Angry student slams government at business summit

A frustrated student from Monterrey went off script and criticized the government as she delivered the closing address at the 11^th International Business Summit held at the Expo Guadalajara this week.

“The government is crushing the young people. They’re not letting us grow,” said Bianca Patricia Treviño, a postgraduate at the University of West Virginia, on Tuesday. She explained that she had been angered by conference organizers who rejected the original speech that she had prepared and just told her to say “thank you, I liked the event.”

“The government doesn’t want to listen to us … they’ve brainwashed us, it’s very difficult to wake people up,” she continued, as the organizers scrambled to cut off her microphone, “but we’re only just beginning this fight.”

Once she left the stage, an apparently unflustered Governor Aristoteles Sandoval welcomed Treviño’s comments and invited her to become engaged in the political process. “Today we cannot have a silent society; it is the worst thing that can happen to our country. We need an active and critical society,” Sandoval said.

The government then blocked footage of the event on YouTube and later posted a censored video in which the girl’s speech had been edited out.

Deals worth 496.2 million dollars of investment in Jalisco were formalized at the summit, which ran from October 20 to 22, including 30 million pesos of investment in the state’s tourist sector.

The event drew leading business owners and government officials from 17 countries, including Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto. It cost 4.4 million dollars to stage the summit, with the Jalisco government contributing 19.7 million pesos.