Missing students’ families retain hope
MEXICO CITY — As a Catholic, Ezequiel Mora was torn over what kind of Mass to offer for his missing 21-year-old son, who vanished a year ago with 42 other college students in southern Mexico.
He could, as some friends suggested, admit that Alexander was dead, as federal prosecutors have said, and offer a Mass for the departed. Or he could preserve the hope that his son is still alive somewhere, and merely pray for his safe return.
“I don’t know what to think,” Mora said the other day, his face weathered and hair far grayer than a year ago. “I go from feeling despair to feeling hope, from one moment to the next.”
Through it all, the dayto-day reminders of his son’s disappearance keep the loss fresh: no extra hands to repair their old taxi, a fragile grandmother who still does not know that he is gone, a daughter without her closest sibling.
Such is the color of grief shared by the families of the missing, who have come here this weekend from their farming villages to commemorate the disappearance of their sons, all students at a teachers’ college in Ayotzinapa, in rural Guerrero state. Snatched from buses by the local police in Iguala, the students were hauled off, handed to a violent drug gang and never seen again. Rising cynicism
Exactly one year later, the facts are as unknown as the whereabouts of the victims. Just one of the student’s bodies has been identified with certainty, that of Alexander Mora. Investigators know neither the location of the remaining 42, nor what happened to them.
The case struck a nerve with the Mexican public, a tragic distillation of the tangle of corruption and complicity that governs life in parts of Mexico. In this case, the suspected involvement of local law enforcement and powerful drug gangs tore open the lives of 43 families whose children were studying to become rural teachers.
An outside panel of experts that reviewed the investigation concluded that the night the students disappeared, federal police and army officers were aware of the violence and did not intervene.
On Saturday, thousands of people are expected to march through the city to commemorate the tragedy. Bearing banners and chanting anti-government slogans, the parents of the missing were once more lifted by the voices of others, their cause back at center stage. The initial public anger over the case has given way to a profound cynicism among Mexicans, one that has dragged the president’s poll numbers down to the lowest for any president in two decades. The case in Iguala marked the beginning of a slide in credibility for this government that has continued ever since.
Unrelated embarrassments in the last year have only heightened the cynicism, including the escape of the country’s most no- torious drug lord from a maximum-security prison and questionable loans taken by the president’s wife from a state contractor.
“Mexico is not the same after Iguala,” Luis Raúl González, president of Mexico’s National Human Rights Commission, said in a statement in July. “The tragedy transcends Guerrero.”
On Thursday, the parents met with President Enrique Peña Nieto, asking him, among other things, to pursue the lines of investigation raised by the outside panel, which said it found no evidence to support the government’s conclusion that the students were killed by the drug gang and their bodies then burned to ashes in a garbage dump.
The president agreed to create a specialized prosecutors’ unit for missing people and reminded the parents that 111 people had been arrested in the case.
“We want the same thing, to know what happened to each of their sons and for there to be justice,” the president said in a Twitter post after the meeting. Unrelenting families
Ona recent sunny morning, Mora stood outside the French Embassy in Mexico City with dozens of other parents chanting: “We are all Ayotzinapa!” and “Alive they took them, alive we want them back!”
He relayed the story of the disappearance to a security guard, who merely looked puzzled. Later that day, Mora joined the rest of the parents, students and several hundred others for a march along Reforma Avenue, a main thoroughfare in the capital.
It was a long way from the protests a year earlier, when the parents were joined by half a million people. Standing on the sidewalk, Cecilia García, a cook in a nearby restaurant, stopped to watch. “No matter how many protests they do, they are all dead,” said García, 33, who felt sorry for the parents. “All of this is in vain.”
Despite the mounting cynicism toward the government, Mora refuses to stop protesting.
As he stood on one of the fanciest avenues in all of Latin America, feeling out of place, he said: “I think sometimes people feel sorry for us, for what happened to us, especially since we are very poor. But only a few of them care.”