Struggle of missing Mexican students’ parents continues

Mexico / AFP

There were no tears and their faces were hardened by 19 months of grief and anger as the parents of 43 Mexican students who vanished in 2014 marched in the capital. Less than two years ago, they would have been surrounded by tens of thousands of people as they protested against President Enrique Pena Nieto’s handling of the case.
But this past Tuesday—just two days after foreign experts issued a damning report accusing the government of obstructing their investigation—the protesters numbered only in the
hundreds.
While the mass disappearance has tainted Mexico’s image abroad, the protests have waned and Pena Nieto’s administration is weathering the criticism despite falling approval ratings.
“It’s a long struggle and there are few of us,” said EmilianoNavarrete, holding a picture of his missing son as he walked down Mexico City’s main boulevard, Reforma. But, Navarrete said, “to shut us up they’ll have to kill us.”
While he couldn’t hide his disappointment at the low attendance, he said the “quality” of the people joining the parents was more important than “quantity.”
The parents travelled from Tixtla, a town in the impoverished southern state of Guerrero, where their 43 sons studied at a rural teacher college. Prosecutors say the students were whisked away by corrupt police in the city of Iguala on September 26, 2014, after they hijacked buses to be used for a future protest.
But the experts of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, who were invited by the government to aid the probe at the parents’ request, rejected the central conclusion in the case.
The experts said there was no scientific proof that the students’ bodies were burned in a funeral pyre at a garbage dump after they were killed by a drug gang.

‘International scrutiny’
The mass disappearance wrecked Pena Nieto’s effort to shift attention away from Mexico’s drug violence and toward his ambitious economic reform agenda.
But while his popularity has dropped to 30 percent, his Institutional Revolutionary Party and its allies still managed to keep their majority in the lower house of Congress in elections last year.
Clemente Rodriguez, another desperate parent, said Mexicans probably stopped protesting because they bought the government’s conclusions in the case.