About 3,000 people took to the streets of downtown Mexico City on Friday, three months after the disappearance and likely massacre of 43 students.
The students went missing on Sept. 26, in an apparent kidnapping and suspected massacre by a police-backed gang that sparked nationwide protests and caused a crisis for Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto.
The latest marches were led by parents and other relatives and friends of the missing, including students from their teacher training college in Guerrero State.
Photo: EPA
“We want them alive,” protesters chanted, walking behind gigantic portraits of the missing students and a huge Mexican flag, whose red and green colors were replaced by black.
“What does Ayotzinapa want?” protest leaders called out, referring to the name of the students’ school.
“Justice. Justice,” the crowd responded.
If all of the students are confirmed dead, it would rank among the worst mass murders in a drug war that has killed more than an estimated 80,000 people and left about 22,000 others missing since 2006 in Mexico.
Authorities say the aspiring teachers vanished after corrupt police officers attacked their buses in the city of Iguala, allegedly under orders from Iguala’s mayor and his wife in a night of terror that left six other people dead.
The police allegedly then delivered the young men to members of the Guerreros Unidos drug gang, who told investigators that they took them in two trucks to a landfill, killed them, burned their bodies and dumped the remains in a river.
Only one of the students has been identified so far from charred remains.
On Wednesday last week, the students’ parents protested under heavy rains in front of the Los Pinos presidential residence and office.
In a sign of the violence that continues to reign in Guerrero State, the body of a priest was recently found with a bullet wound to the head.
Gregorio Lopez Gorostieta was discovered in the Tierra Caliente region two months after another priest’s body was found.
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