Mexico City, September 26 (RHC)-- “Ayotzinapa will not be forgotten,” is the slogan that rang out in the streets of Mexico City as thousands of teachers, students, relatives of victims, and members of diverse social organizations marched Monday to commemorate two years without answers about what happened to the 43 disappeared students.
Families of the missing students and their peers from the Ayotzinapa teachers’ college in the rural Mexican town of Iguala, where the 43 were kidnapped on September 26, 2014, called the march in the capital city to the central Zocalo Square in front of thde National Palace.
Security officials deployed some 2,500 officers to police the marches that focussed on demanding justice for the 43 students, whose whereabouts are still unknown two years after they went missing while commandeering buses to travel to a protest in Mexico City.
The march was the main event among several local actions marking the high-profile anniversary. During a march in the southwestern city of Chilpancingo, in the violence-plagued state of Guerrero, on Sunday, police detained at least seven protesters, seriously injuring at least three. Family members of the 43 students slammed the “brutality” and excessive use of force.
Other marches took place Monday in the states of Oaxaca and Guerrero, local media reported, as part of the national day of action to commemorate the mass forced disappearance and continue to pressure the government to uncover what truly happened that night in Iguala.
Meanwhile, Peña Nieto has garnered criticism for travelling to Cartagena for Colombia’s historic signing of the peace accords with the FARC while Mexico lives an uproar over two years without answers. Critics accuse the Mexican government of trying to cover up the role of federal forces in the students’ disappearance.
Ayotzinapa has become a rallying cry for the movement for justice for widespread human rights abuses in Mexico. Many see the case to epitomize problems of systemic impunity and state collusion with criminal groups as just the tip of a giant iceberg of mass graves across the country and some 28,000 people accounted for as “disappeared.”
