I do not fear the State's repression, I fear the silence of my people
Ayotzinapa, eight years later.
I do not fear the State's repression, I fear the silence of my people
The forced disappearance of 43 students from the Ayotzinapa rural school on September 26, 2014 was enacted by the State. This was confirmed by Alejandro Encinas, head of the Commission for Truth and Access to Justice.
The state and federal police who massacred the students of the Ayotzinapa Normal School on the night of September 26, 2014, in collusion with a system of informal economic entities, relied on rifles from the German company Heckler & Koch – a manufacturer of handguns, assault rifles, machine guns and grenade launchers, smuggled into Mexico. "According to official German permits, these should never have arrived in Guerrero," reported AvispaMidia.
The Ayotzinapa massacre exhibits the profound ongoing crisis plaguing the territory known as Mexico. Brutality is exerted against rural, indigenous and working-class communities seen as surplus populations within the sanguinary circuit of capitalist accumulation on a daily basis.
There have been numerous obstacles to access the files of the various entities involved in the mass disappearance, despite the decree that Andrés Manuel López Obrador signed on December 3, 2018, pledging to make the investigation available to the public.
As Desinformémonos reports, State organisms and agencies hid information, and provided false data. State authorities present on September 26, 2014 were aware of the presence of the informal economic enterprise "Guerreros Unidos"1, and the sowing, cultivation and manufacture2 of heroin production as well as trafficking routes transported in buses. This line of investigation is still pending development.
Demands
The demands of the mothers and fathers of the Ayotzinapa students:
To know the fate of the students.
To continue with the pending lines of investigation: military involvement; drug markets inside one of the buses taken by the students as a possible motive for the attack; activation of the cell phones of several students days after the disappearance.
Access to the military installations and archives, not only for the disappearance of the 43, but also for the Mexican Dirty War3 missing persons of the 60s and 70s.
Investigate in depth the responsibility of former president Enrique Peña Nieto and all military commanders and those involved in the three levels of government.
Execute the warrants.
That the extradition from Israel of Tomás Zerón de Lucio be executed so that he can be tried in Mexico.
The cessation of harassment, persecution and discrediting of the struggle of the families and students of Ayotzinapa.
Ayotzinapa, A Time Tunnel
Text by Luis Hernández Navarro for La Jornada
We seem to have taken a trip, through a time tunnel, back to Enrique Peña Nieto's presidency. The Mexican military Twitter account, EjércitoMX.Noticias, published: Here I leave you the interview with General José Rodríguez Pérez.
Jorge Fernandez, the military interviewer, is one of the most unconditional propagandists of the historical truth. The PRI and PAN regimes used his pen to justify the most atrocious acts, and to filter their versions of the worst barbarities, including Ayotzinapa. Their documentarization The Night of Iguala is propagandistic fiction, not only to conceal what happened eight years ago in Guerrero, but to criminalize the rural normalista students forcefully disappeared. This filmic pamphlet transpires the unmistakable stench of the pipes of power. It is a direct heir of “El Móndrigo!", cooked up in the basements of the intelligence services to discredit the 1968 student movement.
(Note from the translator: The Móndrigo!, a propaganda booklet of unknown author published by the Secretaría de Gobernación of the Mexican government after the 1968 movement in Mexico aimed to justify to the public, ideologically, the state terrorism towards the politically active population massacred after October 2, 1968.)
In front of the camera, in the facilities of Military Camp No. 1, as if he were not in prison, he appears, talking to journalist Jorge Fernández Menéndez for a radio program.
On September 26 and 27, 2014, the now retired general Rodríguez Pérez had the rank of colonel and headed the 27th Infantry Battalion of Iguala, which was known for a long history of counterinsurgency measures. According to the sub-secretary of the Interior, he would have given, in addition to other orders, instructions to kill and disappear six students from Ayotzinapa who were still alive in a warehouse, four days after the attack against the students.
This general was not detained. He ‘voluntarily’ turned himself in (or presented himself, in his words) on September 21. The charges against him are for ‘organized crime’, not homicide or forced disappearance. In one of the tweets to disseminate the interview, the account @SEDENAnoticias warns:
Do not be fooled, the military did not intervene in the disappearance of the normalistas, as Alejandro Encinas would have us believe (accents in the original are respected).
"The institution is supporting me," explains the commander. It is true. The National Defense Department in Mexico went all out to protect the former commander. Not only did it allow a journalist to enter Military Camp 14 to interview him in order to induce his answers, but it also broadcasted excerpts from the program. In addition, together with the Military Public Defender's Office, it incorporated in its defense, pro bono, the heavyweight lawyers Alejandro Robledo and Cesar Gonzalez Hernandez, recently coming out of resounding legal disputes with the prosecutor Alejandro Gertz Manero.
