MEXICO PERSPECTIVE

Mexico City lives the opening in a tension between popular pride and social anger that President Claudia Sheinbaum chose not to confront head-on. On the pitch, El Tri broke the opening-match curse by beating South Africa 2-0 at the renovated Azteca thanks to Julián Quiñones, the tournament's first scorer, and Raúl Jiménez, before 80,000 spectators. But outside the stadium, the party turned to confrontation: the opening day left '19 detained and 11 police injured' according to Citizen Security, an anti-World-Cup march from the national university (UNAM) gathering CNTE teachers, transport workers and mothers of the disappeared under the slogan 'if there is no solution, the ball won't roll.' Amnesty International condemned police use of fire extinguishers to disperse demonstrators. Sheinbaum's political gesture is scrutinized: she skipped the opening, explaining that 'tickets are very expensive' — around $3,000, 'unthinkable for most Mexicans who would barely make that in a month' — and gave her seat to Yolett Cervantes, a Nahua athlete from Veracruz who won a national contest. 'We don't need to rub shoulders at the top,' she said. The president also took care to clarify that Salma Hayek, present at the ceremony, was 'a FIFA guest' and not a government representative. For Mexico, the World Cup is a national pride doubled with a revealer of fractures — cost of living, disappearances, repression — that the party does not mask.