Fury For the Lost

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Protesters smashed the door of Mexico’s presidential palace this week, demanding answers for the 43 college students who went missing a decade ago, a mass disappearance that remains one of the country’s most infamous human rights cases, NPR reported.

On Wednesday, demonstrators used a pickup truck to break down the door of the National Palace, the residence of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador. Security forces were able to stop protesters from reaching the hall where the president was at the time holding a news conference.

López Obrador criticized the protest as unnecessarily violent, saying the protesters were using sledgehammers and blowtorches, according to the Associated Press.

However, he downplayed the unrest, adding that officials would meet with the demonstrators to address their issues.

The incident was the latest demonstration by victims’ families and students at government rural teachers’ colleges protesting the 2014 disappearance of students from the Ayotzinapa teacher training college in the southern city of Iguala.

At the time, a group of students were attacked by municipal police, who then handed them over to a local drug gang. The gang allegedly killed and burned their bodies, with only three sets of remains identified.

Last year, a government truth commission determined that local, state, and federal authorities cooperated with the gang in the murder of the students, labeling it a “state crime.”

López Obrador had pledged a thorough investigation into the case, but recently acknowledged that it would not be concluded before his term ends this year. At the same, he has openly doubted whether the total number of disappeared in Mexico, more than 100,000 people, is really that high.

As the Washington Post reported, he dispatched public workers last year to conduct a census to affirm whether people reported as missing had come back home or not. Families of the missing claimed the president was seeking to play down their suffering before a presidential election in 2024.