Flavors of Oaxaca: Ayotzinapa Notes

In case you haven't been following the Ayotzinapa tragedy in Mexico and want some information about it, here are my notes on the events since September. Most of the info comes from articles which I've linked to at the bottom.

On September 26th, 2014, police shot 6 students and kidnapped 43 more in the rural town of Iguala, Guerrero. The students came from the Escuela Normal Rural Raúl Isidro Burgos (a teacher training school with revolutionary roots) in Ayotzinapa, Guerrero.

On that day, the wife of the mayor of Iguala, Maria de los Angeles Pineda, was hosting a political conference in Iguala. According to some accounts, the students were in Iguala to protest this conference. According to others, they were in town to gather supplies for a protest in October.

In any case, the mayor, Jose Luis Abarca, and his wife are considered by the Mexican government to have been behind the plot to kidnap and murder the students. They fled Guerrero after the incident and were arrested on November 4th in Mexico City.

This tragedy caused outrage throughout Mexico and numerous protests. The Mexican government took its time responding. When the investigation was finally initiated, a mass grave was found and the police began the process of identifying the remains. This provoked further outrage on the part of the families of the students, who demanded that their children be searched for alive.

On November 7th, Attorney General Jesús Murillo Karam held a press conference in which he announced that the bodies found in the first mass grave were not the bodies of the students, but in fact other people who had been assassinated in August. Moreover, he announced that they could now disclose the truth of what had happened to the students. Videos of eye-witnesses and the perpetrators (police, gang members) were produced and they confessed the following story: On the 26th, the Iguala police had handed the students over to the gang known as "Guerreros Unidos" which burned their bodies in a bonfire (lasting about 14-15 hours), and then put their remains in trash bags that were dumped in the San Juan river nearby. One trash bag had allegedly been recovered, and the remains in it (teeth and bones) were sent to a university in Austria to be examined.

December 7th: The remains sent to Austria were confirmed to belong to one of the missing students, a young man named Alexander Mora Venancio.

January 4th: La Jornada published an article citing Jorge Antonio Montemayor Aldrete, an investigator from the Institute of Physics UNAM (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México), saying that it is more likely that the students were cremated in military and private crematoriums than in a bonfire. He is opening an investigation of the military crematorium in Guerrero.

Notes about Guerrero:

According to Coneval, Guerrero and Chiapas were tied as the poorest states in Mexico in 2012, with a mere 6.4% of their populations considered not poor or vulnerable. (I haven't found more recent statistics than this...)