Friday, February 20, 2015

Mexican Army Base Attacked in Protest over Missing Students

2/20/2015

CHILPANCINGO, Mexico – Some 200 students took part in an attack on the headquarters of a Mexican army unit in the capital of the southern state of Guerrero to protest the disappearance of 43 of their classmates late September.

Nobody was hurt in the assault with Molotov cocktails on the 35th Infantry Battalion in Chilpancingo, which coincided with the 102nd anniversary of the army’s founding.

“We are missing 43,” students from the Ayotzinapa teachers college wrote on the base’s main gate.

The students, some wielding sticks and machetes, kept up the assault for only a few minutes before boarding four buses for the trip back to the college in Tixtla, Guerrero.

Families of the 43 missing Ayotzinapa students are seeking an investigation of the army’s role in the violent events of Sept. 26 in Iguala, Guerrero.

That night, police attacked Ayotzinapa students as they traveled through the town on buses. Six people – including three students – were killed and 43 other students abducted.

Federal authorities say the incident was the work of corrupt municipal cops acting on the orders of a corrupt mayor who had connections with the Guerreros Unidos drug cartel.

The cops handed over the students to cartel gunmen, who killed the young people and burned their bodies at a dump, according to the official account.

The students’ families reject that version of events and are demanding to know why soldiers of the Iguala-based 27th Infantry Battalion who witnessed the police attack did not intervene.

In December, respected newsweekly Proceso published a story drawing on a confidential Guerrero state government document that pointed to Mexico’s Federal Police as the perpetrators of the slaughter of the 43 students.

And before the Proceso report, a group of scientists at the National Autonomous University of Mexico said that the federal attorney general’s account of the burning of the students’ bodies “has no support in facts or in physical, chemical or natural phenomena.”


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