The Disappeared 43: Report Exposes Mexico’s Student Murder Cover-Up
09.17.151:06 AM ET
The Disappeared 43: Report Exposes Mexico’s Student Murder Cover-Up
The 560-page report details the possible involvement of Mexican army and federal police agents in the disappearance of 43 students.
On the night of September 26, 2014, not quite a year ago, municipal police from Iguala in the southern state of Guerrero opened fire on a caravan of commercial buses wending its way through the city's downtown. The moral and political crisis provoked by the incident has not only endured, it has grown steadily worse. In the latest development, an investigation backed by the Organization of American States concludes “no evidence whatsoever exists” to support key aspects of the Mexican government’s findings.
What’s known is this:
In the mayhem after the police opened fire, the bus passengers ran for their lives. Most of them were student activists at a rural teachers college in Ayotzinapa; three were shot to death that night, along with a taxi driver, his female passenger, and a semiprofessional soccer player riding with his team in another bus. One of the students killed, a 19-year-old named Julio César Mondragón, was found horribly mutilated on the street, his face peeled from the skull, and his eyes plucked out.
In the hours and days to follow, the students who survived “The Night of Iguala” resurfaced back at the teachers college. But 43 of their classmates remain unaccounted for to this day. Eyewitnesses say they were rounded up by police and driven away in haste. It was the first student massacre of this kind in Mexico since the Dirty War of the 1970s, and the longer the government of President Enrique Peña Nieto persisted without tracking down the disappeared students, the more severe the political crisis became.
There were vibrant, occasionally massive street protests staged all over Mexico throughout the fall, the spirit of the protests spreading to a number of countries abroad, including the United States. One indelible image from that time occurred on November 20 at the end of a rally in the Zócalo in Mexico City, when several thousand protesters massed in front of the National Palace chanting in unison for President Peña Nieto to resign. At the front of the crowd, several Molotov cocktails were lobbed at the palace, and several hundred riot police charged the crowd and fired tear gas while protesters stood their ground. Many of them could be heard singing the national anthem.
More:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/09/17/the-disappeared-43-report-exposes-mexico-s-student-murder-cover-up.html