Ayotzinapa

Protests Against State Violence Go Worldwide

November 23, 2014 Resist! Ayotzinapa, Ferguson, killed by police, Mexico, Police abuse, police brutality, US, Violence

Mexican activists were joined yesterday by solidarity protests in the United States and around the word. Under the banner of “Todos Somos Ayotzinapa – Todos Somos Ferguson,” a number of demonstrations in the States were intended to stand with Mexican organizers and the 43 students abducted, along with the U.S. community of Ferguson, Mo. Any day, a grand jury there is expected to decide whether or not to indict officer Darren Wilson in the killing of unarmed teenager Michael Brown. At a rally in New York’s Union Square last Sunday, protesters held signs in Spanish saying, “Your son could be number 44” — eerily reminiscent of an earlier rallying cry: “I Am Trayvon Martin.” Protesters also called attention to the role of U.S. policy and trade agreements — including the proposed and controversial “Plan Mexico” — in fueling the drug war that has terrorized the country over the last several years, and was accelerated under the presidency of Felipe Calderon, beginning in 2006. Simultaneous protests for Ayotzinapa were held in France, Spain, Germany, the United Kingdom and other countries.

Mexico’s Military & Political Class In The Eye of Ayotzinapa Storm

November 22, 2014 Ted Lewis, www.huffingtonpost.com Resist! Ayotzinapa, Democracy, Mexico

Mexico's political class and governing institutions are suddenly under attack and discredited on a scale not seen for generations. The poor, angry, politically savvy and mostly rural families of the murdered and disappeared students are at the lead of a fast growing dissident movement that has the attention and sympathy of tens of millions of Mexicans. It should have the attention of the U.S. public and foreign policy decision makers as well. A confrontation looms. Last week the families of the 43 disappeared students rejected the findings of the Mexican Attorney General who declared the students dead. His findings were based on the confessions of alleged participants, who described mass slaughter and the burning of corpses at a garbage dump. Instead, the families announced that three caravans would simultaneously crisscross the country to gather allies in the continued fight for their children. Their organized fury represents a genuine threat to the image-dependent, investor-friendly regime of President Enrique Peña Nieto, who brought the notorious PRI back to power just two years ago.

The Rebel Spirit Driving Mexico’s Protests Has Deep Roots

November 21, 2014 Alfonso Serrano, www.america.aljazeera.com Resist! Ayotzinapa, History, Mexico

More than a hundred years ago, peasants in northern Mexico rose up under the leadership of Francisco “Pancho” Villa. In the south, the legendary Emiliano Zapata led a revolt of indigenous people to reclaim ancestral lands. It’s in Zapata’s erstwhile domain that the Ayotzinapa Normal School, which the missing students attended, was built in the aftermath of the Mexican Revolution as part of a teachers’ college system inspired by a radical social vision dedicated to promoting knowledge and social mobility among its mostly poor and indigenous student body. Today’s revolutionaries are well aware of how deeply the history of the Mexican Revolution still resonates. In 1994, Subcomandante Marcos laid claim to that symbolism when, not far from Ayotzinapa, he launched a rebel movement on New Year’s Day as leader of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation.

International Day Of Protest For Ayotzinapa 43

November 21, 2014 Staff, www.popularresistance.org Resist! Ayotzinapa, Mexico, Police violence

Mexico has a very deep wound right now after the disappearance of the 43 students in Ayotzinapa. On September 26, dozens of students took several buses to Iguala, and after a violent encounter with the police, 43 of them were allegedly taken to the police headquarters and never heard from them again. The government claimed the students where there to boycott a political event, but the students claim they were there to raise funds for their school. Mexican authorities eventually declared the students dead after weeks of investigation, but the people of Mexico are not letting this one go so easily. They’ve had enough with the government, and this atrocious act was the last straw, which detonated a series of protests around the whole country.

Mobilization For Peace In Mexico, 43 US Cities, Dec. 3rd

November 20, 2014 Latino Rebels, www.latinorebels.com Resist! Ayotzinapa, Latinx, Mexico

Created as a tribute to Mexico’s #YaMeCansé global movement, a #USTired2 mobilization calling for peace in Mexico launched this morning, campaign organizers told Latino Rebels. The group has identified December 3, 2014 as the day of demonstrations and rallies in at least 43 US cities to represent the 43 Ayotzinapa students. Organizers said that their focus will be to call more national attention to “Plan Mexico” (also known as the Mérida Initiative). The U.S. State Department reports that the “U.S. Congress has appropriated $2.1 billion since the Merida Initiative began in Fiscal Year 2008.” Critics of Plan Mexico insist that such a policy has been tragic for Mexico. To many, Ayotzinapa is just the latest example of such a failed policy. Follow #USTired2 for the latest updates.

This Isn’t The Mass Grave You’ve Been Looking For

November 20, 2014 Greg Grandin, www.thenation.com Resist! Ayotzinapa, Mexico, Student Activism

They have found many mass graves. Just not the mass grave they have been looking for. The forty-three student activists were disappeared on September 26, after being attacked by police in the town of Iguala, in the Mexican state of Guerrero. A week later, I set up an alert for “fosa clandestina”—Spanish for clandestine grave—on Google News. Here’s what has come back: On October 4, the state prosecutor of Guerrero announced that twenty-eight bodies were found in five clandestine mass graves. None of them were the missing forty-three. On October 9, three more graves. None of them contained the missing forty-three. The use of the passive tense on the part of government officials and in news reports is endemic. Graves were discovered. Massacres were committed.

