Why Did The Viral Mexican Video Get Removed from YouTube After 2 Million Views?

Apr 19, 2012
5:03 PM

Last week, a powerful viral video from Mexico gained over 2 million views. The video showed child actors depicting some of the country's most serious problems and demanding that Mexico's political parties start worrying about solving these problems instead of the status quo. Since this year is a presidential election year in Mexico, the video resonated with people, even though there were questions about its origins.

Now Nuestro México del Futuro took the video down from YouTube and no longer features it on its site. But the video can still be seen on some YouTube channels, like this one:

In the meantime, MILENIO provided an article in Spanish that tried to explain the video's removal. The video is also not available on its Facebook site, after it was there last week. The organization's Facebook page now has over 47,000 likes as of this afternoon, with about 20,500 people talking about it, an outstanding Facebook engagement rate. The focus of the page now (even with the video no longer available) is to display the submissions received from the video that had asked for children to share their vision of a better Mexico.

MILENIO tried to provide reasons as to why the video was deleted and contacted the NMF leadership, who said that moving forward the organization will focus on the "the visions of children" and will no longer promote the original video. They will also not do any more interviews about the viral video. Latino Rebels did reach out to NMF this week and got a similar response, being told that NMF has already "presented its case" and they are moving on. We followed up for clarification, but NMF has yet to respond.

According to MILENIO, on April 11 leaders from Mexico's PRI and PT parties both demanded that the video be removed, calling it "despicable" and a violation of human rights by characterizing children as delinquents, beggars, criminals and corrupt police. One Mexican TV critic said that the video clearly violated Mexico's election laws.

The MILENIO report also said that NMF is sponsored by Mexican insurance giant GNP and that the NMF organization has seen over 10 million Mexicans participate in this social movement.