By Rolando Garrido Romo
In these days the people of Mexico are facing a double assault by the political and economic elite of the country, subservient to Washington, which mainly aims to strengthen control over financial and natural resources of the country through the implementation of reforms imposed by the government of president Peña Nieto; and at the same time criminalizing social protest, suppressing all dissent sample or rejection by popular organizations, students, educators, farmers and workers to such predatory and exclusionary model.
In this context a state crime was committed against rural students in the state of Guerrero, where the complicity between municipal and state authorities to organized crime, and the indifference and failure of federal authorities led to another tragedy against country’s poorest population.
On the night of 26 last September and the morning of the 27th, a group of about 200 students from the Rural School Raúl Isidro Burgos of Ayotzinapa (municipality of Tixtla), Guerrero (southwestern Mexico) were attacked with firearms by municipal police of the city of Iguala and a group of men in civilian clothes.
The students of Ayotzinapa had taken some passenger buses with which they moved to the neighboring town of Iguala, in order to raise money to go to Mexico City, and attend the march of October 2nd which is held every year in commemorating the Slaughter of Tlatelolco in 1968 (during which the government of Gustavo Díaz Ordaz ordered the murder of dozens of students who performed a rally in the Plaza of the Three Cultures, precisely protesting against government repression and lack of democracy in the country).
The march on October 2, 2014 was of additional importance, since in recent weeks had developed a student movement at the National Polytechnic Institute (an institution created in 1936 by President Lazaro Cardenas, who in 1938 expropriated the oil industry at large transnational corporations) to reject a series of reforms involving the degradation of their academic level and the conversion of the Institute into a provider of technical second level personnel for transnational corporations.
Although the government had an initial response to the demands of students (repeal the reforms and dismiss the director of the Institute), the student`s assemblies were in favor of greater involvement of students and teachers in the direction of the school and in the determination of plans and programs of study, so that the student`s protest continues in this academic institution.
The shooting attack of Iguala municipal police and gunmen who accompanied her, caused the killing of 6 people, 4 of them students, a woman who was in a taxi and then a young football player (team Hornets of the Third Division of professional football) who was on a bus with peers (after participating in a game), which was also shot by the police, who believed that the players were also students of Ayotzinapa.
Some of the students then decided to report the assault they suffered, before the media, but the place where they tried to take out the press conference that same night, was also shot by the armed group in civilian clothes, so students had to flee.
Later it was learned that 43 students were missing, and no authority was aware of his whereabouts.
That night, the body of a young man (Julio César Mondragón Fuentes) who was tortured, put out his eyes and found skinned face, was found in the street. Later was known that he was one of the students missing that tragic night.
In the days following, national outrage at the attack on defenseless young, forced the state government to deposit with the Public Prosecutor to 22 police officers involved in the attack, and at the same time, it was the Mayor of Iguala, José Luis Abarca Velasquez who requested his resignation and disappeared along with his wife Maria de los Angeles Pineda Villa, who the day of the incident, paid a report as president of the institution responsible for childcare and family (Integral Development of the Family, DIF) in Iguala.
The subsequent protests of Ayotzinapa’s students, as the demands of the return of the missing students by their parents, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the OAS and even the State Department of the United States (usually let these facts unaccounted when they are committed by allied regimes, such as the one that currently governs Mexico) forced the government of Peña Nieto to attract the investigation at federal level.
Once the Attorney General’s Office began investigating, arrested 10 of the gunmen who had participated in the attack and it was they who announced that they were part of a drug cartel known as “Guerreros Unidos”, one of whose leaders known as “Chucky”, had given the order to kill the students. It was they also who gave the location of 9 unmarked graves on the outskirts of Iguala, where the authorities found 43 bodies so far, those who have already practiced forensic examinations and DNA tests, of which 28 bodies according to the Attorney General’s Office, do not correspond to DNA from relatives of the missing students. Still need to know the identity of the other 15 bodies found and if those that are in new mass graves found on 14 and 15 October, are of the missing students.
Later (October 13) 14 municipal police officers of Cocula (adjacent to Iguala), who apparently also participated in the attack and in the delivery of the 43 disappeared students to the cartel “Guerreros Unidos”, were arrested, along with the mayor and the director of public security of the municipality of Cocula.
At this point we must begin to untangle the web of mafia relations between much of the Mexican political class (without distinction of parties) with drug trafficking organizations, businessmen who launder money (along with banks) and different levels of municipal, state and federal government officials who protect criminal enterprises through the police (and often, middle and high level ranking officials of the armed forces are also involved), in exchange for funding for their campaigns and for huge profits that are transferred to them by their criminal associates.
The governor of the state of Guerrero, Angel Aguirre Rivero, is occupying the governorship of the state for the second time, as it did the first time replacing a despotic and dictatorial governor, Ruben Figueroa, who had to take leave from his post in 1995, after he ordered the killing of peasants of the Peasant Organization of the Southern Sierra in Aguas Blancas, Guerrero, who were to apply attention to their demands to the state government.
Aguirre then was part of the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), and replaced his “compadre” Figueroa, who never had to be accountable to justice for the slaughter of Aguas Blancas. Aguirre ruled from 1996 until 1999.
Subsequently, Aguirre wanted to be governor again in 2010, but this time his party, the PRI, decided to run Aguirre’s cousin, Manuel Añorve, who was the mayor of Acapulco.
Aguirre expressed his disagreement and left the PRI, so he sought the nomination for governor by the leftist PRD (Party of the Democratic Revolution), who does not care about his PRI past and prompted the governor, who won the election in 2010.
Since he rose to the governorship in April 2011, Aguirre has turned the state of Guerrero to a private business, as for example, he has appointed to government positions 38 immediate family members; so do other officials, such as Secretary of Finance and Administration, Jorge Salgado Leyva, who has 20 relatives in various state offices.
Aguirre has entrusted to his nephew, Ernesto Aguirre being the liaison with groups of political and economic power, to apply for “commissions” and percentage required to approve projects, investment, government procurement, etc. The governor’s brother, named Carlos Mateo Aguirre, is in charge of controlling everything related to public works by the state.