On August 18, the deputy secretary announced arrest warrants for 20 military personnel related to the night of Iguala. However, so far, only 3 have been apprehended, in addition to General Rodriguez. Second Lieutenant Fabián Alejandro Pirita Ochoa and Private First Lieutenant Eduardo Mota Esquivel. The other, Captain Jose Martinez Crespo, was already in custody and was served with a second arrest warrant.
The defense of General Rodriguez and the rest of the soldiers accused of participating in the forced disappearance of the 43 students of Ayotzinapa and in the fabrication of the historical truth is an indicator of their rejection with regard to the facts of the night of Iguala. Their refusal to share the information about what happened at their disposal, and their refusal to respond to requests for evidence to shed light on the massacre manifests the lack of attempts at veracity in the future of the investigation.
This, despite how the report of the commission for truth and access to justice points out how the military of the 27th Infantry Battalion of Iguala not only did nothing to prevent and falsified what happened, but also murdered and disappeared part of the 43 youths.
It was the Attorney General's Office and not the Special Prosecutor's Office for the Ayotzinapa Case that issued the accusations against Murillo Karam. In addition, inexplicably, it reversed its decision to cancel 21 arrest warrants, 16 for ‘organized crime’ and forced disappearance, which had already been issued against military commanders, members of the 27th and 41st Infantry Battalions.
In what seems to be another throwback period, Vidulfo Rosales, lawyer for the Ayotzinapa relatives, is subjected to an appalling campaign of attacks very similar to the one he experienced during Peña Nieto's time. All, for defending the victims and seeking to explain the behavior of the outraged rural normalistas before passing judgment on them5.
He stated that the Mexican military is hermetic, closed, unwilling to contribute to the clarification of this case. They are reluctant to go to court. They are not willing to have the judicial apparatus and the control mechanisms of the law applied toward themselves. They refuse to go to the judges, so that they can give their version of what transpired. There is no such thing. The trip to the Time Tunnel might be more than just a metaphor.
Twitter: @lhan55
We remember,
Abel García Hernández
Abelardo Vázquez Periten
Adán Abrajan de la Cruz
Alexander Mora Venancio
Antonio Santana Maestro
Benjamín Ascencio Bautista
Bernardo Flores Alcaraz
Carlos Iván Ramírez Villarreal
Carlos Lorenzo Hernández Muñoz
César Manuel González Hernández
Christian Alfonso Rodríguez Telumbre
Christian Tomas Colon Garnica
Cutberto Ortiz Ramos
Dorian González Parral
Emiliano Alen Gaspar de la Cruz
Everardo Rodríguez Bello
Felipe Arnulfo Rosas
Giovanni Galindes Guerrero
Israel Caballero Sánchez
Israel Jacinto Lugardo
Jesús Jovany Rodríguez Tlatempa
Jonas Trujillo González
Jorge Álvarez Nava
Jorge Aníbal Cruz Mendoza
Jorge Antonio Tizapa Legideño
Jorge Luis González Parral
José Ángel Campos Cantor
José Ángel Navarrete González
José Eduardo Bartolo Tlatempa
José Luis Luna Torres
Joshvani Guerrero de la Cruz
Julio César López Patolzin
Leonel Castro Abarca
Luis Ángel Abarca Carrillo
Luis Ángel Francisco Arzola
Magdaleno Rubén Lauro Villegas
Marcial Pablo Baranda
Marco Antonio Gómez Molina
Martín Getsemany Sánchez García
Mauricio Ortega Valerio
Miguel Ángel Hernández Martínez
Miguel Ángel Mendoza Zacarías
Saúl Bruno García
And
Julio César Mondragón Fontes
Daniel Solís Gallardo
Julio César Ramírez Nava
“The more freedom is extended to business,
the more prisons have to be built
for those who suffer that business.”– Eduardo Galeano,
The Open Veins of Latin America
Translated in solidarity. In the face of the capitalist hydra, a common cornfield | ahuehuete.org
Markets are markets.
As of 2012, drug cartels in Mexico made a $25–30bn yearly profit, a great deal of which circulates through international banks such as HSBC.
Morris, Stephen D. (2012-09-07). "Drugs, Violence, and Life in Mexico" (PDF). Latin American Research Review. 47 (2): 216–223.
The Mexican Dirty War (Spanish: Guerra sucia) was an internal political conflict in the 1960s and 1980s between the one-party PRI-rule under the ‘presidencies’ of Gustavo Díaz Ordaz, Luis Echeverría and José López Portillo, backed by the US government, against the politically active population.
Campo Militar 1 (English: Military Camp 1) is a military installation in Mexico City. For the 1968 Summer Olympics, it hosted the riding and running portions of the pentathlon competition.
To the non-rural, Mestizæ-identifying population.