Vol. 79/No. 17 May 11, 2015
Ten relatives, classmates and professors of the disappeared students crisscrossed the U.S. in three caravans over the last month, joining public forums and protests in more than 40 cities to expose contradictions in the Mexican government’s account and to demand a full and impartial investigation.
“We will not rest until the students are found and those who are responsible are brought to justice,” Felipe de la Cruz told the crowd here. Cruz is one of the caravan participants and a professor at the Raúl Isidro Burgos Rural Teachers College in Ayotzinapa, Guerrero state, where the disappeared students were enrolled.
“You are not alone,” protesters chanted, after Cruz and other relatives and students spoke.
Marchers held aloft photos of each of the missing students, elaborate hand-painted banners and homemade signs. Participants came from around the Northeast and from other cities where the caravans had stopped. The march was sponsored by the Caravana 43 NYC coalition, which organized campus meetings and protests in Queens, Brooklyn, the Bronx and Manhattan during the week leading up to the U.N. march.
Ten students came from the University of Richmond in Virginia. “We decided to come after we heard the parents speak on our campus,” Melisa Quiroga-Herrera told the Militant. “We want to stop these kind of things from happening.”
Drug gangs rule many towns
Tomás Espinosa, a construction worker in Philadelphia, said he came to “be in solidarity with the people of Guerrero.”“The government is corrupt and in many towns it is the drug gangs that rule, not the government,” he said.
“The disappearances are nothing new,” said Cirilo Cortés, a garment worker from Jersey City, New Jersey. “But this time they went too far.”
“There are problems in the U.S. with police brutality,” Cortés added. “But in Mexico they are worse.” According to Mexican government figures, more than 25,000 people are “missing” there, 3,000 in the last year alone.
The 43 missing students were part of a group of between 90 and 100 who traveled to the town of Iguala in Guerrero state from nearby Ayotzinapa Sept. 26. They were preparing to join a demonstration in Mexico City Oct. 2, to commemorate the massacre of students there by the Mexican army and police in 1968.
According to the Tlachinollan Human Rights Center of the Mountain, which is working closely with the families of the disappeared, the Ayotzinapa students had taken possession of three buses from a private company in Iguala for use in traveling to the action.
At about 9 p.m. they were on their way out of town when Iguala police intercepted the buses and opened fire. Student Aldo Gutiérrez was badly wounded and is brain-dead. A number of students were detained by police patrols.
At 11:30 p.m. community organizations, journalists and others arrived on the scene in response to calls by the students who had escaped. At midnight, during an impromptu press conference, a pick-up truck approached with armed men who opened fire. Two students, Daniel Solís Gallardo and Julio César Ramírez Nava, were killed and five people seriously wounded.
The students scattered again. Some took refuge in a private clinic, where they were harassed by a Mexican army patrol and prevented from getting immediate medical attention for a wounded classmate.
The next day a third Ayotzinapa student, Julio César Mondragón, was found dead outside of town, his face torn off and showing other signs of torture.
According to the Mexican attorney general, the attack was orchestrated by Iguala Mayor José Luis Abarca and his wife, Maria de los Angeles Pineda, who were working with the Guerreros Unidos drug cartel. He said the police in Iguala turned the students over to the cartel, which then killed them and burned their bodies beyond recognition at a garbage dump in the neighboring town of Cocula. Abarca, Pineda and about 100 Iguala and Cocula cops and alleged cartel members have been arrested and charged in the crime.
Unanswered questions
“The whole town of Iguala knew the attack on the students was taking place,” Vidulfo Rosales Sierra, a lawyer with the Tlachinollan Human Rights Center who accompanied the caravan members, told a meeting of 100 at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York April 24. The Mexican army patrol that was in the area has never explained “what they were doing at the time and why they didn’t intervene to stop it.”Despite the government’s claim that the bodies of all the students were incinerated at the Cocula dump, only one body has been positively identified with DNA testing.
Unless there is physical proof the students are dead, Rosales said, the search must continue. For the government, “the case is closed,” he said. “But we can’t accept this as the truth without scientific evidence.”
Iguala is not the only town run by the drug gangs, he said. What happened on Sept. 26-27 “is just the tip of the iceberg.” While looking for the Ayotzinapa students, both government forces and volunteers uncovered several other mass graves.
The members of the caravan called for Washington to end the Mérida Initiative, a program that has provided more than $2.3 billion to the Mexican government since 2008 to train and arm the Mexican police and army for the “war on drugs.” Many of the weapons end up in the hands of the drug cartels.
Mexico is the United States’ third-largest trading partner. U.S. exports to Mexico reached $240.3 billion in 2014 and nearly 80 percent of Mexico’s exports go to the U.S. This does not include the drug trade, which is estimated to bring in more than $6 billion a year.
A source of superprofits for U.S. imperialism, Mexico has a foreign debt of more than $400 billion.
Millions of workers and peasants from Mexico have emigrated to the U.S. and are a significant component of the U.S. working class, giving the fight for the truth about the Ayotzin apa students increased resonance.
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