Also, the governor is pushing his son Angel Aguirre Jr. to be the candidate for mayor of Acapulco.
“Dangerous “, i.e. with drug gangs, relationships correspond to the cousin of the governor, Victor Hugo Aguirre Garzón, who is in charge of drug trafficking in Acapulco.
Aguirre, along with his Health Secretary, Lazaro Mazon (who is identified with the leftist newly created political party, National Regeneration Movement), and the current so-called New Left, which dominates the Party of the Democratic Revolution, were the main political patronage for José Luis Abarca to became mayor of Iguala.
Abarca is married to Maria de los Angeles Pineda Villa, who is the sister of Alberto Pineda Villa (aka “El Borrado”), and Marco Antonio Pineda Villa, who were operators of the drug cartel of the Beltran Leyva brothers (“coincidentally” few days after the murders of Ayotzinapa, was arrested in San Miguel Allende, Hector Beltran Leyva, leader of the cartel of the same name, along with a well-known businessman who was responsible for washing drug money, Germán Goyeneche, and who had close ties with the political class of the state of Querétaro) and then formed the cartel “Guerreros Unidos” (on 10 October, another brother of Maria de los Angeles, named Salomon, was arrested in Cuernavaca for drug crimes).
The same mother of Maria de los Angeles, Maria Leonor Villa Ortuño, is considered part of the criminal organization, and just provide a video in which she accuses the governor Aguirre of having received funding for his campaign in 2010, by the cartel of the Beltran Leyva and that is the governor who protects “Guerreros Unidos” (this cartel has a bloody dispute with another drug trafficking organization in Guerrero known as “Los Rojos”).
Mayor Abarca was driving his wife Maria de los Angeles to achieve Iguala municipal presidency next year, and the presentation of her report as president of the municipal DIF in the night of September 26, was to be used as his primary campaign launch, so knowing the mobilization of the students of Ayotzinapa, the Mayor and his wife ordered the police and thugs to stop the students at all cost, to avoid “tarnishing” the act of launching of the candidacy of Maria de los Angeles.
Hence the direct orders for the slaughter came from the municipal authorities, but state and federal authorities were complicit, as it is now known that a number of students were retained by Mexican Army soldiers, without providing them with any help; and the state police, which is also based in Iguala, did not intervene to stop the attack, even though all corporations learned about these facts in minutes.
Additionally, both the state government and the federal, were aware that the Mayor Abarca had directly participated in the kidnapping and murder of three leaders of the Popular Unity organization, who had demanded support for that peasant organization and had directly accused the mayor of taking possession of the resources destined to them. These three leaders were massacred and the mayor apparently shot to the head of one of them (Arturo Hernández Cardona), with a shotgun. This was known since the middle of 2013, but neither the state government nor the federal government initiated a thorough investigation into these events.
It should also be noted that Aguirre, since he was with the ruling PRI, was very close to the current president Peña Nieto, and once it became governor for the second time, supported by the leftist PRD, boasted his good relationship with Peña Nieto who was then governor of the State of Mexico and was constantly invited to Aguirre’s family parties and government festivities.
Now Peña has tried to distance himself from the governor and called him to take responsibility, while it pressed for his resignation, which has triggered a flood of words between state and federal government, in order to dilute their responsibilities in these facts.
In this context, it is important to note that the rural students of Ayotzinapa are part of a segment of the population that has been traditionally excluded, demonized and punished by the State, especially since the coming to power of neoliberal governments (1982), who have attempted to disappear the Rural Normal Schools (created in the 20’s), where young farmers are trained not only as teachers for rural areas, but also as social organizers and promoters and as trainers and assistants in agricultural production.
Permanently, the state and the federal governments, have decreased budget allocations for these schools and have attempted to transform curricula or close them up; but students, teachers and parents have mobilized again and again to stop it.
It is worth to mention that the famous Mexican guerrilla fighter Lucio Cabañas, originally from Atoyac de Alvarez, Guerrero, studied precisely in the Rural Normal School of Ayotzinapa, where he graduated as a rural teacher, subsequently adhering to Guerrero Civic Association (Asociación Cívica Guerrerense), who ran another graduate of Ayotzinapa, Genaro Vázquez.
Vazquez created in 1962-63 the National Revolutionary Civic Association (Asociación Cívica Nacional Revolucionaria), after a brutal repression suffered by members of this organization, precisely in the city of Iguala, which convinced Vàzquez to go underground to fight the repressive Mexican authorities.
The same will happened next with Lucio Cabanas, who would experience firsthand another brutal repression in 1967 by state and federal authorities in Atoyac, leading him to create the Party of the Poor and the Peasants’ Justice Brigade to fight in the underground, against the Mexican government.
Also, after the Aguas Blancas massacre, in 1996, the Popular Revolutionary Army appeared (Ejército Popular Revolucionario, EPR), in response to the repression suffered by the peasants by Guerrero state authorities.
Now, following the disappearance of students of Ayotzinapa, the Revolutionary Army of the Insurgent People (ERPI), an EPR detachment, has stated that it has created a Justice Brigade to punish cartel “Guerreros Unidos”, for the murder of the rural students.
For its part, the EZLN (the Zapatistas in Chiapas) mobilized thousands of grassroots supporters in a silent march in support of the missing students.
Several schools and colleges of the National Autonomous University of Mexico, the Metropolitan Autonomous University and the National Pedagogical University, have initiated a strike in support of students and demand of the appearance of the 43 missing students.
There is a proposal in Congress for the disappearance of powers in the state of Guerrero, given that Governor Aguirre refuses to leave office, but the measure will not fix the situation of this state, which is handled by political groups associated with drug cartels and business groups who get rich juicy concessions, so the arrival of an acting governor to the state will only serve to distract public opinion and eventually make the people forget about the responsibility, political and criminal of the governor and the omissions (perhaps intentional) of the federal government, on these facts; not forgetting that the Mayor of Iguala, his wife and the director of Public Safety of that city, Felipe Flores Velasquez, are still fugitives.
