Vol. 78/No. 44      December 8, 2014

The parents of the disappeared students and their classmates from the Rural Teachers’ College in Ayotzinapa, Guerrero, headed the marches that converged on El Zócalo Square, after crisscrossing the country in three bus caravans over the last week.

“This is not the first time that agents of the state have murdered students or carried out extrajudicial killings,” Román Hernández, spokesperson for the Guerrero-based Human Rights Center of the Mountain and a central organizer of the bus caravans, said by phone from Mexico City Nov. 22. “But what is happening today is a general indignation at the accumulation of abuses, a reflection that the people of Mexico are no longer willing to allow this to continue.”

“There is indignation at the more than 30,000 disappeared, the tens of thousands killed because of the security policies of the government, the systematic dispossession of the native people of their lands and the unsolved killings of women in Juárez,” he said.

The government of President Enrique Peña Nieto says the mayor of Iguala had the 43 students turned over to the Guerreros Unidos drug cartel, which murdered them and incinerated their bodies. But DNA tests on the remains uncovered in a mass grave where arrested gang members say the students were disposed have not confirmed any connection with the students.

Most put primary blame on the Mexican government. A popular chant at the march was, “It was the state.”

Tens of thousands of students attended the Nov. 20 march along with trade union contingents of teachers, electricians and transportation workers. Some 60,000 telephone workers held a one-day strike in solidarity with the protest.

“We are shouting really loud so that Peña Nieto can hear us,” Mario Reyes Contreras, a street vendor, told the Los Angeles Times. “We demand he resign. We demand an end in the country to the thousands of dead and disappeared.”

At several points during the protest, groups of masked anarchists sought to carry out violent provocations. But the determination and discipline of the bulk of the marchers prevented actions that would have given the police a handle to attack the demonstration. Writing in Milenio, journalist Carlos Puig described how marchers surrounded a masked group and chanted, “Take off your masks. No violence!” After a few tense moments the group took off their masks.

Marches in solidarity with the Mexico City action took place around the world, including in Buenos Aires, Argentina; Madrid; London; Paris; Frankfurt, Germany; and New York.

The Cuban daily Juventud Rebelde published “A statement in solidarity with the Mexican students by the students of Cuba,” Nov. 19. “We emphatically condemn the tortures, crime and disappearances, and state that we stand with the Mexican people in their call for justice and every school in Cuba is also a trench in your fight for truth.”

“Today it’s the 43, tomorrow it could be others,” said Eliana Miranda Rosales, a pharmacy worker, at the protest of more than 300 in front of the Mexican Consulate in New York City. “The Mexican government must find those who are responsible and jail them.”

Peña Nieto criticized the demonstrators, claiming the protests were aimed at “generating instability, generating social disorder.”

On Nov. 21 students from the main universities in Mexico City continued holding demonstrations, rallies, sit-ins and roadblocks.  
 
 
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