Moms, dads of missing students live in classrooms in Mexico
They turned classrooms at their children’s college into dormitories, sleeping on the floor, but parents of 43 Mexican students missing since 2014 won’t rest until they find them.
The mothers live in one classroom that still has a whiteboard, while fathers bunk in another. Mosquito nets hang over their mattresses, but that didn’t stop one mother from being infected with Zika.
Two tables serve as makeshift altars with photos of their boys next to religious icons. They pray to see their sons alive again, two years after they disappeared in a case that remains unsolved, causing widespread anger at the failure of President Enrique Pena Nieto’s government to find the students.
Around 20 parents have made the teacher training college in Ayotzinapa, southern Guerrero state, their home since September 27, 2014, the day after their sons vanished from the city of Igu ala.
The night before, dozens of young men from the school had gone to Iguala to seize buses for a protest in Mexico City, but they were attacked by local police.
Prosecutors say the officers handed 43 of the students to a drug cartel, but what happened next has been the subject of heated debate.
The attorney general’s office initially said the cartel killed the students after confusing them with a rival gang, incinerated their bodies at a garbage dump and tossed the remains in a river. Only one student has been identified through a bone fragment found at the river.
But independent experts from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights rejected that conclusion, saying there was no scientific proof of such a massive fire at the landfill.
The parents always doubted the government’s conclusions and the report helps them cling to hope that their sons can still be found.
The attorney general’s office says it will soon use laser scanning technology to look for clandestine graves in other locations and investigate if police from other towns were involved in the mass disappearance.
The parents moved to the college because they live in remote parts of the impoverished state, and traveling is expensive for them. They wanted to be closer to the protests, and fight to find their children.
Maria Elena Guerrero’s voice shakes when she says she believes her son, Giovanni Galindo, who would be 21 years old today, is still alive.
A cardboard hangs on the wall with verses written by Uruguayan poet Mario Benedetti: “Don’t give up. Please, don’t give up, even if the cold burns, even if fear bites, even if the sun sets and the wind goes silent.”
Before the tragedy of Sept 26, 2014, Guerrero was a stay-at-home mom, caring for her two children and her husband, Alfredo Galindo, a primary schoolteacher who studied at Ayotzinapa.
She returns to her real home once a month to see her 18-year-old daughter, Sandra, “because she feels lonely,” said Guerrero, 45. But it’s her own daughter who sends her back to the college, saying “you have to fight for my brother.”