Relatives of 43 disappeared Mexican students called out former Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo and the U.S. government, accusing them of complicity in state-sanctioned terrorism in their country.
The three family members of two of the missing students and a teacher from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers College in the state of Guerrero, Mexico, along with members of the Yale Divinity School, Unidad Latina en Accion and the Mexico Solidarity Committee of Connecticut Thursday held an ecumenical service at a makeshift altar featuring a Virgin Mary with her fist raised.
They held the service near a tree, just at the edge of where Zedillo’s office is on Prospect Street, offering prayers and singing songs for the students who disappeared last September.
They called on the U.S. government to stop enabling state-sanctioned killings and kidnappings in Mexico by facilitating aid and training for Mexican police and military. They also called on universities, Yale specifically, to stop harboring the power brokers, namely Zedillo, who they said allowed such terrorism to happen on their watch.
Zedillo, in an e‑mailed response, said the kidnapping was a tragedy and that he was not complicit in any way.
The parents were in town this week as part of a caravan to raise awareness about the killings and kidnappings that took place in Iquala, Mexico. There are three groups of parents traveling to 30 cities in 19 states and the District of Columbia. They joined a protest and march in solidarity with New Haven activists Tuesday against police brutality and state-sanctioned violence. (Read about that here.)
Protestors highlighted the 1997 massacre of 45 people attending a prayer meeting in Acteal, a city in the Mexican state of Chiapas, who were killed by a paramilitary group. At the time, many held the ruling political party, the Institutional Revolutionary Party, responsible for the killing. Zedillo, who was a member of that political party, was president at the time of the killing. Protestors said they still hold Zedillo responsible for those killings, and allege that it was his strategy during his presidency to use the paramilitary “to do his dirty work.”
They said Zediilo’s policies have been continued by the country’s current president, Enrique Peña Nieto, and that’s why their family members attending the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers College in the state of Guerrero were attacked by police last September. In addition to the 43 students who have vanished, 25 others were injured and six killed.
Markeshia Ricks Photo
Clemente Rodríguez (pictured left), father of disappeared student Christian Alfonso Rodríguez, said that the reason that the students were attacked and why the government is dragging its feet about telling the families where they are is because they wanted to better themselves, and educate the people of their community.
He said his son, who was 19 at the time he went missing, wanted to become an agronomist. “I’m not going to rest until my son and the 43 are back,” he said. “Their desks are still empty and we have the hope and faith that those desks will be filled by the 43.”
Anayeli Guerrero de la Cruz (seen in the above video), sister of Jhosivani Guerrero de la Cruz, a 20-year-old student who is among the missing 43, said the U.S. government is complicit in the kidnappings because of its practice of sending aid to the Mexican government. She said the money is supposed to be used to fight drug trafficking and organized crime, but instead it is used to bolster the police and military forces that oppress the people.
“The U.S. is especially guilty of welcoming and giving hospice to murderers like Zedillo,” she said. “I’m not asking you as citizens, I’m asking you as brothers and sisters to raise your voices and struggle together. After all it’s not the people doing this, but the government.”
Felipe de la Cruz Sandoval called Zedillo “a rat” and he said the Mexican people have paid dearly for not standing up to him nearly 20 years ago when the people were killed in Acteal. De la Cruz Sandoval is a teacher at the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers College and his son was among the students attacked, but ultimately spared the day the other students went missing.
He mocked Zedillo’s work as the director of the Yale University Center for the Study of Globalization as “a project putting in place a system of exploitation pitting man against man.”
“The day is coming where he is going to be in jail,” De la Cruz Sandoval said, “because it’s not possible, year after year, to keep implementing this terror on the people of Mexico.”
In an emailed response Zedillo said the kidnapping of the students was “very sad” and “one among numerous tragedies brought about by the criminal activities of drug-related organized crime in Mexico, particularly since 2006.” But he pushed back against allegations that he and the government he presided over from 1994 to 2000 some how contributed to those crimes. He said such allegations were false and slanderous, and that his administration did not create or tolerate any paramilitary group.
“During the administration over which I presided, and after, there was never an accusation of corruption against myself or members of my cabinet,” he said. He said nearly 15 years after his presidency a number of “serious, well-researched analyses” of his time in office “confirm that those calumnious allegations are inconsistent with the historical records.”
Zedillo is no stranger to being protested. In October, protestors gathered outside his office to protest the immunity he has been granted by the U.S. Department of State and Yale. A lawsuit was filed against him alleging that he had a hand in covering up the 1997 massacre. The lawsuit made it to the U.S. Supreme Court, but that court declined to hear the case.
