampment. BDS activist Paulina Castro said that they are specifically calling for a boycott of the tech company HP and the Mexican-based CEMEX, a cement company deeply involved in the oppression of Palestinians through its work building Israel’s “separation barrier” and checkpoints that limit the mobility of Palestinians. 

The students’ demand to break diplomatic relations with Israel has major reverberations due to Israel’s insidious role in Mexico’s domestic politics. In March 2011, Mexico reached an agreement to become the first client of the notorious Israeli-made spying software Pegasus and Mexico eventually became the most prolific user in the world. Purportedly created to fight organized crime, governments use the software, which infiltrates phones without users’ knowledge, to spy on civilians; in the case of Mexico, they used it to spy on human rights defenders and activists. 

Although López Obrador suspended its use, it is believed the Mexican Armed Forces will continue to use the software. Breaking diplomatic relations would spell an end to the partnerships that allow this software to be used in Mexico.

Israel also played a role in obstructing justice for the 43 forcibly disappeared students from the teacher training college in Ayotzinapa in 2014. Israel is currently sheltering Tomás Zerón, then head of the Federal Prosecutor’s Criminal Investigation Agency and believed to have led the state cover-up of the students’ forced disappearance. A warrant for his arrest has been issued, and Mexico has sought Zerón’s extradition from Israel. Israel has refused, in part because of its displeasure with the López Obrador government’s position on Palestine — Mexico fully recognized the State of Palestine in 2023.

The camp at the UNAM has itself become a place of convergence for transnational, cross-border solidarity. A visitor from Canada noted, “Seeing the same kind of language being used — anti-imperialism and anti-occupation — goes to show that this is a shared struggle. We’re not only targeting the United States as the bastion of white supremacy and global imperialism, but also targeting global capital as a whole. We’re not ending until the collective struggle ends with collective liberation.”