More smoke and mirrors: State apathy towards enforced disappearance of students outrages Mexico
Date: 5 May 2015
On 26 September 2014, students from a rural teacher-training college in Ayotzinapa crossed the Mexican state of Guerrero for Iguala to protest against education conditions. Forty-six of them never returned. Two were killed that night in a clash with police, along with three bystanders; a third was found dead the next day with his face flayed; forty-three were abducted by the police. In the intervening months, the charred remains of only one of the students have been identified from the dozens of mass graves since discovered around Iguala. The other forty-two students remain without trace.
This horrific event stands in stark contrast to the Mexico that President Enrique Peña Nieto has been promoting worldwide since he took office in 2012. Earlier in 2014, Time Magazine featured Peña Nieto on its cover under the headline, ‘Saving Mexico,’ crediting Mexico’s position as ‘the hot new emerging market’ in part due to his government’s reforms. Yet these reforms, as Mexican academic Sergio Aguayo points out, have been largely limited to the economy: ‘They don’t touch things like human rights, corruption and security.’
The enforced disappearance of the students in Iguala belies the administration’s attempts to shift Mexico’s international image from a state besieged by the drugs war to one ripe for investment. Domestic and international speculation as to the fate of the students continues to be rife, and reports are contradictory, so that definitively establishing the series of events is, so far, impossible. In our view, the government’s discourse about that fateful night builds on a tradition of deliberately downplaying the state’s role in human rights violations.
The official version, presented by the Attorney General, is that corrupt police handed the students over to a drugs gang, who murdered the students and burned their bodies. Parents and their supporters question this account, particularly as they interpret it as a way for the Federal Government to wash its hands of the incident despite indications of federal police and military involvement in the case.
President Peña Nieto’s actions in the early days – or rather inaction, as he left the Guerrero authorities to handle the investigation while he travelled to China and Australia – have also been read as signs of apathy towards the disappeared and their community. Police reforms he has since proposed have been critiqued as feeble, and the actions of his administration dismissed as ‘smoke and mirrors.’
Such a ‘smoke and mirrors’ approach is a well-known tactic of the party in power, the Partido de la Revolución Institucional (PRI). The PRI ruled Mexico for over 70 years. In 2012, the PRI regained power following a two-term interregnum that many had hoped would mark a lasting transition to democracy. Famously called the ‘perfect dictatorship’, the PRI ruled Mexico for much of the twentieth century as a semi-authoritarian dictatorship in democracy’s clothing. Key to the appearance of democracy was control over the media – control that media owners were happy to cede as part of a cosy cash-for-coverage relationship with authorities.
This traditional media-state relationship began to founder in 1968 following what is known as the Tlatelolco Massacre, a violent clash between protesting students and the police that left protestors dead – how many is unclear. This clash occurred in the context of another moment when Mexico was basking in a successful international image, namely high economic growth as it planned to host the Summer Olympics. In the days following the Tlatelolco Massacre, newspapers loyal to the PRI published official accounts of a few dozen killed, even though the word on the street was that the death toll was in the hundreds. People took to the avenues, protesting the PRI’s brutal repression, and one of their chants was ‘Prensa vendida!’ (‘Sell-out press!).
Though the events of Iguala bear a chilling resemblance to the Tlatelolco Massacre (and, ironically, the students in Iguala were raising money to send a delegation to the annual Tlatelolco Massacre commemoration in Mexico City). The current government continues the tradition of damage control through managing the public image of Mexico – but a key difference between 1968 and 2014 is the existence of social media. On Twitter, hashtags have emerged condemning the Mexican state’s apathy. The most emblematic is #YaMeCansé, which translates as ‘I’m tired,’ or ‘I’ve had enough.’ These words were uttered by Mexico’s Attorney General, Jesus Murillo Karam, in an off-the-cuff comment at the end of a press conference on the events in Iguala. #YaMeCansé surfaced on Twitter within minutes, with users chiming in that they, too, are tired – of the violence, of the injustice, of the impunity, of the corruption.
Some suspect the State of trying to wrest control of the dialogue on social media, as well. After weeks as a top ten trending Twitter topic in Mexico, #YaMeCansé disappeared overnight on the 4th of December 2014. Many interpreted this as a ‘forced disappearance’ of the hashtag and the result of manipulation by bots. Some directly link these bots to the government, calling them ‘peñabots.’ Quite quickly, activists responded with #YaMeCanse2, then #YaMeCanse3 – by January 2nd, #YaMeCanse18 was trending.
Activists’ social media strategies are sophisticated; the group behind yamecanse.mx acts like a ‘media agency’ and draws on expertise from radio, TV, cinema, and advertising. They are harnessing social media to counter the government’s discourse – the ‘official narrative… that [allows the federal government] to evade its negligence and responsibility in the events,’ in the words of Luis Hérnandez Navarro, the opinion editor of Mexico’s La Jornada. Public counter-discourses were not so easy to express during the previous heyday of the PRI, when the party-state had a monopoly on symbolic power – the power to construct social reality – as exercised through the media.
Activists are realistic about the effects of their social media campaigns; one infographic circulating online states, ‘A hashtag is not going to change the country, but it demonstrates the desire to try.’ The visibility on Twitter of outrage about the events in Iguala, moreover, has called international attention to Mexico’s problems and has countered the government’s attempts to downplay them.
The #YaMeCanse movement is asking for global action to put pressure on all governments to suspend all treaties with Mexico until the authorities meet their obligations. Concerned Twitter users in the US have launched a solidarity hashtag, #UStired2, and protestors have mobilized across the nation. One of their demands is that the US stops providing military assistance in Mexico’s war on drugs. In Germany, the Green Party has proposed that the German government provide technical assistance for the Iguala investigation and ban arms sales to Mexico.
Here in the UK, 2015 is ‘The Year of Mexico in the UK and the UK in Mexico.’ This initiative claims that ‘these interlinked Years will leave a legacy that brings British and Mexican societies even closer together in the years ahead.’ This is a high-visibility moment for a government that cares deeply about its image. We urge citizens here to impel the Mexican state – including through our own representatives applying pressure to their colleagues in Mexico – for reforms in relation to corruption, accountability, transparency and effective prosecution in the Iguala case. Of necessity, these reforms should also address the context in which the atrocities and disappearances happened: one where the government is pushing to criminalize aspects of social protest in the midst of a public outrage about the 26,000 people that have disappeared and over 60,000 people that have been killed since 2006.
This article first appeared in the February issue of Red Pepper guest edited by Global Justice Now.
In May three people coming from Mexico to make connections over the grave human rights crisis there. One is a student that survived the brutal police attack at Ayotzinapa that left 43 other students missing, presumed dead. Another is a father of one of these disappeared students. There is a crowdfunding campaign to support this work and a fundraising event in London on May 14. In Cambridge there will be a fundraising event on May 15 organised by Cambridge-Mexico Solidarity.
Photo credit: Flickr/Montecruz Foto