Very comprehensive window about the situation in Mexico. I call it a “window” because if one gets there (in Mexico) realizes that the situation is terrible. In Michoacan (another state in the westside of the country) people try to organize in self defense units to protect themselves from both the police and the criminals. The leader of these units Manuel Mireles was and is still imprisoned while the leader of the criminal cartel “la Tuta” is free dealing quite openly with different authorities. Kidnappings and killings reach an all time high but is downplayed by the Mexican MSM with links to the ruling president Peña Nieto who is as incompetent and corrupt as his prior. He (the president) has been more active to modify the country`s constitution to allow the plundering of the country by transnationals than to fight crime. Mexico is practically lawless in the North in the Gulf area where other cartels operate notably the Zetas and the Gulf Cartel (The Zetas cartel made for instance “popular” beheading of people even before than ISIS!). Mexico is worlds number one in kidnappings but lots remain unreported due that people are aware that police often is involved as accomplish in connection with the criminals. The situation is not improving. Poor Mexican people!
Yet another brilliant addition to the blog, Saker. Great to get REAL news out of Mexico.
Thank you for the useful Saker-style sitrep and analysis of the situation regarding disappeared students in Iguala Guerrero.
I live near Iguala now and during the flamboyant “narco-war” years of 2010-2012 when massacres were commonplace and headless bodies were everywhere.
Neither I nor anyone I know can tell you what happened to the students except for persons who essentially repeat what is said on TV; if asked, these people will tell you that the government is somehow responsible.
To my mind this strange event of the dissapeared youth is eerily reminiscent of the disappearance of the Malaysian jet where it seemed to curiously became an icon to be lost, and perpetually looked-for?¿
It would be a mistake I think to blame the Malaysian government in such a case? but the Guerrero incident plays in to powerful memes of the inability of Mexicans to govern their own country.
To say that this famous incident where a mass kidnapping takes place is the act of corrupt local officials is misleading i think. This is the work of clandestine criminal gangs – gangs that move like the wind and disappear like the night – gangs that knocked the planes of the top two Interior Ministers out of the sky, in the Felipe Calderon administration.
It is NOT the State that is doing this, it is the anti-State forces who have been preparing a battleground in advance here in Guerrero which is one of the most intense concentrations of mineral wealth anywhere in the world.
The story has been for a long time that a clandestine narco-war has been waged between a gang known as “Los Rojos” and another gang known as “Guerreros Unidos”. These two bands in the years 2010-2012 perpetrated a dramatic slaughter spree and this was all explained as infantile torture killing of the rival band members, as revenge for other murders and transgressions of each others territory. The display of cutten-off heads in newspaper photographs sold by men yelling through the streets “see the severed head” found in this or that plaza of the city or on the edge of town; this crazy flamboyant murdering went on for a little more than two years then it largely receded and people here immediately forgot about the narco-wars, concentrating on their personal life and immediate economic problems.
What I am saying is that, this disappearance is part of a ghastly theater and not rightly understood as a State Crime. The spoor of these jokers at the State Department (¿ I dont know where they hang out and make their plans to sow monkey wrenches in the social and would-be democratic practices of people of another nation) is all over the crime scene.
Benito: I do not know if you are Mexican (even if you claim to live there) to claim that this (disappeared youth is a strange event) is a monumental! understatement, the same as to claim that authorities are not involved in this crime. I do not live myself in Mexico but I travel ate least once every year and I KNOW what is going on. Mexico is partially a failed state, it will and probably will become a totally failed state as things look like right now. The current president (Peña Nieto) is just offering more of the same, ie: (more) corruption, (more) kidnappings, (even more) plundering of the country by foreign transnationals, etc so not so brilliant outlook. If things keeps going on like this I do not see how this country can be saved.
This is a fine article. It is the kind of analysis we gringos never get in American media or the so called “mainstream press” and without which it is next to impossible to figure out what is going on. Congratulations to the author and to you, Saker, for exposing it on your blog. Your vineyard promises to become a forest.
Guerero, along with Morelos, was home ground for the Zapatan upsurge and, along with Michoacan, for the Chistero revolt which was never entirely supressed. This latest massacre may set the embers of resistance once more aflame.
I suspect–certainly I hope–that this blog will grow and grow and grow.
Tom
The cristero (from the word Christ) war of the 1920s was a right-wing reactionary movement supported by the Vatican and the local catholic church in central Mexico against the leftist-postrevolutionary government of Plutarco Elias Calles, founder of what has become the PRI. Today, the PRI has betrayed all its social and progressive roots, to bow to US, big oil and neoliberal interests.
dear Oscar, I live here all right, and nowhere else.
Yes my contention is that local officials are certainly not the authors of this crime. This strange event has the fingerprints of deception and chaos warfare all over it; that is why it fits the “Mexico government corruption” meme, yet does not make any sense on the surface of experience.
I think of what has been happening.
First, some kids in israel disappear, then some schoolgirls in nigeria disappear, then a malaysian jet disappears, then guerrero students disappear – seems to me that – not all that long ago – people did NOT just disappear for dramatic effect, now, they seem to disappear all the time, as if it were a play in a book.
Yes indeed this strange event has the earmarks of being a feature of the “Mexican Spring” similiar to the gruesome immolation of the Tunisian fruit peddler.
(My friend just told me of rumors that government documents are right now being removed from the municipal offices in anticipation of attacks.)
The storming of government offices is not an unknown political tactic in the old-west style history of Guerrero but this isnt you classic local land dispute; it is being promoted by the major mass-media and presumably by concentrated covert operations on twitter and facebook.
