On the 10th anniversary of the enforced disappearance of 43 students in Iguala, the victims’ families say they were betrayed by Mexico’s outgoing president.
Parents of missing students protest on September 26, 2024 in Mexico City.
(Christopher Rogel/Getty)
Mexico Sity-In the early evening of September 26, in the last part of a a seven-day series of protests under the title “10 years of impunity”, the families of the 43 forcibly disappeared students of Ayotzinapa Rural Pedagogical College addressed the crowd in front of the National Palace. Rain from Hurricane John, which was battering their homes in the southeastern state of Guerrero, reached the nation’s capital, drenching people who chanted, “It was the army!” and “It was the state!”
Families of young men had passed through city to the palace, the official residence of the president, accompanied by thousands of fansmany of whom are also believed to be missing family members. Heavy metal barricades surrounded the grand building, keeping protesters at a distance from its facade. That morning, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO), once a staunch ally of Ayotcinapa’s parents, resigned. said barricades were necessary to protect the palace from damage by bad actors.
The facts of the Ayotcinapa case to date are that on the night of September 26, 2014 and the following morning, municipal, state and federal police officers, along with Mexican Army soldiers and members of the Guerreros Unidos organized crime network, attacked six buses in Match. Five buses were temporarily confiscated by students from an all-male teacher training college for their trip to Mexico City to mark the anniversary of the October 2, 1968 Tlatelolco massacre. The justification for the attack on Iguala is disputed, but independent investigators to assert that the police may have been trying to protect a shipment of heroin hidden in one of the seized buses that was headed for sale in the United States.
The remains of only three students have been identified, and the fate of the remaining 43 is still unknown. The Mexican military, which documented the attack in real time, has information on their whereabouts. The Secretariat of National Defense (SEDENA), which oversees the army, refuses to hand over 800 folios of information which was invited by an international panel of sworn experts appointed by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. AMLO’s government, as well as that of his predecessor Enrique Peña Nieto, protected SEDENA from having to do this. No convictions have been brought.
“Obrador betrayed the trust that we as parents placed in him and turned his back on the Ayotcinapa case while defending the army,” said Hilda Legideño, mother of Jorge Antonio Tisapa Legideño, as she took the microphone in front of a crowd in Mexico City. .
“He will be an accomplice of those people who disappeared our children.”
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In 2014, as news of the case swept the country, Ayotcinapa quickly became emblematic of both the crisis of enforced disappearances in Mexico and the collective fight against them. Parents 43 rallied those affected by the disappearance of a child or relative and became the catalyst for the creation of the first National Search Teams of family members, who search for the remains of the missing in underground graves. The Ayotcinapa school is one of the socialist schools in Mexico rural normal schoolscommunity-based, politically cohesive education and training systems whose solidarity and organization is reflected in the coordinated search for the missing.
Taking the microphone after Legideño, Mario Gonzalez, father of Cesar Manuel Gonzalez Hernandez, addressed AMLO directly by calling him “vulture”, saying: “You stood at the feet of the army of which you are so proud … You turned your back on all of us, fathers and mothers, whose children were disappeared by the state.”
The outspoken condemnations of many of the parents of the missing students make their position clear: they have been played along by AMLO, who has made their case “a major human rights commitment of his government,” as former special prosecutor Omar Gómez Trejo wrote last week in Lighthouse. They believed that the president and his officials would tell them the truth about what happened to their children and seek compensation for their violent abduction. Despite the constant retreat of the government and attempts from several actors to divide their united front, parents continued to work with the government. Until August of this year, they attended meetings with officials in Mexico City and posed for photo op with AMLO as criminals were arrested and released from prisonor, as the case may be former security chief Thomas Zeronfled to Israel to avoid arrest.
“There were expectations that justice could be done in this government, that we could find out what happened,” Vidulfo Rosales, a lawyer and spokesman for the families. told local media on the eve of the anniversary. After “great optimism” among parents, they were left with “disappointment and despair” as AMLO’s term ended.
On September 24, two days before the anniversary, a contingent of Ayotzinapa parents protested outside the gates of the national Senate as its members debated constitutional reform to merge the National Guard, a civilian force, into an armed force. This was one of AMLO’s many betrayals. The former president took office after vowing to send the army deployed against his own people in the “war on drugs” declared by President Felipe Calderon in 2006 “back to the barracks” under a general pledge to bring peace to the torn country. apart from paramilitary violence. However, AMLO has ushered in an exhaustive militarization of public security and civil functions during his tenure. The Senate approved the reform in place more than 100 thousand National Guard under military command.
“The Movement of Mothers and Fathers of 43 Families is raising its voice here in the Senate to say that it is dangerous for the country to empower an institution that operates in a non-transparent manner, an institution that violates human rights, as in the case of 43 Ayotzinapa, and it is not accountable nobody” Rosales said at the protest.
The harshness with which the AMLO administration dealt with the Ayotzinap families – giving and taking away official hopes – became emblematic of its approach to the demands of social movements, civil society and independent media for democratic principles such as transparency, accountability and reparations. Moreno — the populist party founded by AMLO — uses Mexico’s worn-out state apparatus and former one-party system to ensure impunity, co-opt grassroots activism, and promote policies such as militarization, suppression of migration, and the elimination of institutional checks and balances. As the parents of Ayotzinap testified, once the investigation into the disappearance of their children got too close to SEDENA (the rulers of the state apparatus), they were rejected along with the social movement they had activated for the missing throughout the country. According to AMLO, the number of people reported missing in Mexico since 1964, when the country was in the grip of the Dirty War, has reached at least 116,000; more than 50 thousand were recorded during the six years of his presidency.
“We went with the hope of finding our children,” Legidenho said in front of the National Palace on September 26.
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“We got solidarity from you and for us,” she continued, addressing the crowd.
“You sheltered us and walked with us like parents. Sometimes we don’t know what to say or what to do. We would like to leave, but we can’t, because we don’t have enough son at home.”
As the AMLO administration further and further backtracked on its commitment to resolve the case, the Ayotinapa emblem as an electoral tool for Morena was stripped of hope for justice for the disappeared, instead a testament to the state’s appalling refusal to meet even the most morally important demands of its people. . There is little evidence that AMLO’s successor, Claudia Scheinbaum, plans to do things differently. As a people’s struggle, however, Ayotzinapa will endure until you find themas the slogan of the movement reads: until the missing are found.
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