There is a particular kind of violence in the optics. Ten days before the 2026 FIFA World Cup officially opens, Mexico City riot police deployed teargas against hundreds of teachers who had marched to the Zócalo — the vast, symbolically charged heart of the capital — to demand what teachers have been demanding for years: livable wages, job security, and an end to a reform framework many educators say was designed to discipline them rather than improve schools. The police were not there to mediate. They were there to protect a fan zone under construction.

The confrontation began when teachers from the Coordinadora Nacional de Trabajadores de la Educación — known as the CNTE, the dissident teachers' union that has been a thorn in the side of every Mexican government for four decades — pushed through one of the metal barriers that authorities had erected at the plaza's entrance. The barriers themselves tell the story: the Zócalo, a space that under Mexican constitutional tradition belongs to public assembly as much as to any government or sports federation, has been effectively pre-emptively fenced off for a FIFA commercial activation. That the government felt it necessary to build a physical perimeter around the square before the marchers even arrived says something about who officials believed had the stronger claim to it.