Benito: There is no “Mexican Spring” I would call it “Mexican winter” and it has been going on for many years now. Try to think simple, do not complicate facts. Read my very first comment on this article. It has been some weeks now since these students disappeared and on the search for them many clandestine graves containing multiple corpses of murdered people have been found, after studies none of them matched the disappeared students. But then who are the murdered people lying in these graves? You have to concur with me that these 43 students is just the tip of the iceberg concerning criminality in Mexico. Hundreds of people are kidnapped and killed in a regular basis in Mexico every day. So many that most of this goes unreported. Have you heard about the over hundred immigrants from Central America that were mass murdered in North Mexico? This became known I think because they were foreigners had they been Mexicans nobody would have known their fate.
hey Oscar believe me nobody is surprised at the finding of many bodies in clandestine graves, if you only knew all the murdering and mayhem that went on around here -especially in the years 2010 through 2012; the massacres and over-night killings were extravagent; it had everyone’s hair standing up on its end; Certainly, i had never seen or even imagined seeing anything like this, at such close range. There were so many atrocities, so many…
As recently as last february, a group of high school students from Taxco were kidnapped at the State Fair in Iguala, they were held for a long time and some of them were killed.
Why didnt this horrific mass kidnapping and murder event spark public outrage and calls for violent action? The two kidnapping events are similar, maybe the earlier one was a rehearsal – an investigative journalist might just find something
The mayhem has been going on here for years and the liberal reaction of moral indignation has done absolutely no good at all for anybody, since the sentiments of internet activists do not determine anything at all, as every issue will be forgetten about the next day with the pressure of own life problems and complicated incessant seduction of CIA-sponsored digital impulses, pushing the “Mexico the failed state” meme.
The internet is an unfortunate place to organize political movements or political sentiment because the internet is the laboratory and playground of United States military
A lot of people in Mexico watch television and “get their news” from television and so consequently these people are very likely to by hyponized into the anti-government theme the Televisa actresses are pushing with all the fervor of Angela Joli when, in the name of human-rights, she is out promoting some border war in Africa.
Taking to the street is not an effective strategy if what one wants is to effect policy change and improve the life of the nation.
It would be adding insult to injury to take the good names of those radical militant students and use them for neo-liberal patsy purposes
I mean: Mexico’s problem is NOT the moral crisis of Mexico; it is the fact that Mexicans being duped as Mexico’s resources, both human andn material, are both being exploited to the max. IMHO, Mexicans are not nearly so evil as they are simple – and hypnotizable.
Why didnt this horrific mass kidnapping and murder event spark public outrage and calls for violent action? Benito,terrible things have been happening for long time now, remember the hundreds ormaybe thousands female workers abducted and killed over many years in Juarez? These tragedies and many more have been downplayed and partially hidden by authorities. Then why do not show up in the world MSM to provoke global outrage and the need for a solution? I guess is because Mexico has become an asset of the empire, Mexico is totally alienated and ripe to be plundered so they (MSM) keep mute in order to not disturb the process.
The Iguala student disappearance story is like when the MSM promoted a story like the one about the Tunisian peddler who burned himself alive… the satanic undertones of this story underwrote the pay-off of shady generals and muslim brotherhood insiders who were slated to take over the functions of the Tunisian government and open the ground for chaos and looting and the repetition of this method utilizing twitter and other social media to “fill the plaza” with the idealism of “golden youth” who were trying out their smart phone etc.; the virtual world hubub and all the expressed humane intentions have been in the past a cover for neo-cons (whatever they are) surrepticiously overthrowing the national government. This is now an old trick however it is new for mexicans and they seem to be for the most part swallowing it. i.e. framing this particular massacre as an emblem of anger and resentment against the government.
What irony! These students were real political militants! as were their parents. Even more, all the concerned people whose sense of justice has been offended by this theatrical news event, I invite you to consider
1. the miner’s union which has been on strike for seven years the longest industrial strike in history and this labor dispute has never been resolved and the miners are still waiting to go back to work (look this up on Google “Mexico Miners Strike”
2. the teachers union of guerrero rejected the proposed education reforms in october 2007 with a series of mass-marches in the cities of the state and in mexico city in conjunction with teachers unions from other states. The teachers have fiercely rejected the Reforms for seven years now! their leaders have been sent to federal prison, and the teachers have had their character be systemativcally assasinated as they have been incessently villified by the MSM machine; still, there is NO backing down on the part of the teacher’s union and they remain officialy in a state of non-legal complience with the federal law they ignore.
The militancy and resistance of the miner’s union and the teacher’s union are what this event is distracting from. Again, this is NOT a State Crime it is an anti-State Crime! being perpetrated one supposes by that dreary crew of shady characters coming out of Operation Paperclip.
the Teachers Union of Guerrero (in solidarity with at that time Teachers Union of Morelos made a series of mass-marches in October 2007 and these were not symbolic rallies, thousands up thousands come to this with many banners from the various locals.
And this protest was specifically in opposition to the proposed education privatization legislation.
This was years before the Peña Nieto government tried to implement the neo-liberalist reformas
1. education reform meaning impoverishment of public education in favor of privatization
2. energy meaning continue to allow mexico sub-soil resources to be exploited without benefit to the people of Mexico
3. fiscal reform meaning let the tax authorities and the banks terrorize the people of Mexico
They may have thought that education reform would be the easiest nut to crack?¿ however, the depth of the current of radical sentiment in backwoods Guerrero may have proved unfathomable to scheming elitists.
From October 2007 to Octobe 2014, that is a long time for any political protest anywhere in the world and both the Guerrero Teachers and the Guerrero Miners who are still out on strike and the mines in this area have fired all these people Google “Miner Strike Taxco Zacatecas Cananea” to find out that this is unprecedented effort to break the will of the Miner’s Union; however they are rather rude and crude people who never admit they are beaten also the theoretical militancy appeals to intellectual nature and patriotic sense of history, i know local men still vigil at these mines becasue legally the miners have to vigil to maintain their labor rights to strike, even though they were all fired, years ago.
p.s. I just found out that a VICE TV reporter is in town, (it happens that this writer is a friend of my son and my son gave him my address to inquire in case i was interested in helping him) This VICETV writer emailed me to say that he is doing a story on “The Iguala Protests” so Rupert Murdoch is interested in publicizing his agency’s version of this story told by a young reporter from L.A.
p.p.s. you should see the lurid images circulating on the social media in Taxco; i saw one with a pile of naked bodies that was presented as realistic purporting to be an image of the naked dead bodies of the missing students; fakery and circulated furiously by the gullible also on the local social media notices that 16 municipal governments are going to be attacked and their offices taken over! i also saw a fake report that the employees of the municipal offices of Taxco were removing documents in anticipation of an attack – does this brand of internet fear-mongering and manipulation and fakery seem vaguely familiar?
