by REINALDO SPITALLETTA
In Mexico, Students demonstrating on August 13, 1968 against its government’s repressive policies. PHOTO/Wikipedia
Mexico bleeds as criminal gangs kill the innocent and not-so-innocent, before the gaze of an impotent — or is it indifferent? — state apparatus.
The latest victims were 43 student activists who disappeared in late September and, many believe, were shot dead and cut up by gangsters and policemen collaborating in the western state of Guerrero. The case has provoked protests that are unusual in their scope, especially for a country that has already seen so much criminal violence and impunity.
This is not the first time protesting youth have been murdered in Mexico. In 1968, the Mexican state — headed then, as it is now, by the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) — ruthlessly crushed student protests in the capital. The crackdown was a seminal event in Mexico’s hesitant evolution toward democracy.
What do the students killed in October 1968 have in common with those murdered near Iguala in 2014? Their blood perhaps, and the savagery of their assassins. That, and their unwanted inclusion in Mexico’s lamentable history of violence.
The people of Mexico — those colorful, sometimes sinister and sometimes magical protagonists of the country’s 20th century novels — live today besieged by drug trafficking gangs and the anti-popular policies of a government (and not just this one) that has handed national sovereignty over to multinationals.
In Mexican culture, death does not frighten people because “life has already cured us of fright,” as the poet Octavio Paz wrote in The Labyrinth of Solitude. “Our indifference to death is the other face of our indifference to life. We kill because life, ours and others’, is worthless.”