Mexican students overcome fear and return to Ayotzinapa, where 43 went missing
Mexican students overcome fear and return to Ayotzinapa, where 43 went missing
Josefina Salomón
Mexican governments have often seen these schools as factories of trouble and relentlessly targeted them. That’s why returning is a political act
Thursday 12 November 2015 07.15 EST
When tragedies happen at schools – whether at Sandy Hook, Columbine or Virginia Tech – it is hard to imagine how students find the courage to go back to sites that are filled with so much trauma and pain. But in Ayotzinapa, Mexico, going to class is a powerful political act of defiance.
The name Ayotzinapa, a town in Mexico’s southern Guerrero state, has become shorthand for disappearances. On 26 September 2014, in the nearby city of Iguala, 43 of the school’s students were arrested by police and have not been seen since then.
The 43 students were trying to commandeer buses to travel to Mexico City for a protest to mark the killing of unarmed students in 1968. At least six people are known to have been killed in the Ayotzinapa incident last year. But that’s not preventing some young men from joining the school.
“Not anybody can go through what we have gone through”, Mario, a first year student at Ayotzinapa, told me. He enrolled at the school two months after the events of 26 September. For young men like Mario, born to rural families with very few economic resources, a school like Ayotzinapa provides not only education but also three meals a day and a place to sleep. It provides them with the only opportunity of a higher education and a chance in life.
More:
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/nov/12/mexican-students-return-to-ayotzinapa