The elected governments of about twenty towns have been taken over by the federal police – the gullible public applauds because the mass-media has thoroughly implanted the fixed idea that the disappearance of the students is due to government corruption; no one seems to suspect that it is a theatre orchestrated by foreign military and intelligence agencies.
The constitutional municipal presidents are being systematically deposed, and this is supposed to be a good thing, because of the supposed humanitarian emergency, on account of the dissapeared Ayutzinapa students.
I sincerely hope that later on Mexicans will not find themselves looking around and wondering how their constitutional presidencies went into the flush tank of history!
yes it is confirmed – the supplanting of constitutional presidencies of 16 ? municipalities in northern Guerrero with federal officials and that the entire police force of Taxco has been arrested and is being questioned – I think it is in Pachuca Hidalgo? they are being held somewhere in Mexico not near here; this is not the first time this police force has been arrested. 28 Taxco policemen were arrested in November 2012 the same day as a man known as “el abogado del diablo” was arrested in downtown Taxco and at that time the people said he was a leader of Guerreros Unidos a polic gang set-up to counter the criminal gang and/or to kidnap for ransom. What is going on now is pale, very pale next to the mayhem that was going on around here in the years 2008-2010 (sine approximately that fateful Holy Thursday when the procession of Semana Santa was shattered by a spontaneous mass-panic.
here is part of most recent story written by the VICE News reporter I told you about
https://news.vice.com/article/mass-graves-dot-hillsides-around-iguala-as-search-for-missing-students-continues
The farmer told them he hadn’t seen or heard anything out of the ordinary. He promised. So Miguel Angel Jimenez and the rest of the group marched onward.
Less than an hour later, over a ridge and up a ruddy path, they eventually found two fresh ditches.
With VICE News present, they dug into the ground and turned up some bones — a piece of jawbone, a femur, and some scattered clothes and garbage — before they decided to leave. One of the community police members had received a threatening phone call. The voice on the other end of the line told them they’d better stop poking around up in the hills, or else.
The UPOEG volunteers immediately alerted federal officials that they had found two more graves. Those would add to the nine found in the days prior to their patrol last Monday, but more graves would turn up the next day. And the day after.
In this city, where the local police are accused of firing upon three buses carrying students from the Ayotzinapa Normal School, killing six, before kidnapping 43 others, you dig at the ground in the hillsides and the cemetery that Iguala has become pokes back at you.
mexico has an executive system similar to that of the united states; it is not a parlimentarian system as in europe and many former british colonies
in mexico, the president (theoretically) has the final and maximum political power
so does the governor, on the state level (elected for i think six years)
and so does the municipal president (elected for three years) in the ayuntamiento
and, finally, the comisarios (who are elected for one year) of the villages who have authority on the local level
in the traditional mexican political system, each of these officials has authority, and that is the way the system works, for better or for bad.
however deficient the democratic process (and it is usually very deficient with the corrupt party system installed) …still, these are elected officials
What they are doing now, under cover of this humanitarian emergency involving the disappearance of forty students from militant teachers college, is jumping-over the constitutional process, and the municipal authority by unidentified federal government agents or police chiefs, or who knows who?¿ is taking over, as the legal constitutional authorities are over-written by this top-down take-over of governments in northern Guerrero.
This political operation is to the tune of the applause of well-meaning people who are shocked into action and psychological attitude by the news and social media impact of gore and suspense out of a disney cartoon
Garish stars of Televisa dn TV Azteca and coming out with their boobs with strong support for having the government take responsibility for what happened to the students in Iguala (whatever it was, since nobody seems to know and there is only speculation to go on becasue the product of the investigations is not public)
When TV prostitutes are carrying political banners, one had better watch out for the devil, to see if he is not behind the shades.
I have heard that the big star TV acresses have come out against “government corruption” becasue of the disappearance of the Guerrero students.
Meanwhile many municipal governments were taken over by federal authorities in the past days. I know that Taxco the entire police force has been arrested and taken away for questioning; I dont know exactly on what terms the President (Salomon Majul) exercises authority, and what are the limits of that authority.
The mass-media continues to pitch the story as ghoulish humanitarian disaster with gentle golden youth demanding the renunciation of the governor Aguirre in primal retribution or for some reason.
Here is an example of the weird and highly suspicious materials flooding the local social media; the provincial people are great ones for re-sending e-mails, even if their provenance is not identified.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3iJOj7bTAJI
this photo purports to be of the students, naked in the hands of the police; they are naked and bloody and piled-up a la abu-graib! They remind me of those kid’s bodies they piled up and took pictures of to support accusation of bashar al assad having attacked his population with poison gas when those piled-up bodies were those of children kidnapped in latakia previously.
I think there are obvious fingerprints all over this case in Iguala Guerrero and this is why I maintain this is an Anti-State Crime.
At this moment, they are getting rid of the constitutional elected government officials and replacing them with unidentified federal officials, who for all we know may be foreigners. And getting ready to force the governor to step down.
This is not a party politics thing, still I heard someone say today that the PRI wants to use this to take over all the ayuntamientos controlled by the PRD. As Marie Harf would say: never let a humanitarian emergency go to waste!
here is an example of the systematicinstitutional mass-media coverage of the disappearance of the Ayotzinapa students in Iguala:
By Coleen Jose October 16, 2014
While the world has focused its attention on the pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong, there’s another student movement gaining steam on the other side of the world.
The unfolding protests gripping Mexico began in the small town of Iguala, in the southwest region of Guerrero state, where the disappearance of 43 student teachers on the night of Sept. 26 has sparked outrage amid allegations of collaboration between local police and organized crime.
“Iguala is just one example of the level of decay in state and municipal security institutions,” Duncan Wood, director of the Mexico Institute at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, D.C., told the Washington Post.
Witnesses belong to a local gang, which federal authorities claim has infiltrated the local police department. The police apprehended 17 students from a local teachers college, according to the gang. They were then escorted through a rugged hill, killed and buried.
