Quote du jour | Schapen

We are not sheep to be killed whenever they feel like it.

Aldus de vader van een van de 43 Mexicaanse studenten die enkele weken geleden verdwenen na door politieagenten te zijn ontvoerd.

Eén lichaam is inmiddels teruggevonden en de manier waarop deze student aan zijn einde kwam is ronduit gruwelijk.

Wat blijkt dus? Arme mensen in Mexico zijn, als het zo uitkomt, nog minder dan schapen die rijp zijn voor de slacht.

En dat alles omdat ze de botte pech hebben de arme buren te zijn van een rijk land met een onverzadigbare dorst naar drugs. Een dorst die hun hele land corrumpeert.

Lees hier over de achtergrond van de verdwijning.

The missing young men were almost all first-year students at the all-male Escuela Normal Rural Raúl Isidro Burgos, in Ayotzinapa, a small village in the center of the southwestern state of Guerrero. […]

Normales rurales are teachers’ colleges that take in students from the lowest-income stratum of Mexico. Their parents may earn as little as $400 a month, and it is understood that the students will receive a poor education, just enough to qualify them to pass on their limited body of knowledge to the next generation of children of other poor families. Of the several government-run normales rurales in Guerrero, the one at Ayotzinapa is the poorest.

By long tradition, normales rurales are militant institutions, and none more so than Ayotzinapa. Two leaders of famous rural guerrilla movements in Guerrero studied there in the 1950s, the institution’s walls are covered with radical propaganda, and the Ayotzinapa students descend from their campus several times a year to join protest marches, or to collect money from the public for their expenses. Rice and beans, rice and eggs, beans and eggs are staples of their diet, books are scarce, and, because their parents are already making a great sacrifice by sparing the youths’ labor power at home, outside expenses are generally financed through these collections.

As a part of a week-long hazing ritual at the school, about eighty first-year students took two of the school’s buses down the hill to Chilpancingo, the capital of Guerrero state. The orders from the older students were to head for the capital’s bus station, commandeer a few additional interurban buses, and drive them a couple of hours away, past the town of Iguala, to toll booths on the superhighway that connects Acapulco to Mexico City. There, the students would shut the toll booths down, as they do every year, and use the buses to block the highway lanes, chanting protest slogans and asking for more or less involuntary contributions from infuriated drivers. This year, they had an additional motive; they wanted to join the large protest march being organized in Mexico City to commemorate the anniversary, on October 2, of the student massacre of 1968. However, before they could get to the bus station, security forces chased the students out of Chilpancingo, which is why, according to one version, that afternoon the students headed instead to Iguala, to commandeer more buses there.

As it happened, the students went to Iguala for their hazing on the very day that María de los Ángeles Pineda Villa, the wife of the town’s mayor, was performing another ritual. As Iguala’s First Lady, Pineda served as the beneficent godmother of the local institute for poor children. On September 26 she was celebrating her yearly report on the institute’s activities. The most widely accepted version of events—among several now circulating—has it that, upon learning that the Ayotzinapa kids were commandeering buses at the local bus terminal, either the mayor or his wife gave the order to “do something” about the normalista rowdies, so that nothing might ruin the Iguala First Lady’s big day.

Aangezien de burgemeestersfamilie van Iguala nauwe connecties heeft met de georganiseerde misdaad, droegen de politieagenten de studenten over aan de lokale drugsbende. Met, zoals gezegd, gruwelijke gevolgen:

On the evening of September 26, the municipal police of Iguala chased down the commandeered buses, cornered them, and opened fire on the students. Two first-year students were killed on the spot. […] the students who were abducted were last seen several hours later, as uniformed municipal police shoved them into three vans and drove off. A day after the shootouts, one of the missing youths was found. His eyes had been gouged out, the skin had been removed from his face, and then he had been killed.