Half a century after Avándaro was vilified as a moral threat, Mexico is once again scapegoating music. Last week’s small but pointed protests by artists and venue workers barely registered—their silence from power matters—because cultural freedom is democracy’s amplifier.
Avándaro’s Echo Meets Present Silence
Fifty-four years after the “Mexican Woodstock” gathered hundreds of thousands of young people in muddy fields, the country is replaying the same debate: is music a menace, or a mirror? The release of José Manuel Cravioto’s film Autos, mota y rock ‘ n ‘ roll—a faux-documentary revisiting Avándaro—should have sparked reflection. Instead, the modest demonstrations that accompanied screenings, with placards warning against scapegoating songs, barely broke through the week’s political noise.
That is a mistake. Avándaro’s legacy is not nostalgia but a warning. The festival was born as a naïve sports-and-music event, Cravioto reminded EFE—two friends staging a concert, not a revolution. The hysteria was manufactured afterward, when authorities smeared the crowd as degenerate to bury the wounds of Tlatelolco and the Halconazo.
Cravioto told EFE he intended to show the “B-side” of Mexico’s most crucial counterculture gathering: its contradictions, its humanity, its cautionary tale about criminalizing culture. He quotes the festival as “the last great act of youth rebellion,” a phrase that resonates bitterly in a country again flirting with new taboos.
Blaming Songs While Problems Go Unaddressed
“Instead of blaming the corruption in Mexico, instead of admitting there’s no real security plan and that we’re practically at war with so many dead, it’s very easy to blame the music,” Cravioto said bluntly to EFE.
Once rock was demonized; today it is corridos tumbados. Genres change, scapegoating doesn’t. The math is simple: you can censor a verse, but you cannot censor the homicide rate. You can shut down a stage, but you cannot police away impunity or the poverty that sustains it.
Cravioto added a pointed reminder: “Weed is still not legal.” A policy vacuum keeps “la mota” criminalized, while doing nothing to reduce violence—another echo from Avándaro’s headlines. Instead of serious drug reform, youth spaces, or mental health investment, officials keep reaching for the shortcut: branding entire genres as “apología de la violencia.”
The protesters last week—writers, venue workers, indie producers—weren’t defending every lyric. They were defending the principle that speech should be critiqued, not criminalized. To answer them with silence is to accept that moral panic, not evidence, will guide policy again.
Militarizing Stages Is a Policy Failure
The reflex is not just rhetorical; it is operational. Cravioto pointed to the May 30 police action that cleared a Mexico City concert by Basque musician Fermín Muguruza, calling it proof that concerts “continue to be perpetrated by the military.” He told EFE it was the same logic that shut down independent venues like Multiforo Alicia: send uniforms where dialogue should go, then declare victory.
Militarizing culture is self-defeating. It drives shows underground, erases tax-paying jobs, and teaches artists that safety lies in timidity. It breeds the very resentment authorities claim to fear. And it is applied selectively: stadiums backed by corporate sponsors glide through, while independent venues choke on bureaucracy.
That is why last week’s small assemblies mattered. Their demand was simple: rules, not raids; guardrails, not gags; public safety rooted in policy, not theatrics.
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Listen Now or Lose More Than Music
Ignoring those demands costs more than a few gigs. Cultural freedom is a barometer of whether a democracy trusts itself. Avándaro’s lesson, as reframed in Autos, mota y rock ‘ n ‘ roll, is that the easiest way to dodge accountability is to blame a riff. The film, shot on 16mm and Super 8, threaded with Graciela Iturbide’s images, is itself an act of civic service.
So listen—Decriminalize scapegoats—starting with a serious, regulated approach to cannabis. Stop criminalizing genres as aesthetics of crime. Replace security theatrics with professional civilian crowd management. Invest in community venues, transparent permitting, and cultural circuits that treat an indie stage with the same respect as an arena. Teach this history in schools, so that when artists rally to defend their stages, officials recognize it as democratic participation, not subversion.
Last week’s protests did not fill boulevards; they filled a civic vacuum. In a week tied to memory—the Avándaro anniversary—and a film that insists on nuance, the responsible response would have been to answer with policy, not silence.
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Mexico knows better. Its archives, and the interviews preserved by EFE, remind us: the problem was never the song. The problem is the refusal to listen.