Israeli Embassy in Mexico vandalized in protest over Ayotzinapa case
Mexico City, Sep 21 (EFE).- Families and supporters of the 43 students from Ayotzinapa teacher’s college abducted and killed eight years ago vandalized the Israeli Embassy here Wednesday during a protest to demand that Israel extradite a former head of Mexico’s equivalent of the FBI who faces charges in connection with the case.
The demonstration began peacefully, but hooded militants destroyed the embassy’s security cameras and painted the walls with slogans such as “Extradition of Tomas Zeron” and “43,” as well as “Free Palestine” and “Death to Zionism.”
The protest shut down a busy street in downtown Mexico City’s Lomas de Chapultepec neighborhood for nearly an hour.
Mexico submitted its request for the extradition of Zeron, who led the now-defunct ACI during the 2012-2018 administration of President Enrique Peña Nieto, in September 2020.
Zeron is accused of destroying evidence and torturing witnesses in the course of the investigation of the September 2014 mass abduction in the southern state of Guerrero.
Israel and Mexico don’t have an extradition treaty and The New York Times reported in July that Israeli officials ignored the request to punish the Mexican government for its vote in the United Nations to investigate the crisis in Palestine.
Mexico’s current president, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, has written directly to Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett to request his help in securing the return of Zeron to face justice.
The protest Wednesday at the Israeli Embassy was the latest in a series of events mounted by Ayotzinapa parents and their supporters leading up to the eighth anniversary of the crime.
On the night of Sept. 26, 2014, students from the Ayotzinapa Normal School, an all-male college known for its leftist activism, were attacked in Iguala, Guerrero, after they had commandeered buses to travel to Mexico City for a protest.
Six people – including three students – were killed in the assault, 25 were injured and 43 students were abducted and presumably slain later.
The Peña Nieto administration said in 2015 that the students were killed by a local drug gang after being abducted by municipal cops acting on the orders of Iguala’s corrupt mayor, and that their bodies were incinerated at a dump in the nearby town of Cocula.
Victims’ families were immediately skeptical of that account, as was the Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts, a team assembled by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights who concluded that the bodies could not have been disposed of in the way authorities claimed.
Lopez Obrador, who likewise rejected the account presented by his predecessor’s government, launched a new probe shortly after taking office in December 2018 and appointed a truth commission that issued last month describing the mass abduction and murder as a “state crime.”
The Mexican government announced last Thursday the arrest of army Gen. Jose Rodriguez Perez in connection with the Ayotzinapa case.
EFE
ppc/dr