The 17 students are among the 43 who disappeared in late September.
More than 22,000 people have gone missing in Mexico in the last eight years, according to a list of names the Mexican government holds. Local police claimed that 28 corpses recently exhumed from a mass grave did not belong to any of the missing victims from Iguala’s teacher’s college.
Despite this horrific incident, the outcry in Mexico has been largely overshadowed by Hong Kong,
Now, Mexicans are insisting that their outrage be heard by both government officials and the international media. Protesters took to the streets of the Guerrero state capital this week to demand answers, holding mass demonstrations there and across the country.
College students in Guerrero state burned a portrait of the state’s governor, Angel Aguirre, before they set the capital building on fire.
Most of the demonstrations involve fire and destruction; peaceful protests are also taking place across the country this week. On Oct. 14, Attorney General Jesus Murillo Karam announced that none of the 43 missing students were among remains found in the first mass graves. Following the announcement, students in Mexico City gathered and chanted outside of Karam’s office to demand an investigation.
Students held a banner with the faces of the 43 missing student teachers from the Isidro Burgos rural teachers college. The banner reads “Iguala, cradle of murders.”
Teachers clashed with riot police in front of the Guerrero state capital building.
In Mexico City protests, a woman wore a black veil and held a sign bearing the words “Assassin State,” referring to the state of Guerrero.
A student spray-painted, the words “Repressive State” onto the window of the attorney general’s office.
Protesters demanded the resignation of President Enrique Peña Nieto in a mass protest in Mexico City this week. The federal government has yet to give an explanation about the disappearance of the 43 student teachers.
Relatives of the missing marched with candles and flowers in Mexico City.
Activists of Amnesty International earlier this month demonstrated with a candlelit vigil on the streets of Mexico City.
Omar Garcia, one of the witnesses in Iguala, recalled what he saw that evening for the BBC. “We think the municipal police took them,” Garcia wrote. “What we think happened is that they kept them somewhere and then, as we say, ‘disappeared’ them – like so many thousands of others in this country who are missing.” The search continues for the 43 students.
buenos dias from north guerrero mexico, near iguala – it is cool and cloudy this morning after the night’s rain
i bumped into victor, bulmaro’s boy, in the street in front of estaban villalobos’ house
he told me exitedly that he was hurrying to a meeting in favor of the ayozinapa students
before i said a word he enthusiastically ranted that “this time its really the revolution!”
– this comment amused and worried me
so i reminded him about the israili students, who the entire nation was looking for
and how that was a prelude to the brutal massacre of palestinians in gaza.
Then a Boieng Plane got lost;
they kept looking it for it
trying to catch a glimpse
flying out over the blue ocean
looking out windows of military jets
Then, nigerian schoolgirls got lost,
they can’t find them either, …still looking everywhere, months later
now the Ayotzinapa students disappear and looking for them becomes a week-after-week matter as the international media starts wondering out loud why this event is not as big as the hong kong demonstrations.
(i hear the people repeat gruesome rumors of how the boys were burnt and murdered, and continued effort to link their disappearance to the clandestine graves near Iguala)
Meanwhile, all the police are under arrest and investigation and federal authorities are in charge, as the elected municipal presidents and the governor himself are under investigation by hopefully benign federal authority, whoever they are.
Who are the federal authorities now running public security in Taxco de Alarcón and 16 more municipalities in north guerrero?
i dont know who they are; i can only hope they are not associates of john mccain; cross your fingers out there and say a prayer for us!
I did a little investigating today and asked a local journalist reporter and another person also older who is legal advisor to the chamber of commerce and both were far more sanguine in their assesments of the take-over of the municipal presidency by federal officials.
Separately, both of them expressed a similar view that public security is completely separate from the rest of the government and that, while the municipal presidents are under investigation, it is only the public security function of government that is affected.
I do NOT know that the municipal police can just be separated out like that from the rest of the municipal government, but i did not object to either man’s statement since I had asked their opinion not offered to give my own.
Each of them seemed satisfied and never seemed to have wondered, still less worried, about any constitutional issues or principles, let alone imagining foreigner war-games in progress. Maybe I am just the nervous nelly, lets hope so.
Today, I found out that eleven municipalities in northern Guerrero have been taken over, and the presidents are all under investigation; that the Taxco police have been interrogated and drug tested and are back working, but without their guns.
From what I have heard, there is lots of rancor expressed against the students because they are systematically portrayed by television as troublemakers.
Unless you live in these rural communities you might not identify with these students of Lucio Cabaña and followers of Genaro Vasquez.
I know the government has been trying to close these Normal Schools everywhere in Mexico for a long time.
The Normal Schools were founded in the mid-1930s as part of the socializing economics of Lazaro Cardenus in the shadow of Franklin Roosevelt who applied strong state dirigist economics to the United States upon taking office in 1933.
Police repression is certainly nothing new in Guerrero, we are the state most famous for repression, yet also Iguala is famously known as The Cradle of Mexico’s Liberty.
In the Zocalo in Iguala is an historic monument to the heroic role played by Iguala in giving birth to the Mexican nation.
This unique identity of Iguala is certainly never mentioned in the news reports of the international mass media.
here is a most recent account a press conference by journalist jhon gibler who interviewed all of the students involved; it seems to me a very credible account of what happened, the night the students were attacked and disappeared
https://soundcloud.com/ejekatl1942/testimonio-del-periodista-jhon-gibler
i will admit that this all makes sense in the context of the political mission of the ayotzinapa normal fight for its very existence comandeering a bus and going into
Iguala to drop off the passengers.
According to this account, this was the only reason they were in Iguala at all and they had to call for help for the others to come help them and that the students didnt even know who was the mayor of Iguala or his wife or whether they were in bed with narco gangs or not, these were young people, many of them were on their first political action as it is a school tradition. They go together as comerads put a rope across the highway and collect money from people to support their efforts to resist and protest agains endemic repression both economic and political.
