The killing of George Floyd has sparked global soul-searching

LOCAL POLICE arrested Giovanni López, a 30-year-old Mexican bricklayer, in Ixtlahuacán de los Membrillos, a town near Guadalajara, on May 4th. Why they detained him is unclear. The next morning his family found him dead in a nearby hospital, with bruises on his head and a bullet in his ankle. His name did not go viral; no politician lamented his death.

Christian López, who filmed his brother’s arrest, stayed silent at first. He would later claim that messengers acting on behalf of the local mayor threatened to kill his family if the footage went public. But then came the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, and the anti-police, anti-racism backlash that has swept the world. “I saw it and thought, this is the same thing that happened to my brother,” he says. On June 1st he went to the press.