The recent massacre of six students of a rural teaching
college in Mexico by police, and 43 more who were handed over by the same
police to drug gangsters to complete the “job,” has been predictably blamed on
the seemingly non-stop drug violence in that country. But that allows it to be
too easy to ignore why those students
were killed. The drug gangsters who carried out the brutal kidnapping and
murder of the students have in some isolated instances become little more than
hired thugs working for the social, political and economic elite classes in
Mexico. In exchange for not targeting the power elites (and the police who
protect their interests against the impoverished masses), they look the other
way while the drug gangsters conduct their business, in exchange for “little”
favors—such as these killings.
To recap what actually occurred a month ago, the mayor and
his wife of the town of Iguala in the province of Guerrero, Jose Luis Abarca
and his wife Maria de los Angeles Pineda—note the irony of “of the Angels”—both
apparently ordered the police to “do away” students from the Raúl Isidro Burgos
Rural Teachers' College of Ayotzinapa who were traveling to Iguala and were
suspected of planning to “disrupt” a speech and a party in honor of the Pineda.
According to human rights activists, these two make Macbeth and Lady Macbeth
look like teetotalers. Abarca has in the past been accused of personally
participating in the murder of local activists last year, and having a hand in
the 2011 torture and killing of dozen of students from the same “radical”
teaching college for poor students. Pineda herself has personal ties to the
powerful local drug gang, the Guerreros Unidos, and her husband has cooperated
with the gang in return for those “favors.”
Apparently after police intercepted the students, they fired
on them, killing six. Police then arrested and detained another 43 before turning
them over to the gang, who herded the students onto two trucks so tightly there
was barely room to breathe. According to the testimony of three arrested gang
members, many of the students died of suffocation; those who survived were
taken to a landfill, killed, hurled into the pit, and set on fire. After
fourteen hours of burning, the remains were allegedly crushed, bagged, and
thrown into the San Juan River. Unfortunately for the perpetrators, instead of
simply going unnoticed or unremarked upon, the disappearance and killings of
the students sparked widespread and sometimes violent protests throughout the
country. Abarca and his wife disappeared for a few weeks, but have since been
arrested.
Of course this is shocking, but it isn’t as if we have never
seen such barbaric behavior apparently sanctioned by civil authority; it occurred
on even a greater scale in Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia. Although it can
be said that in Russia these were the actions of an extraordinarily paranoid
man who saw enemies everywhere, in Germany the public had at least a vague, but
purposefully unspoken, knowledge of what was going on, and people who considered
themselves the “epitome” of high civilization felt “justified” in committing
mass murder; mass graves were near many German communities, and the
crematoriums were less about covering up the evidence than a matter of the
“practical” use of available space. Rather than tens of thousands killed as in
Mexico, the numbers dead in Germany and Russia was in the tens of millions of
victims.
Today, such actions seldom fly under the media radar,
particularly with the reach of “social media.” Such actions today occurring on
our southern border seems beyond any moral comprehension, despite the mass
shootings occurring in this country seemingly on a “regular” basis. In Mexico
the drug violence is so commonplace that it is natural that those who have the
most to lose—upper class Euro-elites—have sought to nullify any potential harm
to themselves by coming to an “understanding” with the drug Cartels and gangs. Federal,
state and local authorities and law enforcement either do not have the will or
the “firepower” to deal with the gangs. Even when there is public testimony of
complicity between government officials and the gangs—such Abarca’s role in
previous student and activist murders—federal authorities are loath to
prosecute because their own hand are dirty.
But the problem in Mexico—and much of the rest of Latin
America—runs much deeper than that. The media tends to ignore that rampant
social and economic inequality that is at the heart of the dysfunctionality in
those countries. For example, the UK The
Guardian states that “The disappearance of the students has exposed both
the terrifying levels of violence in some parts of Mexico where organized
criminal groups dominate large territories, and the direct involvement of some
local authorities in the horror.” But just like in this country, lack of viable
employment opportunities and the proliferation of low-paying jobs makes
drug-dealing in some quarters a “preferable” job opportunity. Drug-related
violence in this country is not necessarily less common in Mexico, it is just more
“spread out,” and the media tends to focus on white female murder victims rather
than the much more common drug-related killings that occur in impoverished
neighborhoods.
And it goes beyond even that. Mexico’s social, political and
economic elites do not want social, political and economic equality in that
country. That is why those students were killed—because they were protesting
conditions in Mexico and they were seeking to be heard and achieve redress. In
a country like Mexico or Latin America generally, that is “revolutionary” talk;
this is why the late Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez and his “socialist”
agenda was demonized by the U.S. media (TIME
even wondered if he was “crazy”) and viewed with alarm both by the U.S.
government and the “elites” in his own country.
The hypocrisy of the power elites in Mexico and their desire
to crush efforts to upset the status quo was subtly revealed by Mexico’s
president, Enrique Peña Nieto—himself no “stranger” to accusations of
corruption—sought to avoid the real meaning behind the killing of the students
by suggesting that the prior disturbances to the status quo by the students
(who among other things claimed that there was less funding and fewer job
opportunities for students of rural colleges) and currently by protesters were
little different than the killings themselves in principle.
Nieto even suggested that the protesters against the
killings were not actually concerned about the killings themselves, but sought
to “exploit” them for “political reasons.” This is a highly ironic statement,
since the students who were killed were so for “political” reasons. Revolutions
have occurred in Mexico in the past, but actual “change” in the way the country
is structured is viewed by those in power as extremely dangerous and must be “contained”—even
to the point of enlisting the “help” of drug gangs.
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