“We want everyone to fall from the bottom up,” cried Blanca Nava, the mother of Jorge Álvarez Nava, one of 43 students from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College who were disappeared in 2014 by organized crime groups and members of Mexico. military.
Ms Nava, holding a photo of her missing son and other parents of victims of the massacre, took to the streets of Mexico City on September 26, the eighth anniversary of the attack, to demand justice for family members. of them and to criticize the Government of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador which has so far failed to provide them with justice.
Marching down the main street of Mexico City, thousands of citizens from all over the country walked alongside the parents of the 43 students; labor unions, young students, feminist collectives, socialist organizations and human rights defenders all took to the streets demanding justice.
Trucks equipped with loudspeakers blasted Ska music as Mexicans old and young chanted “they were taken alive, we want them alive!” All present show a sense of anger and camaraderie against what they see as an apathetic Mexican government.
“This president promised to solve the case, maybe to gain popularity so people would trust him,” Emiliano Navarrete Victoriano, the father of one of the victims, told a crowd of about 7,000 supporters. “If we were to make any small progress with this government,” he said, when investigations began to implicate elements of the armed forces, “everything fell apart.
The Case of the Missing Students
On the night of September 26, 2014, a bus full of young teachers studying to be teachers were headed to a protest in Mexico City honoring the victims of the 1968 Tlatelolco massacre, in which the military opened fire on civilians.
The bus was stopped in the small town of Iguala, Guerrero in western Mexico, by the Mexican military, who then reportedly turned the students over to an illegal armed group, Guerreros Unidos, who disappeared, according to a report by following the arrest of a local military general.
In 2014, the government of then-president Enrique Peña Nieto infamously fabricated an interpretation of events that covered the involvement of senior public officials and military commanders.
The now-discredited “historical truth,” as it came to be known, was the official government version at the time, produced by tampering with evidence and extracting signed confessions through torture.
AMLO’s legacy in this case
When President López Obrador campaigned for the presidency in 2018, he promised to give justice to the parents of the 43 students. While his administration has made some progress, critics accuse the government of not pursuing the highest-ranking authorities after the disappearance.
In August, Mexican prosecutors issued 83 arrest warrants against 20 military commanders, including a general from Guerrero, 44 police officers, five judicial authorities and 14 members of the criminal group “Guerreros Unidos” for their alleged involvement in the mass disappearance of 43 students.
However, the students’ families were outraged when they learned how quickly the latest arrest warrants were destroyed.
In September, Mexico’s National Prosecutor ordered that 21 of the 83 arrest warrants be dismissed, including those for 16 members of the military.
Additionally, a district judge released over 100 people implicated in the case, including the former governor of Iguala, Jose Luis Abarca, who is considered the mastermind behind the attack.
While Mr. Abarca remains in prison on the two other charges against him, the judge’s decision sparked outrage among the Mexican population and prompted the undersecretary for human rights, Alejandro Encinas, to file a complaint against the judge with the Mexican Supreme Court. Mexico.
Jesús Murillo Karam, a former prosecutor in Peña Nieto’s administration who had been accused of torture in order to fabricate the version of events presented in the “historical truth”, had his criminal proceedings suspended by a judge after an appeal.
So far, only four members of the military have been charged in the case, with their legal defense claiming that all the allegations made against their clients are fabrications.
The families of the victims are waiting for justice
For the families of the victims standing in the square on September 26, they fear that AMLO will provide those responsible for the disappearance of their family members with the same impunity as his predecessors.
“The truth is that I feel that they are just mocking us because we have not stopped for eight years in the streets, screaming, asking for the return of our children alive,” said Mrs. Nava. “They have not given us an answer. Like the previous government, this new government has not given us an answer.”
She continued: “We want truth and justice and we want those responsible to be punished. We want all those responsible who were already in the 83 arrest warrants to be punished. We don’t want them to be released,” said Mrs. Nava.
“It’s not just 43 missing,” Ms Nava said. “There are thousands of missing people waiting for their father, mother, brother to come home to them; just as I am looking for my son and I want to see him again, I will not stop or stop looking until I find him.”
The post Parents of 43 missing Mexican students seek justice on eighth anniversary of their disappearance appeared first on Aztec Reports.
