Alejandro Torres, a university student at UNAM, serves as a leader in the Morena party’s Youth Section.

“The murder of 43 Ayotzinapa students in 2014 electrified young people of my generation and turned us from passive dissatisfaction into an activist social force. The Morena party formed in 2014 — and AMLO’s election in 2018 —gave young people for the first time in history the space to participate directly in politics, not just in social movements. Hope returned to us. I’m ready!” Read more.

Alejandra Morales Reynoso, the general secretary of the independent union SINTTIA, joined with her co-workers to pull off a historic win against an entrenched company union in 2022. Her union now represents 7,000 auto workers at the huge GM plant in the city of Silao.

“I’ve been working at GM since 2010 as a painter of the Sierra and Cheyenne trucks. Our pay amounts to US $2.00 an hour. We can’t afford cars. We know that US auto workers own cars. Why can’t we be paid enough to own a car? Some of us can’t even afford to live in houses with sewage services! Organizing for our union gives me strength.” Read more.

Verónica Cruz Sánchez founded the women’s rights organization Las Libres in Guanajuato. Her group now serves women in Texas who’ve lost their abortion right.
“When I found out that over 2,000 women nationwide were serving prison sentences for deciding to end an unwanted pregnancy, I felt enraged. Women were even getting imprisoned for miscarriages! Due to our work, in September 2021, the Mexican Supreme Court ruled penalizing abortion unconstitutional. Our winning campaign messages separated ‘beliefs’ from ‘rights’ and ‘religious’ from ‘social.’” 
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The lives of Clemente Rodríguez Moreno and his family changed forever in 2014 when their son became one of 43 students at the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College who suddenly disappeared.

“Students called to tell us our sons were missing. We wanted to go with clubs and machetes to defend our children. We went to the police, to the hospitals, to government offices. People we met said to us, ‘Ask the police.’ But we couldn’t get any information and we couldn’t find our sons. Through this ordeal, we all realized that criminal organizations worked together with the police.” Read more.

Rosalinda Guillen began working as a farmworker at the age of ten in the fields in Skagit County, Washington. She founded Community to Community to support rural people and sustainable agriculture policies.

“Like so many of us who come from a farming tradition, I am a person of the land. I loved picking strawberries. In the fields, you can feel beauty everywhere. But then, in the 1970s and 1980s, pesticides came into use. Workers got sick. Farm work has become so dangerous and exploitative that workers now hate what they once loved. The agriculture industry has beaten the desire to connect to the land out of us. We get chewed up and spit out.” Read more.

Writer, playwright, and freelance journalist Kurt Hackbarth works as a Mexican citizen based in Oaxaca.

“The Summit of the Americas” began in 1994 in the wake of NAFTA, as a vehicle to give the US a platform to proselytize the benefits of free trade. When AMLO refused go to the June 2022 Summit due to the US unilateral decision to exclude member governments, other nations either followed suit or publicly criticized the US at the Summit. AMLO has led Latin American nations to assert their sovereignty.” Read more.