A group of normalistas from Ayotzinapa, the students who were companions of the 43 young people who disappeared almost 10 years ago in the city of Iguala, Guerrero, demolished one of the doors of the National Palace, in Mexico City, the residence this Wednesday. of the president and the symbolic center of the Executive power. The protesters, who thus intend to pressure the Government so that Andrés Manuel López Obrador meets with them and try to unblock the investigation into the kidnapping of the 43 students, have used a van from the Federal Electricity Commission (CFE) that was parked in the street as a battering ram to break down the gate.
The students – shouting “they took them alive, we want them alive” – have broken the windows of the vehicle, removed the handbrake and pushed the car again and again until the wooden door gave way. Inside the National Palace was López Obrador who, like every day, appeared before the press on his popular Mañanera. At the time the young people tried to break into the building, the president was still live. The military police guarding the place fired tear gas to disperse the protesters. Smoke has filled the flank of the Palace while the guards set up a human barricade, protected by shields and batons.
The president has stated that the protesters will be attended to by the Undersecretary of the Interior, Arturo Medina. Asked by a reporter present on La Mañanera, López Obrador indicated that he is not going to meet personally with the normalistas: “No, I am analyzing and conducting everything because what matters to me is finding the students.” [43] young people and the attitude, not of the parents, but of the advisors and the organizations that supposedly defend human rights, is a political attitude at best, very confrontational against us, provocative, and we do not We don't want confrontation at all. Just tell the parents that we are dedicated and that we are making great progress in the research.”
A few hours later, the Ministry of the Interior has published a statement in which he assures that Medina has contacted the victims' relatives who, once again, have responded that “within their agreements was to meet only with President Andrés Manuel López Obrador.” “On this aspect, the president of Mexico reported this Wednesday in his morning conference that said meeting would take place in a few weeks,” the text says, without specifying when. The Government has reiterated “its commitment to truth and justice in the Ayotzinapa case.”
broken relationships
The relationship between the relatives of the 43 students who disappeared on September 26, 2014 and López Obrador is going through one of its worst moments. The president, who assured as an electoral promise that during his Administration he would find the young people, harshly attacked while he was in the opposition against the Government of Enrique Peña Nieto (2012-2018) for the irregularities in the investigation. However, with only three months remaining in his six-year term, López Obrador has not made substantial progress in the case. On the contrary, he has fallen out with the fathers and mothers of Ayotzinapa who, after the failure of the dialogue, have redoubled their presence in the streets to pressure the Executive.
The victims' relatives demand that the Government hand them over hundreds of military espionage documents that, according to them, are key to advancing the stalled investigation. The Secretariat of National Defense (Sedena) denies the existence of said files. The independent group of experts (GIEI) that has investigated the case affirms that they are in the possession of the military. The GIEI ended up leaving Mexico in July, frustrated by the Army's resistance to providing information. The president has assumed the Sedena's story and defends that they have already delivered all the files on the case.
López Obrador, who has characterized his mandate by harsh media opposition to voices critical of his administration, has not left free from his rhetorical attacks not even the fathers and mothers of the kidnapped students or the associations in defense of human rights that they support them. This Wednesday, the president lamented that the relatives are being “manipulated” by a conservative plot, a mix of business and political powers whose only objective, always according to López Obrador, is to take advantage of any opportunity to attack his government. “What happens is that they are being manipulated by the group that heads [el senador independiente Emilio] Álvarez Ycaza, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights [CIDH] of the OAS [Organización de los Estados Americanos]”right-wing conservative groups supported by foreign governments that want to harm us politically,” the president charged.
“What they want is not for us to come to know the truth and for justice to be done, but rather they already have it as a flag against us. The parents don't even have all the information because the lawyers prohibit them from talking to us. You know that I sent a report to each of the fathers and mothers and they did not want to receive them because the lawyers forbade it. What we want is to know the truth and we are going to achieve it, I have confidence in that, and we are going to find the young people, which is the most important thing, but this is something else, this has other purposes,” López Obrador said.
The associations to which the president refers, such as the Prodh Center, are widely recognized nationally and internationally for their work in the defense of human rights. Two of the Prodh lawyers, Santiago Aguirre and María Luis Aguilar, with an impeccable track record in their field and advisors to the families of Ayotzinapa, were spied on with the program Pegasus by the Army, as demonstrated by an investigation by Citizen Lab, the Network in Defense of Digital Rights, Social ICT and Article 19 last April. “Fathers and mothers are not 'manipulated' by either the Prodh Center or the IACHR. They have agency over their process. We regret that the protest of some young people has escalated to actions that we do not share. We urge the reestablishment of respectful dialogue, supervised by international human rights bodies,” the Prodh Center responded on social networks.
Given the breakdown of dialogue between the Government and the families of the victims, the normalistas have intensified their pulse in the streets with continuous protests for days. On February 28, a group of hooded students threw firecrackers at the doors of the Mexico City Senate, after waiting two hours without being attended to by Senator Ricardo Monreal, of Morena, the president's party. A few hours later, they did the same to break the windows of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
On March 2, they protested during the start of the campaign of Claudia Sheinbaum, López Obrador's successor in Morena, in the capital's Zócalo. On Tuesday, parents blocked the intersection of Paseo de la Reforma and Bucareli Avenue, in front of the National Lottery headquarters. On Monday, dozens of students demonstrated in front of the Federal Center of Arraigos, where they also broke down the door with a truck and threw firecrackers. Their objective in all the protests: that López Obrador sits down with them to, 10 years later, untangle the loose ends that could lead to knowing the whereabouts of the 43 missing people.
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