in Mexico, where protesters in the southern state of Guerrero have set fire to government buildings, including the state legislature, as outrage spreads over the disappearance of 43 students. The students from Ayotzinapa teachers college have been missing for nearly seven weeks, after they were ambushed by police. The initial series of attacks killed six people, one of whom was found with the skin of his face peeled off.
Unrest has intensified since Mexican Attorney General Jesús Murillo Karam announced Friday that suspects in the case have admitted to killing the students and incinerating their bodies at a trash dump, leading investigators to remains. He says the mayor of Iguala ordered the attack by police, who then turned the students over to a local drug gang.
Tens of thousands of people have taken to the streets in peaceful protests, while groups of demonstrators have laid siege to government buildings, burned cars, blocked highways across Mexico. On Wednesday, students blocked access to an airport in the state of Michoacán and took over highways in the southern states of Oaxaca and Chiapas.
In Guerrero, multiple mass graves containing dozens of bodies have been uncovered by authorities searching for the students. But a team of Argentine forensic experts has said none of the remains they’ve examined so far match the students. The most recent set of remains, found in trash bags, which authorities say were burned at a garbage dump, have yet to be analyzed.
The parents of the missing students, meanwhile, distrust the authorities’ account and continue to hold out hope their loved ones are alive. On Wednesday, the families announced they will be traveling across parts of the country in three caravans to demand their loved ones’ return.
The students’ disappearance is among the worst human rights crises to hit the country since the 1968 student massacre at Tlatelolco, but it is not an isolated incident. At least eight Mexican soldiers have been detained for an alleged massacre of 22 people in the rural southern state of Mexico. While the army claimed the victims were suspected gang members who died in a firefight, it appears they had actually surrendered. Last month, three American siblings were found dead in the northern border state of Tamaulipas after witnesses saw them taken away by a local police unit.
John Gibler talking:
there has been a massive upsurge in protests since the attorney—federal attorney general’s announcement of their version of the events, their theory about the students were murdered and their remains burned at a trash dump in Cocula. As you heard the representative of the parents say, they do not accept that version.
On Sunday, after Murillo Karam made that announcement, I attended a highway blockade here in Chilpancingo on the highway, federal highway, to Acapulco, where one of the mothers of a young disappeared student said to me, quote, “These are theatrics that the government is mounting to distract us. But we, even though we are humble and poor people, are people with minds capable of understanding what’s going on. They took our students alive, and we want them alive.” Constantly, at every stage of the protests, in which here, at least in Guerrero state, the parents themselves participate, as well as the classmates of the 43 disappeared students, there’s the reiteration of the demand: The students were taken alive by police, and it’s the government’s responsibility to return them alive.
Protests have included marches, highway blockades, the destruction—the property destruction of windows and equipment, and setting cars on fire outside of government buildings. One concrete example, when they’ve attacked the government palace in Chilpancingo, across the highway there’s a very large federal auditorium administered by the state government, which is entirely built of glass. They’ve never thrown a single rock at that theater auditorium across the street. They make the seat of government their target.
what happened deep into the night to the 43 disappeared students, the government is basing their—all of their theories and their actions on the confessions of people they’ve detained. But this now, the version that the students were burned in Cocula, is the third round of supposedly trustworthy confessions made by people who have been detained. We should recall that initially, on October 4, there was the discovery of mass graves in the outskirts of Iguala city. And first the state government prosecutors and then later federal prosecutors said that they had direct participant testimony describing how they had taken the students there, murdered them, dug mass graves and burned them with diesel in these graves. It turns out that now the Argentine forensic anthropology specialists have confirmed that 24 of the 30 remains found there have been confirmed not to be the students who are missing. So here we have, you know, now a pattern of the government saying, “We have these credible witnesses in custody, they’ve described to us what they did,” but then two weeks later the scenario they described turns out not to be true. So the statement that they have been murdered and their bodied found in plastic bags in a river outside a trash dump in Cocula, I think should be met with suspicion.
I traveled to Cocula the other day and was unable to find any kind of witness testimony, people in the surrounding area who could describe either having seen unusual smoke or an unusual amount of traffic on the very desolate, isolated dirt road that heads out to that trash dump. Also, it should be recalled that on the evening of the 26th to the morning of the 27th of September, when the events occurred, it was raining consistently in Iguala and Cocula. I’ve recovered numerous testimonies of people, both surviving students from that night as well as journalists who arrived from Chilpancingo and local journalists in Iguala, who described the rains that night, which has also been confirmed by consulting Mexican meteorological institutions, which makes it somehow hard to—or harder to believe that 43 human beings were murdered and their bodies completely obliterated through a massive fire using diesel and tires, expired tires, considering it was raining all night.
[It reminds me of the early ’60s, when Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman, you know, Mickey Schwerner, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman, their bodies were discovered in Mississippi—they were killed by the Klan—and how when they were looking for their bodies over those weeks in that fateful summer, they kept turning up the bodies of others, African Americans who had been killed that no one had known about before, when you talk about this search for the bodies and this endless discovery of mass graves.]
