By THE PULSE NEWS MEXICO STAFF

After a group  of students from Mexico’s Ayotzinapa Normal College, in the coastal state of Guerrero, launched a trailer truck with no brakes at members of the National Guard (GN) on Saturday, Feb. 5, because the GN prevented them from forcefully seizing control of a toll booth along the Mexico City-Acapulco highway, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) on Sunday, Feb. 13, said that he will now “pay” those who take the booths to allow motorists to pass.

Despite having said in 2020 that the unlawful seizure of tolls booths constituted “stealing from the Mexican people,” AMLO, after passing through an “improvised” booth in the northern state of Sonora, where indigenous Yaquis consistently charge motorists for allowing them to pass — including the president and his entourage that day — called on the state governor Alfonso Durazo to help him “investigate how much they earn in that booth so that the government instead pays them that same amount of money.”

“As I told the young people from the Normal School of Ayotzinapa who took over the booths: If you are doing this because you don’t have money for your studies and you are poor students, we will give everyone scholarships,” AMLO said.

“Let’s see, how much the Yaquis get (from the seized booths) and we will pay them that amount for work.”

But in December 2020, the president stated in Sinaloa that taking booths was a crime and his leftist National Regeneration Movement (Morena) party promoted a law to punish those who highjack toll points with seven years in prison.