Parents of Mexico’s 43 Disappeared Students Will Speak in Berkeley Thursday and Friday
Mar 30, 2015
Posted in Berkeley, World News
Special to the Post
A group of parents of 43 disappeared students and surviving students from the teachers’ school “Raúl Isidro Burgos” of Ayotzinapa, Mexico will be in Berkeley this week.
The parents are on a speaking tour in the United States to explain the struggle of the people in Mexico, share and explain their demand and seek solidarity with Latino population and others who believe in justice and human rights.
On Thursday, April 2, 2 p.m., to 4 p.m., there will be a rally at Martin Luther King Jr. Civic Center Park in Berkeley.
On Friday, April 3 from 1 p.m. to 3 p.m. parents and “normalistas” will speak at a forum, “Ayotzinapa: Mexico at the Crossroads,” in the Maude Fife Room, 315 Wheeler Hall on the UC Berkeley campus.
On Sept. 26-27, in Iguala, Mexico six people, among them three students from the “Raúl Isidro Burgos” teachers school, were killed by the police, one of them brutally tortured before being killed, and 43 other students were forcibly disappeared.
This has been a watershed event in Mexican history. There is a radical difference between the before and the after of these events, in spite of the Mexican government insistence on continuing business as usual.
According to many people in Mexico, the killing and disappearance of the normalistas have made evident the moral abyss of the political class governing the country – a corrupted state deeply infiltrated by drug cartels at every level.
Many Mexicans had hoped that the sheer magnitude of the tragedy—Who would kill students in such fashion? Who would disappear them? Who would attack people belonging to a particularly unprotected social class?—would make the government react, force it to turn around and correct its many years of its shameful behavior and corruption.
Unfortunately, the investigation of the case has been plagued by inconsistencies, omissions, and inexplicable gaps, according to observers.
Renowned scientists, journalists and independent investigators, along with the Argentine forensic team whose collaboration the Procuraduría General de Justicia (PGR, the Mexican Department of Justice) was forced to accept, have strongly challenged the PGR’s version of what occurred on Sept. 26.
Many people are saying that this version lacks an explanation of why a group of petty drug dealers would be interested in killing and erasing every trace of the normalistas—especially when we know that drug dealers seem to take special pains to leave visible traces of their activities.
