Students at Mexican College Seize Buses, Force Drivers to Drive Them to Protests Jacobo G. Garcia and Mark Stevenson - The Associated Press
go to original November 30, 2014

Seized trucks and buses are parked inside the grounds of Isidro Burgos rural teacher's college, better known as Ayotzinapa, in Tixtla de Guerrero, Mexico. (Rebecca Blackwell/AP)

TIXTLA — The men are holed up with their buses on the college’s soccer field, sleeping in the compartments that once held passenger luggage and hanging the clothes they’ve hand-washed from the windshields.

While attention has focused on the kidnapping and disappearance of 43 students from the Raul Isidro Burgos teachers college in Tixtla, few have paid much attention to the three dozen or more bus drivers who say they are being forced by activists from the school to live as captives and act as chauffeurs for the very people who commandeered their vehicles.

The drivers, some of whom have been at the southern Mexico school more than a month, say they cannot abandon the buses because their companies hold them financially responsible for the vehicles, some of which are worth well over $100,000 dollars. And with authorities unwilling to inflame tensions over the disappearance and presumed massacre of students from the school, no one is coming to their rescue.

“They say we aren’t kidnapped because we can get out and walk around, or swim in the (campus) pool,” said one driver who, like the others holed up at the school, refused to give his name for fear of angering the students. “But a prison inmate can also go out to the exercise yard or the gym, and that doesn’t mean they’re free.”

The students, who have a long history of sometimes violent activism, have justified the mass bus seizure as “an expropriation” and say they need the vehicles to ferry them to and from the many protests that have erupted in Guerrero state since the Sept. 26 disappearance and likely killing of their colleagues.

Read the rest at The Star

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