by RAFAEL BARAJAS and PEDRO MIGUEL
A woman places a candle on photos of the missing students during a protest against the disappearance of 43 students from the Isidro Burgos rural teachers college, in Mexico City, Wednesday, Oct. 22, 2014. Tens of thousands marched in Mexico City’s main avenue demanding the return of the missing students. PHOTO/AP/On Point
Without drug money, the Mexican economy would collapse, which is why politics, economics and gangsterism are entwined at the highest levels. That reality, underlying the students’ massacre, has led to a rare display of anger on Mexico’s streets.
When a police force arrests 43 students and hands them over to narco-gangsters who kill them as a “lesson”, then the police work for a narco-state that entwines organised crime and political power. The same police force also machine-gunned students, killing six and seriously wounding six more; it seized a student, tore the skin from his face, ripped out his eyes and left him lying in the street. This is a narco-state that practises terrorism.
These things happened in Iguala, the third-biggest city in the state of Guerrero, Mexico. The police attacked a group of students from the Ayotzinapa rural teacher training college and are accused of leading them to their deaths. Iguala’s mayor, José Luis Abarca, and his wife, María de Los Angeles, who have close links with a cartel in the region, are suspected of ordering this operation. They were arrested on 4 November.
Mexico’s rural teacher training centres were established 80 years ago to provide high-quality rural teaching and give young teachers from poor backgrounds the chance to better themselves. But these aims, inherited from the revolution (1910-17), have clashed with the neoliberal economic model adopted since the 1980s. According to neoliberal logic, public education limits the scope to exploit education as a commodity, and the countryside harbours relics of the past (indigenous communities or peasant farmers who stand in the way of expanding export-focused agro-business). That is why Mexico’s 15 remaining rural teacher training centres are under threat, as is evident from budget cuts and the accusation by the media and politicians that they are “seedbeds for guerrillas”, according to the former secretary general of the ruling Partido Revolucionario Institucional (Institutional Revolutionary Party, PRI), Elba Esther Gordillo (1); havens for “good-for-nothings and delinquents”, according to a debate on Televisa (1 December 2012); and “dens of organised crime,” as Ricardo Alemán wrote in El Universal, 7 October 2014.
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