These kinds of radicals are instinctively supported by the backcountry poor people, however persons considering themselves to be on the rungs of the proletariat club tend to resent and despise them especially because mass-media propaganda against the teachers union for rejecting the education reform legislation has been villified incessently and many Mexicans must think that teachers are lazy vicious creatures who want to get paid for not working etc.
in the press conference you will hear about a white car with three hooded men who showed up at one point and fired from the hip with machine guns
https://soundcloud.com/ejekatl1942/testimonio-del-periodista-jhon-gibler
I have been thinking since last night about what I learned from that press conference with reporter who interviewed everybody from the school who is still alive, who was involved in the fatal event and carefully reconstructed what happened last night!
I have got to admit that the disappearance of students appears to have not been the work of spooks as I had suspected. Yes the spooky mass-media machine stepped right in and compared it to the demonstations in hong kong; where it got really smelly is looking for the students among graves of dead men pretending that they could be buried over there…
This story I think now is organic in character, the mass-media wars aside.
…anyway, long live always truth over theory!
let’s get back to the story…
The Ayotzinapa Normal student had their first vacation of the school year where they could go to their home town and they were ready to leave with their bags when one of their leaders told them they were going on an action and many of them were very disappointed until the comeradship claimed their loyalty and that for many youth it was their first action, and a school tradition.
They were going to comandeer a Bus in Chilpancingo terminal, but they had already taken one the week before and there thought a police detail was waiting for them. This was cited as evidence that they were NOT looking for a fight that night!
– to be contined
So, the students set up a barrier at a toll booth on the Highway of the Sun the main route from Mexico City to Acapulco and they are collecting money in bottles
(“botellando” it is evidently called, i was not familiar with this term)
They still need a vehicle and they comandeer one at the checkpoint they say the driver is cool with it, only asking to drop of the passengers.
And so a group of about ten student militants split off and went with the bus to Iguala to drop off passengers.
The students testimony suggests that the farthest thing from their mind was that Iguala is ruled at night by a criminal gang
Anyway, the ones on the bus in Iguala were confronted with police that shot in the ground and shot in the air and then shot this one kid in the face.
The testimony claims they were not afraid that they got down and were standing there when they were attacked; meanwhile the main group at the toll booth was, rushing in to help them.
According to this evidence, the summary of the testimonay of the students involved, this is how the event started about 9.30 at night.
The bus with ten students was stopped by Iguala police at a roadblock and shouting and shooting began at that time. During the night, several more attacks took place; at 1.30 am, near the north loop road, the student militants were attacked by three hooded figures who came and went in a white car; these killers sprayed the group of students firing indiscriminently from the hip.
All of the strikes me as realistic.
Everybody knows that the night belongs to the malilla. Well anyway, around here, the people know the night is not a safe place to be going around in. However these militant student were young and they were from the countryside, most of them, and they didrnt know about Iguala at all, most of them are from the Hot Country and the Sierra regions of Guerrero; the city of Iguala was up north, just beyond their traditional reaches, because the Ayotzinapa students found their traditional support from indignant poor people who been rudely exploited.
They were young and brave and foolish to go into Iguala like that at night.
They were just going to drop off the passengers of the bus they had comandeered, to go return and join their comrades at the Highway of the Sun toll booth.
So in my present day analysis, based on the evidence I have heard; this is of the character of an organic event, the conflict of two forces, the militant idealism of the ayotzinapa normal students and the violent and vile nature of the so-called drug gangs. I guess now I am glad the federal government is taking over the local governments. I really thought this was all too pat as mcCain plans mexico spring but those spooks never planned this event even if they try to exploit it to the maximum possible
Considering this testimony, which I credit, this was not a staged event,
imo you might as well take advantage of it by eliminating a lot of these kidnappers and killers who have been operating around here in recent years
The same real issues remain, the continuing most pressing issue is the economic crisis which is devastating and crushing the people of Guerrero.
The governor of the state of Guerrero Angél Aguirre Rivero is being removed as the direct result of this fatal incident involving the disappeared students of the Ayotzinapa Normal.
I would have to read La Jornada and Excelsior to have some idea what is really going on; Mexican politics is far beyond my area of competency.
Aguirre was elected as a candidate of the PRD the leftist-party that almost won the Presidency of Mexico with Cuahtemoc Cardenas and then with Manuel Lopez Obrador. But Aguirre came over to the PRD from the PRI and who knows what this all means? not me
I didnt learn anything new today about the political situation in Guerrero except that I was told that it is the House of Deputies that determines the new governor; I have no idea how that is determined.
From the testimony of the surviving students, I remain convinced that this was an organic encouter between super-radical youth militants from the Rural Normal School “Raul Isidro Burgos” of Ayotzinapa and the police of Iguala and one of these gang that has been wreaking havoc in recent years.
And yes I can certainly attest that Iguala is no exception to the wave of terror in the forms of extortion, kidnapping, murder, massacre and flamboyant torture. Everyone here was familiar with the name of the Guerreros Unidos gang before this deadly event ocurred. Although nobody can tell them apart, this gang is a rival of the Red Gang; I had an idea that the Guerreros Unidos were a police gang so that accords with the complicity of the Iguala police in the disappearance of the students in what is certainly a ghastly crime, still I hear people say they deserve it because they were supposedly out looking for a fight, but these young men were stealing gasoline and borrowing autobuses in the name of the principles enunciated by Lucio Cabañas in the nineteen-seventies and still carried on by his rural peasant party today.
At first, I thought this must be one of those fancy false flag events, because it seemed so suspicious, but given what i learned from what the survivors said, i am tentatively concluding that this terrible event was not any CIA operation, it was more of a Guerrero cock-fight.
The Ayotzinapa Normal was established in 1935 in the time of the Presidency of Lazaro Cardenas which fulfilled many aspirations of the populist militants of Mexico’s South, partial victors in the Mexican Revolution of 1910-1920.
This school was part of the social infrastructure guerrilla uprisings of Genaro Vasquez and Lucio Cabañas in Guerrero in the early 1970s. At that time, Marxism reigned in the Universities. The confluence of peasant political ideology and intellectual marxism and structures influenced Mexico and continues to determine the main veins of thinking of a certain portion of the population, lets say it is about 25% hard-core. However in the poor parts of Guerrero, the thinking is more like 85%, to give some idea.
