Was it the State?
Two months ago today in Mexico, on September 26, María de los Ángeles Pineda, wife of the former mayor of Iguala, José Luis Abarca, prepared to give a speech in which she was to report on her work as president of the local public institution dedicated to social assistance (DIF). At the same time, a group of students from the Normal School Ayotzinapa—an institution well known for its tradition in political resistance—were on their way to Iguala (apparently, in buses they had hijacked) to protest government education reforms. The mayor, afraid that the students might interfere with his wife’s speech and jeopardize her aspirations to become the next mayoress, gave orders to the police to stop them. In a series of vicious clashes with the police, six people including three students were killed (one had his eyes torn out and his face flayed to a skull), and 43 students disappeared.
According to the reconstruction of the facts provided by the Attorney General of Mexico, the 43 students were loaded on a pickup truck and driven to the nearby Cocula, where they were handed over to a drug gang known as Guerreros Unidos (Warriors United). As reported by three arrested members of this group, the students were then killed and burned (some of them still alive) on a pyre. It appears that both José Luis Abarca and his wife were members of Guerreros Unidos, that the mayor used public funds to transfer between 2 and 3 million pesos a month to the criminal group (roughly between £90,000 and £140,000), and that he had previously assassinated one of his political enemies.
In one of the mass protests that have taken place since the students went missing, a sign was painted in Mexico City’s main square that read: “It was the State.” A photo of the sign circulated widely on the Internet, and the phrase became a viral hashtag in social networks. In response, Mexico’s Attorney General said that “Iguala is not the Mexican State.”
Was it the State?