Cervantes Laureate Elena Poniatowska Says Mexico Ruined By Corruption Euronews
go to original November 6, 2014

Writer Elena Poniatowska is at the center of the fight to find Mexico’s missing students. She made a very moving speech in Mexico City’s Zócalo Square a few days ago on their behalf.

Poniatowska is a laureate of the most important Spanish language literature award, the Miguel de Cervantes Prize. She presented some of the key facts and context of what happened.

Elena Poniatowska: “These 43 youths are very poor. Their families have nothing. They’re mostly farming families. Photos I saw of their rooms in the teacher’s college they were going to showed how bare and poor their rooms were, their backpacks on the floor, no furniture, pieces of cardboard on the floor, no bunks, no beds, just completely abandoned. To attend their studies they have to go around begging with a tin, asking people to help them out with some money, give some loose change. These boys are very young, and full of aspirations, and so this is just terrible, because this is treating them as if they were rubbish, simply because they were poor.”

Poniatowska condemns the local authorities as corrupt, linking them to the students’ disappearance.

Read the whole transcript at euronews

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