Missing Mexican students’ parents demand action
MEXICO CITY — They arrived in buses, just as their children had a year ago. They carried photos of their missing sons and daughters. And they listened as Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto, a handsome man hardly older looking than their abducted children, promised them that the investigation into the horrific crime had not been closed.
But the parents of the “Ayotzinapa 43” — students kidnapped and presumed killed on Sept. 26, 2014 — were not placated. They were, after all, literally starving for answers.
On Thursday, family members of the disappeared students met with Peña Nieto in Mexico City to present him with a list of their demands. In the middle of a two-day hunger strike, they accused the Mexican government of telling them a “historic lie” about the incident almost a year ago. And they reiterated their plans to protest in the city’s historic center on Saturday — the one-year anniversary of the suspected massacre — and beyond.
“We won’t rest,” Maria de Jesus Tlatempa, the mother of one disappeared student, told AFP news agency. “We will be a pebble in his shoes. We won’t go home.”
The meeting marked a grisly anniversary for Mexico, a country long plagued by drug violence and mysterious, often unresolved mass killings.
The year-long nightmare began with a bizarre and bloody night in Iguala, a city in the southwestern Mexican state of Guerrero. On Sept. 26, 2014, roughly 100 students from a teacher’s college in the tiny, poor town of Ayotzinapa commandeered a bus and drove it to Iguala. The plan was to commandeer several more buses — a common practice by student groups in Mexico — to raise money and vehicles for an Oct. 2 trip to the capital.
Once in Iguala, however, all hell broke loose. The students had commandeered a total of five buses, but their vehicles were now under attack from uniformed officials. First, it was tear gas. Then bullets. Then they began dragging the students out of the buses, throwing them into trucks and driving off.
By the time the strange siege ended, six people were dead on the street, including three students and three bystanders. One student was found with his face peeled off. Scores more were alive but injured, some of them shot.
Most terrifying of all, almost half the students were simply gone.
Even in a country where roughly 25,000 people are considered missing, the disappearance of the 43 students created a firestorm of controversy. Student witnesses said their attackers included city cops as well as what appeared to be federal police, yet, local investigators appeared to do little.
On Thursday, Peña Nieto met the students’ relatives for the second time. He listened to their demands for international oversight of the Ayotzinapa investigation, but didn’t agree to anything concrete. . The president did, however, order the creation of a special prosecutor’s office to investigate disappearances.