After 43 student teachers went missing after being arrested last September 26 in Ayotzinapa, Mexico, thousands of people have taken to the streets to protest in Mexico and overseas over what many believe to be a case of kidnapping. Bay Area organizations have organized a second protest today at 4 p.m. outside the Mexican Consulate to condemn the violent acts and to ask for the return of the 43 student teachers alive.
In an effort to find them, thousands of people have started to look for them and came across several mass graves where bodies were found, but it remains unclear if the bodies belong to those of the missing students. Here’s more from El País:
43 student protestors were arrested by local police in Iguala on September 26 and turned over to a local drug gang. Two hitmen later confessed to killing 17 of them, and dozens of as-yet unidentified bodies have turned up in several mass graves outside town.
Despite Governor Ángel Aguirre’s statements to the effect that the bodies were not those of the missing students, the government’s inability to identify the remains quickly or to provide an efficient response to the two-week-old disappearances has turned up the heat on a simmering crisis.
On Monday, around 500 students from the Escuela Normal Rural Raúl Isidro Burgos teachers’ collegesurrounded the state headquarters and demanded to see the governor. Their request was turned down and the building evacuated, after which demonstrators began hurling rocks and burning parked vehicles. Some then set fire to nearby office buildings, including the one that houses Guerrero’s department of home affairs.
A detachment of around 500 riot police officers was dispatched to the area, but little was done to stop the students, who simply drove off on their buses once they were done. READ MORE.
It has been reported that the mayor of Iguala, José Luis Abarca, gave the order to the local and state police to detain the students that have now disappeared.
From El País:
“Since then, fear has taken over Iguala,” says Sofía Mendoza Martínez, Hernández Cardona’s widow and councilwoman for the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD). She was one of the few people capable of breaking the cycle of terror by accusing the mayor even before he became the most wanted man in Mexico for the murder of six people and the disappearance of 43 student teachers in the aftermath of brutal skirmishes with police and cartels on September 26.
Abarca’s whereabouts are a mystery. Investigators believe he has left Iguala and the spoils of his mysterious rise from selling straw hats and sandals at his family’s stand to a business and real estate emporium. He used that platform to get into politics in 2012 with the support of a former PRD senator. Despite his inexperience, he won the election. The realization of a dream – or, of a nightmare. The municipality of 130,000 residents is the third-largest city in Guerrero. It is the historic cradle of the Mexican flag and a strategic enclave for drug cartels. READ MORE HERE.
Puts our local SoccerGate scandal in perspective, I’d aver.