Mexicans march on anniversary of 43 students’ disappearance

People vanishing into thin air, mass graves filled with bones so small DNA tests are impossible to conduct and dismembered bodies dumped in abandoned trucks are now so common in Mexico that they hardly make front-page news. Specifically, it concluded the bodies of 43 students could not have been burned at the garbage dump in Cocula as the government maintained.

The case has galvanized public protest against the government of Pena Nieto, who came to office three years ago on a platform to distance himself from his predecessor’s all-out war on drug cartels and focus on economic reforms, and victims’ rights. “Perhaps (the pope) could do something for us … could help us pressure the Mexican government”.

Separately, Amnesty International’s Americas director, Erika Guevara-Rosas, blasted Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto’s administration this week. “Is it with the citizenry or is it with the organized crime?!”

Investigations into any kind of human rights abuses are routinely so poor that examinations of crime scenes are extremely negligent or non-existent.

The experts also say there is nothing to indicate that anybody, not even Guerreros Unidos, was particularly concerned about the students’ presence in Iguala until they sought to leave the city.

Meanwhile, there is a lack of prosecution of those accused of torture. The situation is so desperate that it is often the families of the disappeared who have to look for their missing ones without financial resources or knowledge of how to search.

Poet Horacio Lozano Warpola wrote about the disappearances in Poets for Ayotzinapa.

“Peña Nieto takes real action now, he will continue to be seen around the world as an enabler of horrors”. But these steps don’t appear to be actually accomplishing anything.

As the first anniversary of the events approaches, however, momentum is growing behind the hypothesis that the real target of the attack was not the students – but the bus they were travelling in.

They say the funeral pyre simply didn’t happen, and suggest the attack occurred because students unknowingly hijacked a bus carrying illegal drugs or money.

The report of the Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts (GIEI) destroys the government version on a number of crucial aspects. Justice will only be made when the Mexican workers, peasants and youth take power into their own hands and brush aside this frightful rotten regime which is capitalism.

Demanding justice for their beloved ones, scores of family members including the parents of the students marched down the Mexican capital’s premier avenue, Paseo de la Reforma, towards the historic Zocalo Square.

But AI and the parents note that worldwide forensic experts with the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team said last week that the tests by Austria’s Medical University of Innsbruck were inconclusive. Neither were they aware that for many of them it would be the last day of their lives. After all, thousands of civilians have disappeared on Peña Nieto’s watch without any significant threat to his rule. A year later the students still have not been located.