The protests in Mexico due to the lack of progress regarding the disappearance, in 2014, of the 43 Ayotzinapa students have intensified these days and entered fully into the electoral campaign, fueling the conflict between the president and the relatives and colleagues of the normalistas .
The investigations launched during the mandate of Andrés Manuel López Obrador to fulfill his government promises and try to find the truth of what happened that September almost 10 years ago have run into the Army, from whom those affected demand documents that supposedly would clarify the facts.
Angry at the lack of results, a group of students who arrived from Guerrero last Wednesday pushed a vehicle and broke down a door of the National Palace, where the president lives and where he was currently holding a press conference.
The president described what happened as a “vulgar act of provocation” and framed it in the electoral campaign that the country is experiencing these days for the presidential elections in June.
On Thursday night, the police killed a student from the Ayotzinapa school in the capital of Guerrero while trying to stop the van, supposedly stolen, in which the boy, Yanqui Kothan Gómez Peralta, 23, was traveling.
Of the four who were in the vehicle, another was detained without knowing what happened to him or what condition he was in and the others were released.
The disappearance of the Ayotzinapa normalistas when they were heading on a bus to a demonstration in the capital, during the six-year term of Enrique Peña Nieto, is one of the saddest and most tangled chapters in recent Mexican history.
It meant a drop in the popularity of the then president, in whose Administration the so-called historical truth was fabricated under the auspices of Attorney General Jesús Murillo Karam.
The investigations always indicated that the event was interwoven in a kind of collaboration between organized crime, the military and the State to hide the bodies of the normalistas and close the case.
There is still no absolute certainty who was involved or where the bodies are.
Only a few bones have appeared, but the relatives are still standing, frustrated now by the slowdown in the investigation.
The demolition of the door of the National Palace, after a week of protests with incendiary devices and firecrackers against other institutions, was intended to recover dialogue with the President of the Government, who maintains close ties with the Army and who is responsible for preventing them from going out. to light the documents that a multinational group of independent researchers requested without success in recent years.
The death of the student in Guerrero has raised eyebrows again.
This Friday, López Obrador asked the Federal Prosecutor's Office to take charge of the case of the shot student, for which he offered condolences to the family.
“We don't like anyone dying,” he said, but then he accused the representative of the relatives of the missing, Vidulfo Rosales, of wanting to denigrate the military institution as a whole and of dark dealings that prevent a fluid relationship with those affected.
However, he does not consider the matter dead and has promised to get “to the bottom”, something that is trusted less and less, given the power that the military has acquired in this six-year term.
Some uniformed officers, however, have been imprisoned as a result of the investigations carried out, as has the controversial prosecutor Murillo Karam, who is imprisoned and with several cases open.
Firefighters extinguish the fire of a patrol car set on fire by alleged normalistas, this March 8 at dawn, in Chilpancingo.Dassaev Téllez Adame
The early days of López Obrador's mandate were seen with optimism for the resolution of this case, with multiple actors in charge of finding the whereabouts of the students and doing justice, but time has been closing hope, after a government report where They were considered dead and the involvement of the military, among others, was pointed out.
That's as far as it went.
The students have taken advantage of the end of his term and the electoral campaign in which this president will be replaced to inflame his cause and fuel the investigations.
The demolition of the door of the National Palace and the death of the normal student this Thursday in Guerrero, as well as the president's statements, have tense the political moment that the country is experiencing.
The relatives, who made their proclamation “they took them alive, we want them alive” famous throughout the world, have threatened to go as far as necessary and to boycott the rallies of the official candidate, Claudia Sheinbaum, López Obrador's replacement in the Government party, Morena.
“What is that?” the president asked this Friday.
And he has asked why they only plan to attend the rallies of his candidate and not those of the rest of the candidates.
At Sheinbaum's campaign opening in the capital's large Zócalo there was a group of concentrated students protesting.
The shooting death of Yanqui Kothan Gómez Peralta in Guerrero, even with many unexplained extremes, has brought to mind in all its harshness what happened that September 2014 and has shaken up the already cloudy panorama.
The family has accused the police of “planting” false evidence to justify the altercation, something common in Mexico.
The authorities of said State have indicated that the students were traveling in a stolen van, a practice also common among normal students, and that they were carrying weapons that they used against the agents who stopped them, hence why they repelled the attack with bullets.
Later, the police patrol was set on fire.
Some experts familiar with this case fear that the light will never be opened on it and that time will cover it in silence without full justice being achieved.
But the normalistas and the relatives of the 43 missing people do not give up.
Their protests in the electoral campaign will once again remind the political class that the State is responsible for investigating and bringing to justice those responsible for a terrible event that refuses to close the wound.
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