FIFA Counts Goals, Mexicans Count the Disappeared |
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
1. 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 US-Mexico Canada (USMC) North American free trade agreement for another 16 years. The USMCA, an update to the North America Free Trade Agreement, is codified empire, depriving Mexico of corn sovereignty, institutionalizing the US' 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.
The US and Mexico are employing selective hospitality for the World Cup—or, more precisely, implementing racist and classist measures of city beautification for some, and social cleansing, deportations, raids, repression, and evictions for others.
2. 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.
3. 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 Ramón de la Fuente receiving the corporation and the trophy as though they were fellow officials. The trophy and massive Coca-Cola boards then toured the country, including a photo shoot at the sacred and world heritage site, Chichén Itza, and an appearance on the president's daily news show.
Coca-Cola has had advertising at every FIFA tournament since 1950. The promotions and sponsorship are a major part of its strategy to increase consumption during the games, and for acquiring new customers. Coca-Cola, along with companies like Pepsi and Nestle, extract (steal) over 133 billion liters of Mexico's water annually, and Mexico is already the biggest consumer of Coca-Cola globally, at an average of 163 liters of soft drink per person per year. The FIFA-Coca-Cola alliance is spoon-feeding more empire to a country it is already slowly poisoning.
4. Red carpet for tourists, disposable locals: The US and Mexico are employing selective hospitality for the World Cup—or, more precisely, implementing racist and classist measures of city beautification for some, and social cleansing, deportations, raids, repression, and evictions for others.
The US is promoting the World Cup as a way to "showcase" their "hospitality," while simultaneously violating a range of human rights with its closed border, Immigration and Customs Enforcement racial profiling, and illegal and cruel deportations.
In Mexico City over the past month, officials have also held anti-migrant raids, where police, the military, and migration authorities have detained people who are typically irregular precisely because of the closed border to the north and horrific wait times and unfair outcomes from Mexican institutions. Social cleansing for the World Cup also includes removing vendors from the area near the Mexico City stadium and homeless people from parts of the city where tourists are expected. Sex workers report that a new 17-kilometer bike lane built for the World Cup has left thousands of them without work, and local communities, who weren't consulted, said they support bike lanes, but this one cuts through bus stops, endangering pedestrians.
The government is also valuing Mexico's beautiful axolotls more as World Cup mascots than living creatures. It spent 62 million pesos adorning walls around the city and the light-rail with axolotl images, while nearby in Xochimilco, the animals are endangered due to contaminated runoff and public works.
Further, the government is staging Day of the Dead celebrations in June just for tourists, while erecting massive metal perimeters around Mexico City's main square. There is a two-kilometer exclusion zone around the stadium that is causing huge difficulties for locals as well as stopping........