Chilpancingo, Mexico, Sep 18 (EFE).- Soldiers in the city of Iguala, in the southern Mexican state of Guerrero, on Monday used tear gas to stop the parents and peers of the 43 missing students of Ayotzinapa from demonstrating outside the military barracks.
Students demonstrate today in front of a military barracks to demand justice for the 43 missing students from Ayotzinapa, in Iguala, state of Guerrero, Mexico 18 September 2023. EFE/Jose Luis de la Cruz
As part of their scheduled activities this week, ahead of the ninth anniversary of the disappearance from the city of the 43 students on Sep. 26, 2014, the parents and members of the Federation of Socialist Peasant Students of Mexico (FECSM) tried hold a rally outside the military headquarters.
More than 20 buses of people arrived at the facilities of the Mexican military, deemed complicit in the disappearance of the students, according to the Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts.
At the front of the student protest were the parents with large photos of the faces of their missing children, and when Tlachinollan Mountain Human Rights Center lawyer Isidoro Vicario Aguilar spoke, the first tear gas bomb was launched.
The protest was dispersed as the military threw more tear gas bombs. In response, the protesters threw homemade projectiles and set fire to a cargo vehicle belonging to the Coppel chain of stores.
The scuffle stopped traffic on nearby roads and caused people from businesses and passers-by to take shelter from the smoke.
A vehicle incinerated during a student demonstration today, in front of a military barracks to demand justice for the 43 missing students from Ayotzinapa, in Iguala, state of Guerrero, Mexico 18 September 2023. EFE/Jose Luis de la Cruz
Last Thursday in Chilpancingo, students were also deterred with tear gas in their protest in front of a military barracks, and the smoke affected children from a primary school and a kindergarten.
As part of their activities to commemorate the date, parents and students will travel to Mexico City in the coming days, where they will sit in front of the Attorney General’s Office and protest to demand that President Andrés Manuel López Obrador resolve the case.
The controversy over Ayotzinapa is growing because there is one year left for López Obrador to fulfill his promise to reveal what happened to the students after his government concluded last year that it was a “state crime” in which authorities at all levels participated, including the military.
The government of López Obrador has denied the controversial version of the government of Enrique Peña Nieto (2012-2018), the so-called “historical truth,” which held that corrupt police officers detained the students and handed them over to the Guerreros Unidos cartel, which murdered and incinerated them in the Cocula landfill. EFE
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