One month before the 10th anniversary of the disappearance of the 43 Ayotzinapa teacher training students, family members and activists protested with a strong demand to the outgoing president of Mexico, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, whom they accuse of covering up for the military involved in the case and of failing to keep his promise to solve the case.
From the Angel of Independence, a monument in the heart of the Mexican capital, protesters marched to demand truth and justice in the case, ahead of their final meeting with President López Obrador, who will leave power on September 30.
“It was the State and all its organizations and institutions of repression,” could be heard from a loudspeaker in a vehicle leading the march, led by current students of the Ayotzinapa rural teachers’ college in the state of Guerrero, southern Mexico.
At the front of the demonstration, the parents of the 43 students held signs with the names and faces of their children, with the legend ‘They took him alive, we want him back alive!’
Estanislao Mendoza, father of Miguel Ángel Mendoza Zacarías, reproached President López Obrador for failing to keep the promise he made to them on May 25, 2018 when he was campaigning, and for not having resolved the case with just over a month to go before his government ends.
Disappointed with the president
“It’s been 10 years and we are still protesting and we are asking the government: Where is the promise that it made, that it would find them? And we are waiting,” Mendoza said.
“We are disappointed in him (López Obrador). Before, when he started, there was a glimmer of hope because we believed in him a little,” lamented the activist father.
Mendoza said that the Government “is covering for the Mexican Army,” because despite the presidential decree that “it was going to investigate, whoever it was,” when it reached the Armed Forces, “that’s where it ran into” and could not do anything.
The last march, prior to the tenth anniversary of the disappearance of the 43 students, which will be celebrated on September 26, arrived in the rain to the “anti-monument” located on Reforma Avenue, where they did a roll call of each one of them, and some relatives took the microphone.
María de Jesús Tlatempa, mother of José Eduardo Bartolo, reiterated the demand for justice and truth in the case, prior to her last meeting with López Obrador, this Tuesday.
“Now we are going to thank him tomorrow for nothing. Because he did nothing. We got to where we had to get with the Army, and then we stopped knowing,” Tlatempa accused.
The mother also said that the Army and the Ministerial Police know what happened the night the students disappeared, and she said that they will not stop fighting “until they know what really happened to them.”
A campaign promise
The latest meetings have taken place in a climate of growing tension following the publication of a letter in which López Obrador defended the Armed Forces and accused human rights defenders, international organizations, and journalists of discrediting the Army.
The case has remained unsolved for almost 10 years. On September 26, 2014, 43 students from the Ayotzinapa Rural School disappeared while on their way to Mexico City to protest on the anniversary of the Tlatelolco massacre, which occurred on October 2, 1968.
The case has been controversial during the López Obrador administration because the parents of the missing have accused him of not making progress in solving the case, as he promised during his 2018 election campaign.
On Monday, López Obrador asked the Attorney General’s Office (FGR) to summon former President Enrique Peña Nieto (2012-2018) to testify “if there are elements” regarding his responsibility in the case of the disappearance of the 43 students from Ayotzinapa in 2014.
Continue reading:
- AMLO’s controversial judicial reform in Mexico is approved by a Congressional Commission
- Relatives say goodbye to 8 police officers killed in Michoacán, Mexico
- AMLO: Mexico is a free country and we don’t want a wall, he refuted Trump’s promises