In an austere room of the Bochil Prosecutor’s Office, frightened children are crowded. They testify in a slow and repetitive process about what happened on October 7, when a hundred minors were intoxicated inside a school. While they appear in this small town in the Altos de Chiapas, the case repeats itself 450 kilometers to the south. In Tapachula, on the border with Guatemala, unconscious female students are hurled out of school. They are the latest cases in a wave of massive poisonings for which the authorities offer no explanation. Since September 23, 116 minors have had to be hospitalized for ingesting toxic substances in schools. The Chiapas Prosecutor’s Office still does not even know what substance affected the students. These cases illustrate the heavy entry of drugs into schools and point to the reorganization of drug trafficking in what was, until a few years ago, one of the safest states in the country.
It’s hot outside before storms, but Lupita is wrapped up in a blanket. She gets suspicious on the sofa in her house: she is 11 years old, with an attentive look and a picture of anxiety. She is her first year in high school and she has only been at the Juana de Asbaje school for a month. Since Friday she no longer goes out on the street. She has been admitted to two different hospitals and has started seeing a psychologist. She says that she keeps remembering her classmates fainting on the school field and that is why she is afraid. She shows a photo of some sweets that she ate on Friday, which cost three pesos, and she says that “perhaps that contained the drug.” Or that it could also be the water that she filled from a common water tank. “They told me that they went there to dump the drugs. Right next to the field. I went to refill my water there and I drank it straight away, ”she says in her girl’s story.
The lack of responses from the Prosecutor’s Office, the municipal presidency and the school’s management has made an already very strange case even more rare. The testimonies compiled by EL PAÍS indicate as a first hypothesis that a group of four or five children would have taken drugs to high school. Parents and students say that there were continuous rumors that drugs were being distributed at school. In May, six girls fainted after eating a brownieswhich had been given to them by seniors, and which contained marijuana.
During that October morning the teachers located the mobile phone of a student. Students are prohibited from entering with cell phones, makeup or even nail polish, so word spread that the administration was going to do a backpack check. That could revolutionize everything. Some minors report that they saw how other students threw drugs —powder in transparent bags— outside the classrooms and that they disposed of pills in the bathroom that they kept in compresses for the period.
It all blows up—and gets more confusing—at recess time. At 5:20 p.m., the teachers met in a meeting and the children left their classes, the playground or the cooperative to buy drinks and food. In that time frame, something was distributed in the water bottles. What the Ministry of Health has called “ingestion of water contaminated with an unknown substance” unleashed chaos.
In Tapachula three other cases were registered, two of them occurred in the same school, Federal Secondary School 1: on September 23 with 21 minors affected, on October 6 with five and on October 11 with 18 students. As probable causes of these cases, those responsible for Health identify “ingestion of food contaminated by unknown substances”, water, and “inhalation of unknown substances”.
In a country of tragedies, this has escaped being one of them. “Luckily no child has died, because otherwise this would be complete chaos,” says Juan Antonio Hernández, father of Alan, one of the minors at the Bochil school. Those affected in these weeks are between 11 and 14 years old, and the majority, 90, are women. Ten children are still hospitalized and one has just come out of a coma. In addition, about twenty had to be re-admitted up to four days after the poisoning. The authorities have not issued any official diagnosis for them, but the families report difficulty breathing, tachycardia, delirium, paralysis of muscles and limbs, vomiting and loss of consciousness.
Given this scenario, the position of the Prosecutor’s Office has been to deny that it is a drug. “It has not been for drug use,” state prosecutor Olaf Gómez said at a press conference on Wednesday, after announcing that all the toxicological tests they had carried out had come out negative for cocaine, amphetamines, methamphetamines, cannabis and opiates. Both in the case of Bochil (61 tests) and in the last one with 18 minors. No tests were done for the first two cases in Tapachula. “We are going to set the line of investigation to follow: we have not ruled out a single one,” said the prosecutor, accompanied by all the state authorities. The Secretary of Education, Rosa Aidé Domínguez, announced as the only measure that the so-called Backpack Operation will be reimplemented, which consists of the inspection of students’ bags before entering schools.
For Pedro Faro, director of the Fray Bartolomé de las Casas Human Rights Center, the return of these measures is an example of how “the State tends to act in a criminalizing manner to appear to be doing something.” “Instead of addressing the causes or paying for the education of knowledge of drugs and their effects, there is a repressive and re-victimizing issue, with risks of psychosocial impacts on young people. A factory of culprits begins to be created, ”explains Faro. For him, this type of case “is evidence of the destruction of the social fabric in Chiapas, we are witnessing that it is impacting young people, children, due to criminal action linked to the State.”
In the prayer of the day, in the main church of Bochil, with 35,000 inhabitants, they pray for intoxicated children and their families, a Security table meets in the municipal presidency and in the streets, theories are fired. “What about the children is a message from the big cartels,” says Francisco, who affirms that for some time the drug has been easily distributed throughout the town, “the motorcycles and trucks go up and down without stopping.” Bochil is framed within a corridor in the Altos de Chiapas that extends from Tapalula or Rayón to San Andrés Duraznal, an area in which the presence of criminal groups has been registered. Faced with a danger that they see as imminent, and permitted by the municipal authorities, a group of parents is proposing the return of the Civil Guard, a security unit made up of untrained civilians, “to protect the people.”
This wave of intoxications is part of a larger framework of violence: just a few months ago an armed group took over the center of San Cristóbal de las Casas, the oasis of the State, for hours; this year complaints for drug dealing have skyrocketed, which are four times more than in 2016; the crisis of displaced people grips the State on its border and in Chentaloh, and the clashes with organized groups have forced the Secretary of Defense this week to send hundreds of soldiers.
In this context, and without a response from the authorities to the latest poisoning, the children have returned to the rest of the Bochil schools this Thursday. The police guard the entrance and exit of the students, who have been forced to wear an identification badge and wear the uniform. The director of Technical Secondary School 38, which has more than 700 students, acknowledges that everything is preventive because they still do not know what they are facing: “Until we know what happened in Juana de Asbaje, we cannot prevent It will happen again in other schools as well.”
subscribe here to newsletter of EL PAÍS Mexico and receive all the informative keys of the news of this country
#children #hospitalized #day #wave #massive #poisonings #terrifies #schools #Chiapas