Tuesday, April 26, 2016

New Yorker series on the 43 disappeared students in Mexico

My readers may or may not remember the case of the 43 students from the Ayotzinapa school who were ambushed by police and other masked gunmen in Guerrero, Mexico in late 2014, and whose subsequent disappearance has still not been explained to anyone's satisfaction.  I'm linking to an article by Francisco Goldman about the Ayotzinapa case.  It is the first in a (I believe) seven-part series that recently concluded.  The article layout isn't that convenient for reading through the whole series, but if you click on the author's name, you can see all of his recent long-format articles, most of the older ones relating to this heinous crime.

The Ayotzinapa case really affected me personal, because the student victims had a similar profile to the students I used to work with in my university job in Colombia.  They are children of peasants looking on the one hand to improve their lot in life through education, but on the other hand they don't want to leave behind or forget their communities, so they train to be teachers that can return to where they're from and help improve life for other children.  It is a noble aspiration that we should all be supporting, not reviling.  The fact that such students often subscribe to a radical leftist ideology is natural; if you are the product of a stiflingly unjust system and you receive a critical education, of course you are going to understand that your impoverishment and that of an entire population corresponds to an active process of exclusion and oppression by the powerful.  In any case, someone's ideology should have no impact on the value we ascribe to their life; no one deserves to be attacked, murdered, or disappeared, nor to even live under the threat of such treatment.

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