Since NAFTA, the political structures of the country have steadily swing aroung to the neoliberal prescriptions and that caused a steady downslide in productivity, aggravated by an egregious labor exportation program, infamously disguised as an invasion of “illegal immigrants”.
In our times, the Normal of Ayotzinapa is so out-of-favor, the federal government has been trying very hard, so-far unsuccessfully, for a long time, to close the provision by which such schools are chartered.
Famously, the teachers assigned to Ayotzinala school by the government are bitter political enemies of the students there, and so they do their homework under totally onerous pressures, a real anti-education.
Many of the kids who weredisappeared were freshmen and it was their first political action of their first year.
The school is near Chilapa in another region south of Iguala and these students were mostly from the Hot Country and the Sierra and Costa Chica
based on the composite testimony of the survivers :
A group of about ten students had gone into Iguala to drop off passengers from a bus they comandeered on the Highway of the Sun checkpoint where they were out “botellando”.
They did NOT know that the alcalde and his wife were holding a lavish political event with the commander of the local military batallion sitting beside them; this so-described lavish political event was disguised as a DIF informe; this banquet has figured in later news reports.
I was probably the last party for those two unfortunate political figure;
…when those kids got into a wrangle with the town cops who were not used to being talked back to.
Its almost as uncomplicated as that. becasue these Ayotzinapa students were real fiery rebels who were certainly not afraid to speak out!
In their own home country, the students are respected for stealing gasoline to move themselves to their interventions. Not in Iguala which is in another world where the criminals and the police had merged as a function of the narco-wars phenomena that has gripped Guerrero.
Still the question:
is this a “State Crime” or is it perhaps still an “anti-State Crime”?¿
if this was no falso-flago
and, in reality, a Guerrero cock-fight between two groups, each far beyond the pale of ordinary legality…
– then, what is the lesson to be learned?
the political bosses of Iguala, a young couple, will surely now be severely punished.
And Angél Aguirre is being destituted as Governor of Guerrero that has to hurt.
(Of course, Aguirre who is originally from the PRI was elected on the PRD ticket so the PRI is looking to take advantage, or so I’ve heard, but will never have a way of ascertaining because mexico policks is a labyrynth and political journalists write 10,000 word articles with ease and for me it is usually, if not always, passingly hard to tell what they are referring to – i think that one has to be involved for it to make any sense; to such a player, journalistic analysis i imagine can be compelling, but i would myself much rather play chess or read a novel)
Iguala has been epicenter of the so-called narco-wars that have been going on here the past few years.
Now the federal government has stepped in to investigate the public security situation , drug-testing the police and closely questioning them;
The violent criminals perpetrating the actual murders are mercenary soldiers protecting entrenched corporate, commercial, financial and mineral extraction interests who pay them off, if they don’t set them up.
On the other hand, the leftist Teachers Union Strike in Guerrero is now seven years old without a solution – there has been a stolid consistent rejection of the privatization education reform.
Whereas the Taxco Zacatecas Cananea Silver Miner’s Union Strike is also more than seven years now without resolution; these conflicts are in the background of the situation in the backcountry of Guerrero with its multiple revolutionary traditions.
¿ So, what happened to the students of the Ayotzinapa Normal, that fatal night in Iguala, Guerrero, México?
The disappearance of persons in Iguala and points south is hardly unprecedented, one hears of people being disappeared and this is in spite of the fact that since these troubles began, the people do not like to talk at all of anything touching on the subject of the criminal gangs.
Last Mexican Flag Day February 28th a group of schoolboys from Taxco were abducted at the State Fair in Iguala.
I do not know the details however it was a group of boys; after several weeks, ransoms were paid and i think some of them were released …however according to what I heard, at least one of the victims was found murdered even though his ransom had been paid.
These disappeared schoolboys were from the nearby city of Taxco and were all from local families. In all the extensive coverage of the abduction and disappearance of the Iguala students, I havent heard mention of the abduction of disappearance of the Taxco schoolboys earlier this year.
The point I am making: 1. the superficiality of the mass-media portrayal of what happened in Iguala and 2. the venality and sheer evil of these “sicarios” as they are referred to is extra-ordinary degraded and cruel and the kidnapping of people for money or for another reason is something that has been going on in the black of night since it seems to me about 2008 or 2009.
Before this narco-war crime wave began its apparent descent into hell, nobody around here ever cut anybody’s head off!
yet Guerrero was already notorious as a violent state; and the men of Guerrero (the women too!) have a deserved national-scale reputation for murder. However the traditional motives for murder in Guerrero were land, a woman, an insult, and/or a misunderstanding between two compadres when they have been drinking all night.
the pattern of violence of the sicarios is obviously entirely outside the pattern of violence of a backwoods confrontational type people
Indeed, once the massacres got going, I noticed that people completely stopped killing each other for personal reasons; machete fights are now a thing of the past;
people associate violence with the sicarios and in your ordinary village or provincial society, nobody wants to put on that hat and extreme violence has become passé.
Thus, ironically, the so-called narco-wars, have performed a “civilizing” function for the country peopl ein this region.
The new Governor of Guerrero is from Taxco! So far, nobody knows who is his family, nobody has heard of him.
He was the head of the Autonomous University of Guerrero and supposed to be friendly with the Ayotzinapa Normal and understanding of the peculiar local traditional ethos of disaffected militant political youth.
His biography says he has no party affiliation. It says he has written numbers of books and articles. I havent checked these out.
I just want to know if the guy is an evangelical, or if he is a chicago school friedmanite or if he is a United nations-type burocrat or is he an avowed neo-liberal, or, perchance, he is a protogé of some old-school Spanish fascist order left over from Franco…
If he is evidently none of the aforementioned, this appointment bodes well under the circumstances.
Under Mexico’s Constitution, after the President, the Governor is the maximum authority, therefore this change is of great importance and will certainly be consequential – let’s see what now happens as Mexico’s modern history unfolds.