By EFE
Young Mexicans protesting the disappearance of the 43 Ayotzinapa students broke one of the main doors of the National Palace this Wednesday while the president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, held his morning conference inside.
The protesters, who accuse López Obrador of not resolving the case to protect the military involved, took a van that belongs to the Federal Electricity Commission (CFE) to knock down Gate 1 on Moneda Street in the historic center of Mexico City.
While answering questions from the press, the president learned of the incident, which he called a “provocation,” although he ruled out retaliation.
Hooded protesters vandalize one of the doors of the National Palace this Wednesday, in Mexico City (Mexico).Madla Hartz / EFE
“It's not going to escalate, it's just that what they would like is for us to respond violently, but we are not repressors.
The door is going to be fixed and there is no problem, but what they want is to provoke,” said the Mexican president.
The students of Ayotzinapa are protesting because López Obrador has not kept his promise to resolve the disappearance of his 43 classmates in September 2014 in the southern state of Guerrero, although the Truth Commission created by him concluded in 2022 that it was a “crime of state” in which the Army also participated.
[“We thirst for justice”: relatives of Ayotzinapa march for the ninth anniversary of the disappearance of the 43 students]
In recent weeks they have hijacked trucks,
vandalized government facilities
and held a sit-in in the Zócalo to demand an audience with López Obrador.
“It is already a movement against us, they have been going to (the Ministry of the Interior) for about a week and breaking windows, yesterday at the National Lottery.
It is a provocative plan, that is, very clear and then we are not going to fall into any provocation,” added the president.
Despite the demonstrations, López Obrador indicated that he would not receive them, arguing that within “about 15 or 20 more days” he will receive the families of the 43 students to “speak with them and show evidence of how the investigation was manipulated.”
The president assured the parents that he is “making great progress in the investigation” but “what is happening is that they are being manipulated” by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), the Organization of American States (OAS) and “ right-wing conservative groups supported by foreign governments.”
“What matters to me is finding the young people and the attitude, not of the parents, but of the advisors and the organizations that supposedly defend human rights, is an attitude, at best political, very confrontational in against us,” he explained.