We still don’t know why, what the mayor was thinking. His statements to the press have been cynical and obviously laden with lies. From the students’ behalf, we should recall that there was never a protest, even though that’s been widely repeated in the English-language press. There was no plan to go to Iguala to interrupt the mayor’s wife’s ceremony. Most of the students who were attacked that night were freshmen. They had been at Ayotzinapa for only a matter of weeks. In fact, that Friday, for many, it was their first day of classes. So, these people, who come from some of the most economically battered municipalities in Mexico, and perhaps in the Western Hemisphere, had no idea who the mayor of Iguala was.
I think what happened speaks to two things. One, it shows the full merger between police forces and local governance and organized crime. I don’t think it’s possible anymore to talk about corruption. The idea of corruption no longer has any kind of descriptive power. But what we have is two sectors of an industry that have fully merged—the police and the drug or organized crime gangs themselves—and the confluence of two forms of violence—the classic state violence of repression and the kind of newish forms of narcobrutality, the violence associated with organized crime organizations here.
Again, the police attack to round up, detain, beat, arrest, perhaps shoot a few students, this is something that’s been going on against the Ayotzinapa students for years. In fact, on December 12, 2011, state police shot and killed, during a protest action on the highway, two students. That case still remains also in impunity. No one has been punished. But also, the mix with the forms of terror—forced disappearance has a long and sordid history as a practice of state violence in Mexico, but very particularly in Guerrero, which during the so-called Dirty War of the 1970s, half of the people disappeared in Mexico were disappeared in Guerrero state. So that’s a long-standing state practice of violence. But this removal of Julio César Mondragón’s face, the gouging out of his eyes, the displaying of that body, I think testifies or shows the merger, confluence of state violence and so-called narcoviolence.
Peña Nieto, the president, had been enjoying a kind of love affair with the international press, which I think is epitomized by the Time magazine cover. He was presented—Peña Nieto was presented as the president of reforms, energy and education reforms. He had busted an old-school corrupt union boss. He had grabbed El Chapo. It seemed like everybody, especially, again, in the English-language press, was in love with Peña Nieto. But now, with municipal police, ordered by the mayor, rounding up, murdering, disappearing students, leaving six people dead, 43 disappeared, the army base three miles away and the army never interceding on behalf of the victims, it completely destroys the myth of a Mexico that had been “saved,” to quote Time magazine, by this political official.
And again, as Ernesto, the young survivor of the attacks, had said, what’s most outraged the parents, the survivors and the classmates of the 43 disappeared has precisely been that the government, after weeks of ineptitude and foot dragging, when they finally started looking for the students, they looked for them in mass graves. They looked for them dead, in the forms of bones and ash. And the parents are very intense and clear in their demands: “The students were taken away alive by the police. Bring them back alive.”
And so, the attorney general’s statements that he’s tired can only seem violent and ridiculous. Imagine how the 43 sets of families feel, what they—how much sleep did they get at night? And the president’s, you know, just insane luxury home, officially registered with this company that he’s gotten contracts for, that news breaking as these families are looking for their children—and recall that these families are from some of the most marginalized places in Mexico. Literally, the state of Guerrero has the top ranking so-called poorest municipalities in the country, so families that live in hand-built, adobe and wood constructions in very small rural communities. Then you have the president’s slick, multimillion-dollar home displayed on television screens and magazines at a time when these people are camping out on a basketball court at a small rural college, waiting for their children to be returned alive. It’s outrageous.
Laura Carlsen talking:
the United States has a fairly direct role in what’s happening today. And as the students begin and youth begin to analyze it, it’s becoming a major issue in terms of how far they’ll be able to change the model. Besides the nearly $3 billion that’s come through the Merida Initiative, there’s also Department of Defense money, and that money is going to train police forces and armed forces, that now we find are directly involved in attacks on the people, and particularly attacks on youth. We mentioned the case of Tlatlaya, where 22 youth were—now, it seems, by all evidence available—actually executed by the armed forces. And the State Department has admitted that in that battalion, although we don’t know because they won’t give us the names, there are five individuals that were trained in the United States. So there’s been a call for a long time to stop the Merida Initiative precisely for this reason, because of what John mentioned, that the state agents, at this point, in Mexico and organized crime are one in the same in many, many parts of the country.
at this point, that President Obama and President Peña Nieto—John mentioned the problem that he seems to have been more dedicated, by far, to damage control than to ever resolving the problem here in Mexico, and there’s a reason for that. The main thing that both of them are concerned with is foreign investment. Mexico, with the reforms under Peña Nieto, that the Ayotzinapa students were very active in protesting, by the way, which is a big part of why they’ve been targeted, as well, is now betting the entire country on foreign investment, especially in the newly opened oil and gas area. And President Obama and the Mexican government and the transnational corporations that are based in the U.S. have been pushing this, and it’s one of the reasons they created this very false image of everything’s great and modern, and Peña Nieto is the great reformer in Mexico, that has now been completely shattered by the revelations not just of the 43 students, but the mass graves and the disappearances and the corruption and collusion throughout the country.
