Kidnapping survivor speaks on Ayotzinapa movement

Many ask why 43 students disappeared Sept. 26, 2014.

Some speculate the ambush and mass kidnapping in the city of Iguala, in the Mexican state of Guerrero, was brought on by the students’ dissent for the Mexican government as pupils of the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College – a hotbed for guerrilla movements.

But what about the 30,000 other people who have disappeared in Mexico? asked Omar García, a survivor of the 2014 incident that made international headlines. 

“I don’t attribute (our activism), our way of thinking, to what they did to us on Sept. 26,” García said Thursday during a speaking event Thursday at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi. “The (30,000) disappeared include military officials, federal police officers, far-right conservatives, far-left … wealthy people, poor people, Catholics, atheists.”

“What needs to be understood is that this is a human rights crisis. It can happen to anybody.”

García was among the more than 100 students from the Ayotzinapa college who clashed with municipal police in Iguala while en route to an upcoming demonstration in Mexico City. He shared his experience during a speaking event coordinated by the student group, Student Citizen Activists of TAMUCC, in partnership with the Carnalismo National Brown Berets of Corpus Christi.

The student group’s president and founder, Daniel Yzaguirre, said the opportunity to host García could not passed up despite a busy semester.

“The opportunity was presented to us and being student activists ourselves the story hit close to home,” Yzaguirre said. “Along with all the headlines of violence just across the border in Mexico, we thought this would be a good opportunity to highlight the ongoing crisis and to show our students the impact politics and policy can have on their education by sharing the stories of their student neighbors to the south.”

García shared an interactive cartographic platform that maps out and examines the different narratives of the 2014 event. The Ayotzinapa Case: A Cartography Of Violence is a project by Forensic Architecture, an independent research agency based at Goldsmiths, University of London.

The project, published earlier this year, underlines inconsistencies in the government’s account of the events.

The Mexican Attorney General at the time said a government investigation determined the 43 students were picked up by municipal government employees and handed over to a local drug gang, according to reports. They were driven to a garbage dump where they were killed, incinerated and their ashes tossed into a river.

The families and friends of the disappeared 43 students obtained legal counsel after growing skeptical of the Mexican Government’s accounts, García said. To this day, they want them back alive.

They invited the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team and the human rights organization Centro de Derechos Humanos Miguel Agustín Pro Juárez to conduct independent investigations into the students’ disappearance. The families have yet to gain closure on their whereabouts.

Three years since the incident, the parents, and friends of the missing 43 students continue to seek international help to battle systemic impunity in Mexico and to raise awareness on the tragedy. The Ayotzinapa movement was born out of the struggle for answers from the Mexican government and lack of proper procedures for the investigation.

García thanked the attendees of the Thursday event for taking the time to listen. He made it clear that the Ayotzinapa movement will continue until the missing 43 are found.

“The truth is the families of the disappeared have the right to know the truth, which has been denied by the (Mexican) government … The truth is what we are seeking,” García. “What happened to our peers? Who took them? Why? Who will be held accountable and how can this be kept from happening again?”

“The truth implicates not asking the victims; that answer needs to be provided by those responsible. The state. The authorities.”

Beatriz Alvarado (@CallerBetty) | Twitter