Vol. 79/No. 13      April 13, 2015

Municipal police in Iguala, Guerrero state, launched two armed attacks Sept. 26 on students from the teaching school in nearby Ayotzinapa. The students were in town preparing for an upcoming protest in Mexico City. Two were killed in the attacks, one was found dead the next day and the rest are presumed dead.

Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto says the case has been solved and those responsible are under arrest or indicted. Federal Attorney General Arely Gómez González, appointed March 3 after the previous attorney general resigned over protests against the government’s handling of the investigation, called it an “isolated case.”

But millions in Mexico refuse to accept the official version of events. The 43 have become a symbol in the fight against the impunity of police, soldiers and the private armies of capitalist drug cartels; of outrage over government corruption; and in defense of democratic rights.

A delegation of 10, including family members and classmates, began traveling in three caravans across the U.S. March 16 to win solidarity and bring those responsible to justice. (For information on activities in your city, visit www.caravan43.com.)

“The parents of the Ayotzinapa students and the members of human rights groups that have been by their side have denounced the decision of the Mexican government to close the investigations,” Roman Hernández, a spokesperson for the Tlachinollan Human Rights Center of the Mountain, which works closely with the families, told the Militant in a phone interview from Guerrero shortly before the caravans to the U.S. began. “Peña Nieto is trying to recreate the image that Mexico is a prosperous country where human rights are respected, a safe place for business to invest.”

Widespread disappearances

The drug trade to the U.S. is a major capitalist industry in Mexico. Killings and disappearances are concentrated in regions where rival capitalist drug cartels compete for control. These bloody wars involve police, sections of the military and government officials from all the main bourgeois political parties.

Some 10 years ago, sections of the Mexican ruling class, backed by Washington, decided the drug trade was interfering with capitalist investment, production and trade. Felipe Calderón, president from 2006 to 2012, launched a “war on drugs,” bolstered by the U.S. government’s Mérida Initiative — funded to the tune of $2.3 billion since it began in 2008 — to train and arm the Mexican police and army to “systematically capture and jail the leaders” of the drug trade.

But the Mexican government has not moved decisively to confront the capitalist drug business. By attacking some drug cartels, weakening their control over some of their territory, it has set off violent fights among competing gangs. The unintended consequence was skyrocketing kidnappings and killings under Calderón that have continued since.

According to a report by the University of San Diego Trans-Border Institute, there were more than 50,000 murders in Mexico tied to the drug trade from December 2006 to November 2011.

Drugs part of capitalist business

A 2013 report by Human Rights Watch documents more than 140 cases where Mexican security forces — from local and federal police to Navy personnel — were involved in disappearances, kidnappings and murders.

The violence is centered in areas where the drug cartels flourish, including Guerrero state, where both Ayotzinapa and Iguala are located. “Drug cartels rule large swaths of land” in Guerrero, ABC News reported Feb. 27, “extorting business owners, buying off authorities and disrupting important industries such as agriculture and tourism.”

The Mexican federal prosecutor’s office says that the mayor of Iguala, José Luis Abarca, and his wife, Maria de los Angeles Pineda, are allied with the Guerreros Unidos drug gang.

“According to the attorney general, the 43 were detained by the Iguala municipal police and handed over to an organized crime group that killed them, incinerated their bodies and threw their ashes in the river,” Hernández said. “This version is based mostly on testimony from three people. Some had signs of having been tortured.”

The government also reported that the killers believed the students had been infiltrated by a competing drug gang, Los Rojos, Hernández said, charges that “are just slanders.”

Nearly 100 people, including municipal police, alleged drug gang members, Abarca and other local officials have been arrested and charged.

Students report that soldiers from a base in Iguala briefly detained them after the most serious attack when many were wounded and delayed access to medical care. The government has refused to investigate the role of the Mexican army.

“Everywhere in town you could hear the shots the night of the attack,” Juan Antonio, a teacher who lives in Iguala, told the Militant by phone. “There were so many shots we expected more deaths.”

The day after the attack state police detained the entire Iguala police force and disarmed them. Ten days later federal police took over.

At first people in Iguala applauded their arrival, Velasco said. “But it ended up being the same with the federales.”

On Feb. 13, Norma Angélica Bruno, a member of the group “Family of the Other Disappeared,” was assassinated in front of two of her children in Iguala in broad daylight.

Many in Mexico’s capitalist class are uneasy with the murders, disappearances and disruption caused by the drug cartels. Twenty major business groups took out a full-page ad in Mexican newspapers in January demanding that Peña Nieto work to guarantee “total security, in all of the country.”

But the bosses also took aim at protesters who continue to demand the truth behind the disappearances, marching, blocking highways, even shutting down airports. “How long with this go on?” the business group complained.  
 
 
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