So, right now, first of all, in the United States, all funding to these police and military forces through this drug war model, which has militarized the country and created a new model for repression against youth and against opposition, must be cut off immediately, or we’re directly responsible for future crimes which will occur. And on the Mexican side, the call in all these marches—and I’ve been to giant marches, 50,000, 100,000. There’s assemblies in UNAM. We’ve been to four or five in which students are already planning what to do to force the resignation of Peña Nieto. The idea is, if there’s a country where there can be mass graves, if there’s a country where 43 students can go missing at the hands of state agents, then something is so deeply wrong that the government needs to be changed completely and the whole system needs to be changed. So there are constant discussions to try to figure out how to do that. But there is a very firm commitment on the part of these protests that whatever happens in terms of the fate of the students right now, it will not end there.
There’s a fund for municipal security, for example, that they received 80 million pesos from. But we’re having a very hard time tracking it, because we can’t get the information for the State Department or the Mexican government to make direct ties. But it doesn’t matter, in the broader sense, because what we know is that the United States is funding this drug war to support security forces that it turns out are in deep collusion with the criminal forces and that in fact this collusion is directed against the population, instead of being the “good guy” government against the “bad guy” drug cartels. And so, even if you don’t find the smoking gun or the exact ties between this dollar went to this government agency, we know it’s there. And, in fact, the Merida Initiative lately has explicitly gone more toward municipal funding, which is even more problematic in Mexico, because that’s where you find the highest levels of direct collusion.
Merida Initiative was started by the Bush administration. In 2007, it was announced as a counternarcotics, counterterrorism and border security initiative, and then was funded in 2008. And the Obama administration, instead of coming in after the three-year initiative ran out and saying, “Well, what are the results of this?”—we already knew that the results were increased violence in Mexico—announced that it would be extended indefinitely. And indeed that’s what’s happened. So, this goes to training police forces. At the beginning, it went to funding a lot of big-ticket military equipment.
There’s a constant lobbying effort on the part of defense companies, intelligence companies and private security firms in the United States to perpetuate the Merida Initiative and to perpetuate the drug war in Mexico. And it seems to have no impact whatsoever that we can go and say to Congress, “There’s a direct correlation between this model and 100,000 people dead. This is not working. It’s not only not working; it’s completely dangerously counterproductive.” No matter how often that’s said, there is still this impetus to continue because of the money that’s involved and because of the Pentagon’s interest, through this vehicle of the drug war, to have a far stronger hand in Mexico. You know, it’s part of this concept that Mexico now forms part of the U.S. security parameter, which says a lot about the disregard for Mexican sovereignty, and it’s also put Mexico in this position of doing the United States’ dirty work to enforce prohibition laws in the United States at this incredibly high social cost for Mexico.
in Mexico, where there’s concessions for oil, just as we’ve seen where there have been concessions for mining in recent years, it means that the government will want to have complete territorial control, that guarantees that those businesses and those corporations will be able to extract and make a lot of money off Mexican natural resources. This is a big problem, because they’ll be taking over resources that actually belong to the people. And we will see resistance, because the Mexican people in the farming communities are not going to just allow this to happen with their land.
And then, in terms of what’s happening with the binational relationship, you know, we’ve talked before about this whole process of arming NAFTA, which means that there’s a series of mechanisms—the drug war being the most important—that are really aimed at militarizing the country in order to protect foreign investment. So, as that becomes even more intensified with the greater investment in oil and gas, including fracking, including things that are going to be devastating to Mexican communities and to the Mexican environment, there’s going to be more emphasis on the militarization, not to fight the drug cartels, because they haven’t even really been doing that, and certainly not been doing that effectively, but to fight the resistance of the people to the takeover of their lands and resources.
John Gibler talking:
our necessity to analyze how the drug war is designed to perpetuate itself. The drug war is built to fuel the drug war, not to stop drug production, trafficking or consumption, not to address real public health issues, but to create these very forms of violence, which require further military intervention.
And then, as a last point, I’d like to recall some of the words from the open letter from protesters and allies in Ferguson, which have really been resonating for me as I’ve been attending the recent protests in Guerrero, where from Ferguson they wrote, “We are not concerned if this inconveniences you. Dead children are more than an inconvenience. We are not concerned if this disturbs your comfort. Freedom outweighs that privilege.”
— source democracynow.org
John Gibler, author and independent journalist based in Mexico. He is the author of Mexico Unconquered: Chronicles of Power and Revolt and To Die in Mexico: Dispatches from Inside the Drug War.
Laura Carlsen, director of the Mexico City-based Americas Policy Program of the Center for International Policy.