Crisis in Mexico: The Protests for the Missing Forty-Three

[cbayer]

http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/crisis-mexico-protests-missing-forty-three

NOVEMBER 12, 2014
Crisis in Mexico: The Protests for the Missing Forty-Three
BY FRANCISCO GOLDMAN


A movement has emerged from the tragedy of the Ayotzinapa students.
CREDIT PHOTOGRAPH BY MIGUEL TOVAR / LATINCONTENT / GETTY

In a televised press conference on Friday, Mexico’s Attorney General, Jesús Murillo Karam, announced that the forty-three missing students from the Ayotzinapa Normal School had been executed and incinerated in the municipal dump of Cocula. He added one important qualification: the fragmented remains were too badly burned to permit any quick forensic confirmation of what the Attorney General was presenting, in macabre detail, as fact. Many people in Mexico City told me that they were in tears before the conference was over. The writer and musician Juan Carlos Reyna said that the news conference made him feel “like all of Mexico was being asphyxiated.” He was not alone. That evening in Mexico City, hundreds of people walked over to Avenida Reforma to sit on the steps of the monument known as El Ángel to clear their heads, take deep breaths of the fresher evening air, and share their thoughts. A slogan for Mexico’s civic movement was born that night. Murillo Karam had ended his press conference by saying, “Ya me cansé,”—“I’m finally tired” or, more colloquially, “I’ve had enough.” By the end of that night, #YaMeCansé was spreading on social networks, summoning people to a march in Mexico City the next night: #YaMeCanséDelMiedo. I’ve had enough fear.


Murillo Karam announced, during his press conference, that this new information was the result of testimony gathered just that week from three recently captured young members of the cartel Guerreros Unidos, which traffics heroin to the United States. The three captured delinquents were known as “El Pato,” “El Jona,” and “El Chereje.” According to Murillo Karam, the Iguala municipal police who detained the Ayotzinapa students had turned them over to Guerreros Unidos in the early-morning hours of September 27th, shortly after the police and other gunmen had already killed three students, as well as three other bystanders, in a series of armed attacks in Iguala during the previous night. The initial attacks, and everything that happened after, were allegedly carried out on the orders of the then mayor of Iguala, José Luis Abarca, who became a fugitive for about a month, until he was finally captured last week, along with his wife, in an abandoned-looking house in a working-class Mexico City barrio.

At the press conference, Murillo Karam interspersed his narration of what happened after the students were handed over with video snippets from the declarations of the arrested cartel members. The students were mostly crammed into the back of a cargo truck, piled atop one another (some others were forced into a smaller truck), and then driven to the Cocula municipal dump. According to the detained witnesses, some fifteen of the students were already dead by the time they arrived; several had been wounded during that night’s earlier attacks. The cartel gunmen interrogated those who were still alive about their identities and the reasons they had come to Iguala, and one after another the captives replied that they were students. Then the gunmen executed them.

In one of the interrogation videos, El Chereje acts out how he and others had swung the dead students by hands and feet into a ditch. Tires and stacked wood had been laid at the bottom. The students—some still alive, according to Murillo Karam — were doused with diesel and gasoline and set on fire. The fire burned for more than fourteen hours. The cartel members were then ordered to sift through ashes for remains, to break bones into fragments, to put as much as they could into plastic bags and toss them into a nearby river. Murillo Karam presented images of the forensic experts at work, and of the human remains they’d collected: rows of bone fragments laid out on trays; teeth so carbonized that the slightest touch collapsed them into ash.

more at link

[Jefferson23]

1. Mexico protesters torch state assembly

Masked demonstrators set on fire parts of Guerrero state legislature in protest against apparent killing of 43 students.

Last updated: 13 Nov 2014 06:03

Demonstrators have set fire to the local legislature building in the capital of the southwestern Mexican state of Guerrero in protests over the apparent killing of 43 students by corrupt police and thugs from drug gangs.

Violent demonstrations have rocked several other states, where protesters blocked an airport and damaged the local office of President Enrique Pena Nieto's ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI).

On Wednesday, hundreds of protesters, most wearing masks, rallied in central Chilpancingo, Guerrero's capital.

The demonstrators, purportedly students and teachers, set fire to the session hall in the empty state assembly building while also torching several cars outside. Firefighters extinguished the blaze.

http://www.aljazeera.com/news/americas/2014/11/mexico-protesters-torch-state-assembly-2014111342022463875.html

[cbayer]

2. I posted that in LBN.

I think this might be Mexico's "spring".

This is a population familiar with revolution and very dedicated to their country. They have had enough.

[Jefferson23]

3. I wish them well, and hope they succeed..enough is right.

Thanks for the thread.