Conflicts & War

Thousands in Mexico march 7 years after disappearance of 43 students

Mexico City, Sep 26 (EFE).- Thousands of Mexicans marched Sunday through the capital to demand clarity about the disappearance of 43 students from Ayotzinapa in the southern state of Guerrero seven years since the incident.

As every year, the demonstration started in the emblematic Angel of Independence landmark in Mexico City, led by the students’ parents, and passed through the center of the city towards Zocalo square, near the National Palace.

Before leaving, a priest led a mass in honor of the disappeared, whose faces were printed on the banners that their families carry each year.

Demonstrators protested amid chants of “they were taken alive, we want them alive” and some painted on public property.

In front of a monument with the +43 symbol erected years ago, relatives and students chanted the names of the disappeared.

Only three of the students have been identified. The official in charge of the investigation in the previous government, Tomas Zeron, fled to Israel.

According to the government of former President Enrique Pena Nieto’s controversial version of events, the students of the Ayotzinapa school for teachers were arrested Sep. 26, 2014 at night by corrupt policemen in Iguala and handed over to the Guerreros Unidos cartel.

The group allegedly murdered and incinerated them in the Cocula garbage dump and threw the remains in a nearby river.

The story, known as the “historical truth,” was questioned by relatives and an investigation by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and its Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts, which said the bodies could not be burned there.

The current Government of Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador reopened the case in 2018 and definitively refuted that version of events by identifying unburned remains of Christian Rodriguez in 2020 and of Jhosivani Guerrero in June, both in the Carniceria ravine, outside the garbage dump.

These two identifications are in addition to that of Alexander Mora, whose remains were found in the river in 2014.

Lopez Obrador told parents during aa Friday meeting that he had asked Israel for the extradition of Tomas Zeron, who produced the former version of events, while families criticized the alleged disdain they perceive from the prosecutor’s Office and called on the army to clarify what happened. EFE

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