Protests in Mexico - A Rallying Cry Against Human Rights Violations and Impunity Perseo Quiroz Rendon and Monica Oehler Toca - The Cyprus Mail
go to original January 16, 2015

Aleluya: Por Paz en Mexico - Reflecting a few minutes for Mexico Ayotzinapa (theMUSICALchannelTV)

Mexico is in the midst of a human rights crisis. President Enrique Peña Nieto’s government, however, is focusing almost exclusively on its economic and political agenda and leaving human rights aside.

Reports of torture and ill-treatment have increased by 600 percent in the last decade, and enforced disappearances continue to occur widely. In August 2014, the government acknowledged that there are around 22,000 missing persons.

On September 26, a group of students from the Raúl Isidro Burgos Rural Teachers’ College of Ayotzinapa went missing in the city of Iguala after police opened fire on them without warning. Six students were killed in the confrontation, and another 43 were taken into custody and never seen again.

In the search for the missing 43 students, unrelated mass graves have been discovered in the state of Guerrero, and the government’s complicity with organized crime has been in the spotlight.

This is far from an isolated issue. Other gross human rights violations include the murders of 17 peasants in Aguas Blancas (1995), 45 indigenous townspeople in Acteal (1997), 72 immigrants in San Fernando (2010), hundreds of women and girls in Ciudad Juárez (since 1993), and 22 civilians in Tlatlaya (2014).

Outraged by these human rights violations and the country’s 98 percent impunity rate, and mobilized by the mass kidnapping in Iguala, people from diverse groups in all regions of Mexico are raising their voices in protest.

Read the rest at The Cyprus Mail

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