Two months ago, in the southern Mexican city of Iguala, police arrested 43 student activists from a rural education program in the town of Ayotzinapa. One student was found in the streets, his body marked by torture, his eyes gouged out, and the skin of his face peeled away. The rest have not been seen since. Reports suggest police handed them over to a local criminal gang (with pretensions to being a “cartel”), at the behest of the local mayor and his wife. Several suspects have testified the students all were killed, and their bodies incinerated. Extensive searches in the hills surrounding Iguala have turned up dozens of mass graves, all full. But none of them contain the missing students.
The whole country has erupted in outrage. Protest marches fill the wide, tree-lined boulevard of Paseo de la Reforma, and empty into the enormous public square known as the Zócalo. On the ancient paving stones there, between the colonial-era palace of government and the metropolitan cathedral, protesters wrote in large letters, “Fue el estado” — it was the state.
The protests spurred by Ayotzinapa may be the largest since the fateful protests on the eve of the 1968 Mexico City Olympics. Some commentators have speculated that the moment has potential to escalate into a second Mexican Revolution — the largest war ever fought in the western hemisphere.
The 43 students of Ayotzinapa are not the first casualties of the drug war in Mexico. But the incident has galvanized Mexican civil society, and Mexicans are demanding change. When the attorney general sighed, “Ya me cansé” — I’ve had enough — during his press conference on the incident (just as President Enrique Peña Nieto, darling of the U.S. business community, left on an ill-timed trip to China), Mexican citizens took up another rallying cry. “I’ve had enough.” And with good reason. By most estimates, at least 100,000 have been killed or disappeared in Mexico since 2006.
The arrests and disappearance were perpetrated under the noses of state and federal authorities, as well as the Mexican military. The incident in Iguala has exposed corruption and apathy in every political party, in every branch, and at every level of government. Mexicans have had enough of a drug war that produces beheadings, burnings, and torture on a mass scale. This is a moment that matters.
The print media has run numerous stories on Ayotzinapa and the ensuing popular outcry. But broadcast media is virtually silent. More importantly, nowhere have media focused on the deep involvement of the United States in every aspect of Mexico’s drug war. The militarization of the drug war through the 2008 Mérida Initiative depends on millions in U.S. aid, training, and support. Most analysts believe Mexico’s most spectacularly violent cartel, the Zetas, is deeply connected to U.S.-trained Guatemalan counter-revolutionary soldiers from the Reagan era, repeatedly implicated in gross human rights violations and genocide.
The ground for Mexico’s explosion of drug violence was laid not only by the U.S. drug war in Colombia, which squeezed cocaine conduits northward, but also by rural Mexico’s desolation in the wake of NAFTA, and the simultaneous militarization of the 2,000 mile U.S.-Mexico border.
“Love thy neighbor” isn’t an injunction often associated with media coverage or U.S. foreign policy. But in a situation like the present one — a situation in which U.S. policy (not to mention U.S. demand for drugs) has helped create violence and barbarity that dwarfs that of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria; a situation that sears the hearts of communities across the country and on both sides of the border; a situation so tightly bound up with contentious questions of immigration, citizenship, neoliberal free trade, and gun control, yet so rarely discussed — loving one’s neighbor enough even to pay attention seems the least we can do.
We cannot continue congratulating ourselves for the invisibility of what historian Froylan Enciso has called “the outsourcing of blood.” On Thursday, by rallying around the Twitter hashtag #accionglobalporayotzinapa (Global Action for Ayotzinapa) in at least 150 cities across Mexico and worldwide, from Iguala to Mexico City, from Los Angeles to New York, Paris and Sydney, communities will demonstrate in solidarity with Mexican civil society. U.S. media should pay closer attention to what is happening with our neighbors, and to our role in what is happening. Coloradans should, too.
Eric Frith is assistant professor of history at the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the U.S. Air Force, Department of Defense, or the U.S. government.
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