43 Students and the Future of Mexico
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- Published on Tuesday, 25 November 2014 21:22
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A Socialist Project e-bulletin .... No. 1059 .... November 26, 2014
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43 Students and the Future of Mexico
Justin Paulson
Nearly two months ago, on September 26, a group of students from the Normal Rural Raúl Isidro Burgos -- a boarding school for student teachers in Ayotzinapa, Guerrero -- was soliciting funds in nearby Iguala when they were attacked by local police, acting under orders. Six people were killed; the remaining 43 students were arrested and were not heard from again. They have, for now, joined the ranks of Mexico's disappeared.
Massacres and disappearances are all too common in Mexico. By some estimates, more than 150,000 have been killed since the beginning of the so-called drug war in the late 1990s, and more than 27,000 disappeared (figures vary widely, and some estimates are as high... as 63,000 disappeared; the state claims not to know). But something about this attack has felt, for many, like the last straw. Hundreds of thousands have repeatedly taken to the streets across Mexico in an uproar that hasn't been seen since the election of 2006, and perhaps since the Zapatista uprising twenty years ago. The unrest sweeping the country is unusually widespread, and the daily demonstrations continue to grow.
As the state tried to assert some semblance of control over the situation (see also Bullet No. 1058, by Richard Roman and Edur Velasco Arregui), the Mayor of Iguala and his wife were arrested, accused of masterminding the attack in collusion with the local cartel, and the governor of Guerrero was forced to step aside. 22 members of the Iguala police force and a number of local gang members were also arrested. Protestors see these as merely the tip of the iceberg. Demonstrators' outrage includes criticisms of government inaction and attempts to minimize the damage, but extends much further -- to a general sense that the military, the police, and all politicians are responsible. Although most protests have been nonviolent, some government offices have been torched, the police violently clashed with protestors in several parts of the country, and the front door of the National Palace was twice set ablaze in the Zócalo. The pessimists talk openly of a return of the "Guerra sucia," or "dirty war," of the 1960s and 1970s; optimists expect a mass uprising. Much hangs in the balance.
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