Political crisis deepens in Mexico as army is called on to testify on Iguala massacre

Political crisis deepens in Mexico as army is called on to testify on Iguala massacre

By Rafael Azul

Mexican authorities have handed over to the Medical Forensic Service of the city of Iguala a yet-to-be disclosed number of corpses from a garbage dump near the city of Cocula. Forensic teams from Mexico and Argentina are investigating whether the remains are those of 43 rural teaching students who were forcibly disappeared by the police forces of Iguala and Cocula, acting in collusion with the Guerreros Unidos (GU) drug trafficking gang.

It is alleged that two GU gang members confessed to having been involved and gave federal investigators the information about the Cocula dump. Access has been tightly controlled to the area by security forces. The Mexico City daily La Jornada reported on an incident in which armed men, in a car with no plates, detained a television crew, attempted to smash their way into its vehicle and, failing to do so, motioned for the federal police to block the reporters’ way.

On Tuesday, the Legislative National Security Commission called on the national defense secretary,

General Salvador Cienfuegos, to clear up what the Army’s role was in the massacre and abduction of the Ayotzinapa student teachers on September 26. Alejandro Encinas, president of the commission, promised that the meeting with the general would be “very private.”

According to Encinas, the commission trusts that the Army chief would share intelligence data. Encinas’s promise of privacy and his deferential attitude to the Defense Ministry strongly suggests that the Mexican Congress is seeking to help cover up the Army’s role that night. This is consistent with a government that at all levels acts as if it is under siege.

The commission has also met with Government Secretary Miguel Ángel Osorio and with Attorney General Jesus Murillo, but had avoided until now bringing in the Army itself, as if it had had nothing to do with the Iguala massacre. Given the links between narcotics syndicates and not only the municipal, state and national governments, but the Army itself, this proven untenable.

In particular, the commission wants to know what the 27th Infantry battalion, based less than one mile away from the scene of the massacre, did that night.

The 27th was one of several battalions of soldiers and marines deployed to Iguala and other places during the first years of the war on drugs against drug cartels and guerrilla groups, based on the belief that municipal and state police forces were infiltrated by the drug cartels. However, the activities of the battalion have not been made clear and seem inexplicable

Those normalistas that managed to escape alive from the ordeal, initially said that they suspected that some of the disappeared students were being held in an Army base in Iguala (that of the 27th Infantry). The role of the battalion has never been fully explained. Omar García, one of the surviving students, had described how, after an initial attack by the Iguala police at 9:30 p.m. on September 26 that resulted in the execution of Aldo Gutirrez, a student, the police then withdrew. Four hours later, at 1:30 a.m. on September 27, a second attack was launched on the students, this time by men dressed as civilians and in unmarked cars; more than 200 rounds were fired. Two other students and three bystanders were killed, several students were left wounded and 43 others were abducted.

Students went knocking on doors for help for their wounded comrades and met up with a military patrol that arrived within minutes of the second attack. After stealing their cell phones, the soldiers threatened to arrest them for trespassing. “You guys wanted to be big shots, now pull up your pants!” said the soldiers as they were leaving, according to García.

When informed of the wounded students, the officer in charge offered to call an ambulance (that never showed up). When on Sunday, October 28, relatives of the missing students accompanied by human rights activists questioned Colonel Rodriguez at the Army base, he denied having any of the students in custody. He did admit that the Army had been aware of the attack on the students, and that troops had been sent out to the scene, but that the Army had not participated in the attack.

A report in the Guerrero daily newspaper El Diario de Guerrero the day after the massacre applauded the bloody act of repression against “vandals trying to steal buses,” which it attributed to State Police and the Army itself.

Meanwhile, an embattled President Enrique Peña Nieto has declared his intention to meet with family members of the disappeared students, this fully one month after the massacre and kidnapping. The president is facing mistrust and criticism. The resignation of Guerrero governor Angel Aguirre, one of Peña Nieto’s closest allies in a state that the president had visited more than two dozen times since 2012 (the president has yet to set foot in Guerrero since the massacre), has not helped matters.

The role of the Army in Iguala now places a question mark over how much the federal government knew about the Iguala and Colusa drug connections, when the news of the police assault reached federal authorities, and how involved the Peña Nieto administration was in planning and executing the attacks of that night.

A mass protest march of more than 100,000 students, teachers, education workers and ordinary citizens took place in Mexico City on Wednesday, November 5, in solidarity with the 43 missing teaching students, normalistas, of the Ayotzinapa Normal School, who have been missing for over 40 days.

