Jared Goyette: Mexican Students on Why They Burn Down, Not Sit-In Jared Goyette - Fusion
go to original October 18, 2014

While protest movements around the world have generally tended to peaceful – see Hong Kong and Ferguson — in southern Mexico, protesters are burning buildings, throwing rocks and hijacking trucks in response to the recent disappearance of 43 students.

But while the images coming out of Mexico stand in stark contrast to the global trend, they can be seen clearly through the prism of a specific radical tradition born in a place where the rule of law has been undermined by decades of corruption, political violence, government neglect and pervasive poverty.

The Ayotzinapa rural teachers college, where the missing students are from, has a long leftist tradition of protest and dissent, going back to the 1960s and continuing through days of the “perfect dictatorship” of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI). One of the school’s more famous alumnus, Lucio Cabanas, was a guerrilla fighter killed by the Mexican army in 1974. In recent times, student protests have tended to focus on more local concerns, such as improved living conditions at the school, where the sleeping quarters look more like cell blocks than college dorms. The disappearance of the 43 students, allegedly at the hands of the local government working in conjunction with a drug cartel, has changed the dynamic.

Read the rest at Fusion

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