by Eugene Walker
Mexico—It’s been ten years since the atrocity was committed on the night of Sep. 26, 2014. That’s when a group of students from the Raúl Isidro Burgos Rural Teachers’ College in Ayotzinapa, Mexico, were brutally attacked by police officers associated with organized crime groups. The attack left six people dead, 40 injured and 43 students forcefully disappeared.
Ten years! And yet there is still no sign of those 43 students; no explanation of what happened to them; no full accounting of that horrific event. There are now too many twists and turns of the investigation, lies, cover-ups and obfuscation that have characterized the decade that followed to recount here. The government of President Peña Nieto, during which the disappearance occurred, created a completely false narrative of what happened. During the presidency of López Obrador, some discoveries were made, but when the evidence showed the involvement of the army, Obrador put up a roadblock to any further investigation.
Families of the 43 students at the event in Mexico City marking 10 years of their forced disappearence. Photo: Desinformémonos. Reproduced according to their policiy in their webpage.
Ten years! What is clear is that the mix of narco-traffic criminal gangs, collusion and corruption at all levels of the Mexican government—local, state, federal, including the army—has blocked any resolution to the kidnapping of the students. It remains to be seen whether the new presidency of Claudia Sheinbaum will yield advances.
What cannot be forgotten, and indeed is the only real hope for any resolution, has been and continues to be the living social forces that can transform Mexico root and branch—the resistance. That is, first of all, the parents of the students who, day after day, month after month, year after year, continue searching for their sons, demanding their return, insisting on accountability, demanding justice. They have been joined by generations of students of Raúl Isidro Burgos Rural Teachers’ College and from the other rural Normal schools throughout Mexico. Thousands of families are searching for the over 100,000 human beings disappeared in Mexico. They are joined with other social forces, including dissident teachers from Guerrero, the state where the students were taken, other radical teachers in Mexico and Indigenous peoples from many parts of the country.
In writing of these 10 years of “Memory and Rage,” Zapatista Subcomandante Insurgente Moisés, addressing the mothers, fathers, classmates, companions and comrades of the Missing from Ayotzinapa and those searching for their missing loved ones, expressed the significance of this resistance:
. . . We, the Zapatista people, believe that we have in common with you this feeling that is only found in the hearts of those who fight…
Because the day will come when the figures of those who tirelessly search for their missing, of the fathers and mothers of those missing from Ayotzinapa, of their classmates, of their teachers, of their relatives and friends, will be associated with two words whose real absence this geography now suffers: truth and justice.
And because the day will come when being a student, a man or a woman, from a rural teachers’ college or whatever, an employee, a worker, an adult or an elderly person, will not be a reason for persecution, contempt, disappearance, or death.
But for that day to come, we must persevere. If we cannot yet bequeath that Truth and Justice to those who follow us in calendars and geographies, we can bequeath to them the rage, memory, and dignity necessary to not give up, not sell out, and not give in. . .
If there is no Truth or Justice, let there be no lack of rage and memory.