Mexican Mayor Charged With Murder Of Students

November 16, 2014 Jo Tuckman, www.theguardian.com Educate! Ayotzinapa, Mexico, Murder

José Luis Abarca allegedly ordered the police to attack the students because he feared they were going to disrupt an event designed to promote a bid by his wife, Maria de los Angeles Pineda, to replace him as mayor in 2015. Surviving students, from the radical teacher training college in Ayotzinapa, about two hours’ drive away, said they were in Iguala to commandeer buses to use in future protests. They say the attacks began when police blocked their convoy as they were leaving town at about 9pm. The students claim some of the passengers descended from the bus to confront the officers, who began firing indiscriminately in their direction for about 30 minutes before making dozens of arrests. One student was shot in the face in the first attack; several more were seriously injured.

Door to Mexico President’s Ceremonial Palace Set On Fire

November 10, 2014 Elinor Complay, www.reuters.com Resist! Ayotzinapa, Mexico, Student Activism

(Reuters) - A group of protesters set fire to the wooden door of Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto's ceremonial palace in Mexico City's historic city center late on Saturday, denouncing the apparent massacre of 43 trainee teachers. The group, carrying torches, broke away from what had been a mostly peaceful protest demanding justice for the students, who were abducted six weeks ago and apparently murdered and incinerated by corrupt police in league with drug gang members. Police put out the flames and enforced fencing designed to keep the protesters away from the National Palace, which was built for Hernan Cortes after the Spanish conquest and now houses Mexico's finance ministry. Pena Nieto lives in a presidential residence across town, and was not in the palace at the time.

Tens Of Thousands Protest Over Missing Students

November 7, 2014 Associated Press, www.cbc.ca Resist! Ayotzinapa, Mexico, Student Activism

Tens of thousands of people marched down Mexico City's main boulevard Wednesday evening to protest the disappearance of 43 young people in the southern part of the country and demand the government find them. The largely young crowd carried Mexican flags with black mourning bands replacing the red and green stripes, counting off the numbers from one to 43. Protesters also chanted: "They took them away alive, and alive we want them back." In Chilpancingo, the capital of Guerrero state, groups of protesters angry about the government's inability to find the missing used hijacked trucks to block all three highways leading into the city for several hours. The missing youths were enrolled at a rural teachers college in Guerrero. They had been taken away by police after a confrontation in the city of Iguala on Sept. 26.

Ayotzinapa Vive! A Month With Mexico’s Student Protesters

November 6, 2014 Manuel Rueda, www.fusion.net Resist! Ayotzinapa, Mexico, Student Activism

Twenty thousand people are currently missing in Mexico. But the disappearance of 43 students has struck a nerve in this country like few other crimes in its recent history. Protest happening almost on a daily basis are pressuring the government to find the missing students and end the kind of systematic corruption, and narco-infiltrations that many believe led to the tragedy. The missing students were attacked by municipal policemen from Iguala on Sept. 26, after they had commandeered three buses in a protest. Investigators believe that policemen turned the students over to a drug-trafficking gang that had ties to Iguala’s mayor.

The Ugly Update: Search For 43 Missing Mexican Students

November 1, 2014 Charlotte Alfred, www.huffingtonpost.com Educate! Ayotzinapa, Mexico, Student Activism

The students -- men in their late teens and early 20s -- were studying to become teachers in rural Mexico at a college with a history of radical leftist activism, the BBC reported. That Friday, they went out to demonstrate against hiring discrimination and solicit funds for an upcoming protest march. Witnesses have said that the students were in Iguala, a city in southern Mexico, when they came under fire from police. By the end of the night, six people were left dead. The body of one student was laterfound with his face skinned and eyes gouged out, the New Yorker reported, "the signature of a Mexican organized-crime assassination." Some of the students escaped Iguala, but 43 of them have not been seen since that night.

Contact Mexican Embassy: Justice For Ayotzinapa

October 23, 2014 #YoSoy132, www.popularresistance.org Petitions and Online Actions Ayotzinapa, Students, Violence

We scholars, students and academics from Mexico and elsewhere who live and work outside of Mexico join the voices of concern and distress for the violence that prevails in Mexico. The events that took place in Iguala on September 26, 2014 are one of the most deplorable moments in the country’s history. There are no words to express the horror and fury that we feel at the murder of six people, three of them students at the “Raúl Isidro Burgos” Normal School in Ayotzinapa (one of them by the most savage of means), and by the disappearance, at the hands of the government and the local police, of another 43 students. We express our solidarity with the demands for justice being expressed and we share in the pain of the families, friends and colleagues of the Ayotzinapa students. We are profoundly indignant at the magnitude of the events and the fact that the Mexican government has offered contradictory statements and presented results that are not only meaningless but actually quite worrisome: the irregularities of the investigation grow by the day without shedding any light on the capture of the perpetrators or the whereabouts of the 43 students and, instead, more mass graves are discovered and many more bodies found.

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