This was the third mass demonstration and by far the largest and angriest. Many of the participants directed their anger at President Enrique Peña Nieto, demanding that he resign. One protest sign denounced him “for corruption, betraying the nation, ineptitude,” calling him a “repressor and assassin.”

Others carried signs that said, “It was the State.” Leading the march were students from Mexico City’s National Autonomous Metropolitan University (UNAM), the Polytechnic Institute, rural teaching colleges, and Iberian-American University, who all had joined a massive nationwide 72-hour student strike.

At Mexico City’s Constitution Square (the Zócalo), many thousands greeted the protesters as they arrived after the two-and-a-half-hour march from the president’s mansion (Los Pinos). At the mass rally, family members of the 43 disappeared students spoke to the demonstrators. None of the major political parties (the governing PRI, the PAN, the PRD, the Greens) were involved in the protest.

The day before the demonstration, a special police detachment arrested the mayor of Iguala (Jose Luis Abarca) and his wife (Maria Pineda), reportedly the intellectual authors of the September 26 massacre of the Ayotzinapa normalistas (6 were killed, 25 were wounded, 43 were kidnapped by the police and turned over to the Guerreros Unidos narcotics gang). The couple had been holed up in Iztapalapa, a crowded Mexico City neighborhood of auto parts businesses, body shops, and small factories. Iztapalapa itself is a PRD stronghold, governed by Jesus Valencia, who is close to former Mexico City mayor Marcelo Ebrard. According to the Mexico City newsweekly Proceso, they had a suitcase full of money with them. There is as yet no sign of Iguala police chief Felipe Flores, who had also fled with Abarca. Proceso also placed a question mark on the role of PRD leader Jesús Zambrano in the affair. Abarca had met in Mexico City with Zambrano three days after the massacre, as it was already making national headlines. Abarca had been involved in the deaths of leaders of striking miners in 2013 and had been accused of assassinating PRD rivals in Guerrero. It is not credible that Zambrano did not know this. Zambrano claims that at the meeting he asked Abarca to turn himself in.

Also on Tuesday, UNAM students, no doubt in reaction to these developments, expelled PRD leader Jesús Zambrano from the Law Department of that University, calling him an “assassin, traitor,” and demanding that the PRD take responsibility for the Ayotzinapa massacre.

The arrest of the couple did nothing to soothe the anger of the marchers, who are demanding an end to Mexico’s system of crony capitalism, in which corruption, impunity, bribery have been institutionalized.

In the coastal city of Acapulco (Guerrero’s largest city) and in Chilpancingo (Guerrero’s capital), normalistas and teachers, members of the dissident teachers union CETEG, have occupied federal and state court buildings. Also in Chilpancingo, thousands of students blocked the main connecting highway into Acapulco.

The case of the missing normalistas has become an issue of international significance. On Wednesday, scores of demonstrators marched in front of the Mexican Consulate in New York City with their hands painted blood red. Other demonstrations took place in Argentina, Chile, Netherlands, the United Kingdom and France. At the University of Puerto Rico (UPR) in Río Piedras, students and professors rallied in solidarity with Mexico City’s day of protest.

The Peña Nieto administration is faced with a severe social and political crisis. The president himself was slow to respond to the September 26 massacre and more concerned with the neo-liberal pro-business reforms that he and his partners in the “Mexico Pact”—his own ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), the right-wing National Action Party (PAN) and the PRD—have been pushing through. Taken by surprise by the uprising of students and education workers, the president is now proposing a second “pact” within the political establishment, supposedly to attend to the security needs of the country.

This so called “security pact,” promoted by Peña Nieto, had been proposed by CEOs Claudio Gonzalez, of Kimberley Clark Mexico and Sergio Argüelles of papermaker FINSA Mexico, as well as others at the 12th annual Mexico Business Summit last month in Querétaro, Mexico. According to Gonzalez, the fallout from the Guerrero massacre has to be seen as “a great opportunity” to confront “decisively” the problem of corruption and impunity. At the same time, the Kimberly Clark executive cautioned that whatever is done will take a long time, since this problem (corruption impunity) derives from the sale and consumption of drugs.

That the purpose of the new pact is to give greater powers to the federal police and military was made explicit by the governor of Aguascalientes State, who called for a centralized command and an efficient justice system.

Wednesday’s march in México City was dominated by both outrage over the vicious attack on the normalistas and demands of protesters for a transformation of Mexican society. “Another country is possible and we are here to build it!” said one banner; many other signs denounced the “state.” This struggle can find a way forward only through a turn to the working class on the basis of a socialist program.