Parents of 43 Mexican students who disappeared previous year began a 43-hour hunger strike, a day before meeting with President Enrique Pena Nieto ahead of the case’s anniversary. While the march was smaller than past demonstrations, the case has served to publicize the thousands who have gone missing since Mexico’s drug war started in 2006.
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In 2013, Mexico’s National Human Rights Commission said it had received 1,505 complaints of torture and other forms of ill-treatment, 600% more than in 2003.
They were particularly incensed by the government’s conclusion, released last November, that the students were massacred in a garbage dump and their bodies burned to little more than ashes on a pyre at the same site.
The parents of the 43 missing students suddenly met with President Peña Nieto and were usually agitated as he wasn t interested all their personal request for just society. “We won’t rest until we force the government to tell the truth”, he said. “I’m diabetic. I’ll do all I can”, said Genovena Sanchez, whose son 21-year-old Israel Caballero is among the missing.
Murillo Karam stepped down a month after he made that statement due, in large part, to public outcry for his mishandling of the investigation into the students’ disappearances. Gonzalez said, surrounded by other parents in Mexico City’s central plaza.
When pressure mounts, authorities round up a number of suspects who quickly take responsibility – and later report having been tortured to confess to the crimes.
The President and administration were once hailed as the country’s hope but now they are desperately trying to hold on to any shred of credibility.
Only one student was “positively identified among charred remains while the attorney general said last week that there was a possible match for a second one”, Yahoo!
The government has claimed to have detained more than 110 people for ties to the disappearances. “In particular, they should look into the military and law enforcement agencies’ role in the tragedy after they failed to take action despite being aware of the abuses against the students as they were taking place”.
Parents and classmates of the students have prayed at a homemade shrine to St. James, traveled to the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe and celebrated Mass at the Ayotzinapa normal school with Archbishop Christophe Pierre, apostolic nuncio to Mexico.
Finally, the report details a pattern of deliberate and systematic destruction and hiding of evidence by the state at different levels, including the investigation carried out by the State Attorney’s Office.
The parents haven’t stopped looking for their children, and haven’t stopped protesting across Mexico.
Credit: YURI CORTEZ/AFP/Getty Images The government’s investigation of the students’ disappearance has drawn widespread criticism.
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Noting that Mexican authorities have prohibited independent experts from interviewing soldiers of the 27th infantry battalion, based in the town where the students were arrested, Guevara-Rosas said that action “raises alarming questions”.
