At least 116 minors have been admitted to hospitals due to massive intoxication that has been registered in less than 20 days in several schools in the state of Chiapas, in southern Mexico.
Lupita, 11, is one of the victims: she has been hospitalized twice, in two different hospitals.
She studies at the Juana de Asbaje school, in the Bochil municipality, where on October 8 at least 57 students suffered a sudden poisoning that took them to the hospital with stomach pains and seizures.
Some of them tested positive for
cocaine.
14 of the 116 intoxicated remain hospitalized.
Telemundo News
Lupita, like other classmates, had bought snacks in the school cafeteria.
She had eaten a sweet of three pesos (0.15 dollars) that "perhaps contained the drug", as she told the newspaper El País.
It could have been the candy or perhaps the water from a tub at school that intoxicated her and left her with anxiety.
"They told me that they were going to throw the drug there. Right next to the field. I went to fill up my water there and I drank it straight away," said Lupita, who now receives psychological attention because the image of
her fainted teammates
keeps haunting her. on the school field.
On the morning of October 8, the teachers realized that one of the students had brought a cell phone, according to the aforementioned newspaper.
This, like painting nails or having makeup, was prohibited at Lupita's school.
The authorities, then, began to carry out a search that caused many students, frightened by what they could find in their backpacks, to throw transparent bags with white powder out the windows of the classrooms, into the common tub from which Lupita drank, or that they go to the bathroom
to get rid of pills that they kept in the bags of compresses for menstruation, according to the newspaper.
The state health secretary stated then that many of the students had "ingested water contaminated with an unknown substance."
Some parents of the children said, according to the aforementioned media, that their daughters and sons had cocaine intoxication.
The Prosecutor's Office, however, continues to deny that it was a drug, since the toxicological tests carried out on the students came out negative for amphetamines, methamphetamines, cannabis (marijuana) and opiates and opiates.
Chiapas families demand that the intoxications of students in a school be clarified
Oct. 13, 202201:43
Parents, authorities and the Catholic Church say they are concerned that a similar incident will be repeated, since the presence of
drug traffickers
has already been registered in this area .
"Until we know what happened in Juana de Asbaje, we cannot prevent it from happening again in other schools," the director of Technical Secondary School 38, close to the Juana de Asbaje school, told El País.
[Chiapas authorities find no drugs in 35 toxicology tests after poisonings in a school]
The Ministry of Education announced, for the time being, that in order to control something that happens, it will implement the Backpack Operation: check each student's bag before they enter school.