Small homemade bombs fly against the Senate of the Republic. The boys—shaven, dressed in black, with their faces covered by scarves that imitate balaclavas—seize them on the sidewalk, lean their bodies back, arm their arms, and throw them forcefully against the Upper House. Very young faces, very challenging looks, very frowning brows. The explosives, elongated white plastic tubes the size of a forearm, draw an arc in the air, release smoke and disappear inside the Senate. Seconds later the boomReforma trembles, splinters fly, everything rumbles like thunder that had fallen between the buildings of the great avenue of Mexico City. There are no police, just many press cameras that closely record the scene. Less than five minutes later, the arsonists have already boarded a bus and disappeared up the street.
The kids are normalistas: students from rural normal schools, schools that train the children of peasants who want to be teachers. The 43 young people kidnapped by the police and the Guerreros Unidos criminal group one night a decade ago in Iguala, Guerrero, during the six-year term of PRI Enrique Peña Nieto (2012-2018) belonged to one of them, the Ayotzinapa school. In 10 years the bones of only three of them have been found. Some time later, the Government recognized what the normalistas shouted from the beginning: that it was a state crime. It wasn’t enough. The investigation is stalled due to the refusal of the Army to collaborate, towards which all eyes are pointed, supported by the president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador. There is no longer much hope of finding the boys, convicting the guilty, or knowing what happened.
That is the cause of the rage that leads the boys to throw explosives at the Senate of the Republic. Since September 26, 2014, the companions of the missing and their families have marched through the capital on the 26th of each month. It is not the first time they have set off firecrackers, they even knocked down the door of the National Palace with the president inside. Nothing has worked, but they don’t give in, even though the police shot and killed another of them, Yanqui Kothan, this year. And this week, on the anniversary of a decade, they have turned up the volume with daily protests in the streets of the capital prior to the big march this Thursday, from Ángel to the Zócalo.
Omar, a teenager with a small body, finds Spanish difficult. His family works the fields in Malinaltepec, a town in the mountains of Guerrero where Tlapanec is spoken more than Spanish. The handkerchief he covers his mouth with doesn’t help either. He doesn’t remember the day they kidnapped him at 43. He was nine years old. In 2022, he began studying at the Ayotzinapa school. It was that or harvest. “I come from a place where there is no money, well. “My parents don’t have money to study at another school,” he explains briefly. “We come for our missing companions, all 43 of us, since 2014, the early morning of September 26 to 27,” he says in a huddle, the lesson learned.
It’s Monday and in front of the Ministry of the Interior the buses begin to arrive. First two, who bring the fathers and mothers of the 43. Then, more than 20, loaded with hundreds of normal students from all over Mexico, who this week are sleeping at the Ayotzinapa school, 300 kilometers from the capital. Every day they leave there early, travel to the city, protest and return to school, in the municipality of Tixtla, to sleep. Family members and representatives of each school speak. When the rally is over, most of the boys return to the vehicles. A few, the older ones, wait. They throw explosives and jump onto buses. They have managed to sneak into all the news of the day.
“We do not understand this dialogue”
On Tuesday the place changes, the Senate, but the modus operandi. The parents arrive and then the students. They collapse a Reforma lane that traffic officers, the only police officers who will be seen, have to cut. Most of the normalistas wear black and sports shoes, although some wear huaraches that reveal where they come from. They cover their faces with scarves (some with t-shirts or rags). Lots of shaved heads. The attempt to appear military discipline by a handful of teenagers who want to be teachers.
The boys line up behind banners of each normal. In silence, no one opens their mouth, they barely move: very straight, stretched out, with their arms close to their bodies and their gaze straight ahead. One flag says, in reference to the broken conversations with López Obrador: “We do not understand this dialogue.” It is yellow, has a blood stain painted on it and inside is a machine gun. Next to him, on the floor, are five cardboard boxes. Each one contains six spray paints that they will later use to write slogans on the Senate fence. They prepare a speaker, plug in the cables. A microphone clicks and a timid voice begins to say:
—Because they took them alive…
Hundreds of boys lean their backs slightly backwards, fill their lungs, shout in chorus with a slow, thunderous cadence:
—We want them alive!
Xaté Guadalupe is 19 years old, from Angahuan, Michoacán, and studies at the Normal Superior School of that State. Her parents, primary school teachers, were normalistas before her. Like Omar and all the young people who have come, she was a girl in 2014. She never met the 43. “They were colleagues who are not from my generation, but for all of us it is important because just as it happened to them it could have happened to us. any of us. If we took these protests as a ‘don’t forget us’, it would be like accepting it, and this type of mobilization is done because we do not accept what they tell us, because they know that they are not giving us the answers we demand. We are still waiting for that progress. “It’s heartbreaking.”
Guadalupe wants to finish studying and return to her town to be a teacher, like her parents. “I see my future in front of a classroom and with my family,” he says. For her, normal “means a portal to future generations, where you are in front of the group and you are responsible for the education that comes behind you.” He knows that many people criticize the normalistas for their ways of protesting, the blockades, the explosives. “You can’t understand it until you’re inside. I know it is very annoying, but regardless of that, if you find out about the situations we fight for, you see that it is not because of pleasure and desire, but because we have reasons that support us.”
“It was the Army”
On Wednesday no one throws explosives. The meeting place is once again Reforma, this time next to the “anti-monument”, a statue of number 43 between the Monument to the Revolution and the Alameda. The day is gray, like the previous one. Mexico has woken up with two important news: the Senate, where they were protesting yesterday, has approved an amendment to the Constitution that definitively puts the National Guard under the control of the Ministry of Defense, the Army, despite criticism of the militarization of the public life; the presidential commission of Ayotzinapa case has published its third and last report before López Obrador leaves office on October 1, which supports the president’s arguments, rejected by family members. There are few references to it, however. Fathers and mothers wait for this Thursday’s speech from the Zócalo. Even so, the normalistas paper the walls with posters: “It was the Army.”
The confrontation between the normalistas, the Government and the Army is not new. The schools were stigmatized and severely beaten during the PRI’s dirty war at the end of the last century for their proximity to the guerrilla and their leftist ideas. Marisol, 19 years old, comes from the Saucillo normal school, in Chihuahua. His parents are farmers in Delicias, a town in the same State. His red Zapatista bandana covers his face up to his eyes. “More than anything it is to raise awareness, something very serious is happening in Mexico. There are students who still do not have resources to study. The rural normals give the opportunity to people who live in remote places to have a better education and be able to support their families.”
This Thursday, without rest, they will go out again. And the following month. And to the other. Who knows until when. Ángel, who studies at the Hecelchakán rural normal school in Campeche, sums it up: “We are here so that something like this does not happen again, so that the day the Government disappears again, people know that we are not going to be silent, we are not going to being on our knees, we are going to demand what belongs to us: justice, truth and, above all, freedom. Many people will think: ‘And why do they continue to demand that, since it’s been a long time?’ 10, 20 years pass, this event for rural normalism and for any type of student will not be able to be forgotten. “We are not going to leave anything unpunished.”
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