In Mexico, Disappearance Is the Rule of Law
Posted on April 10, 2015 by Alice Driver
In Mexico, Disappearance Is the Rule of Law
Seven months have passed since the Mexican government said that there were no bodies: no bones, no teeth, no nothing. All 43 of them were burned up in a pile of trash, Attorney General Jesús Murillo Karam reported, and then he began to enumerate what was thrown on top of the bodies —diesel, gasoline, tires, firewood, plastic— as if that were evidence of some truth. Later, officials discovered one bone, identified one body, and they did it triumphantly. But where were the rest?
“With the 43, you can only say that they’ve identified one body,” said journalist Francisco Goldman, who writes for The New Yorker about the events unfolding in Mexico. I interviewed Goldman in February 2015, five months after the students had been forcibly disappeared, and the country was still in the throes of the largest protests in the history of the country. “That’s all you can say. Legally they’re disappeared. Everybody wants to say they’re dead,” explained Goldman.
Under President Felipe Calderón, between 2006 and 2012, an average of six people disappeared per day, according to the investigative reporting of Proceso. Under President Enrique Peña Nieto, that number has risen to 13, a conservative estimate based on unreliable government statistics. “People in Mexico understand that it’s not just those 43—those 43 have come to represent everyone else. Something’s got to happen. Something’s got to move. It’s now or never for Mexico. It really is,” said Goldman.
Goldman has spent the better part of the last two decades living in and writing about Mexico, and he participated in the largest protest in the history of the country in November 2014, a protest sparked by the disappearance of 43 students from a rural school in Ayotzinapa famous for its history of social activism.
It took the government 10 days to open an investigation into their disappearance, and eventually it came to light that the mayor had sent the police to stop the buses full of students, and he had asked the police to hand the students over to a local gang. Murillo Karam announced that the gang had confessed to murdering the students and burning their bodies, a convenient narrative. It is the favorite storyline of both the Mexican and the U.S. media to blame all violence on drug gangs.
More:
http://www.latinorebels.com/2015/04/10/in-mexico-disappearance-is-the-rule-of-law/
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