Powerful Photos Capture Student Protests In Mexico
While the world has focused its attention on
the pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong, there's another student
movement gaining steam on the other side of the world.
The unfolding protests gripping Mexico began in the small town of
Iguala, in the southwest region of Guerrero state, where the
disappearance of 43 student teachers on the night of Sept. 26 has
sparked outrage amid allegations of collaboration between local police
and organized crime.
"Iguala is just one example of the level of decay in state and
municipal security institutions," Duncan Wood, director of the Mexico
Institute at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, D.C., told the Washington Post.
Witnesses belong to a local gang, which federal authorities claim has
infiltrated the local police department. The police apprehended 17
students from a local teachers college, according to the gang. They were
then escorted through a rugged hill, killed and buried.
The 17 students are among the 43 who disappeared in late September.
More than 22,000 people have gone missing in Mexico in the last eight years, according to a list of names the Mexican government holds. Local police claimed that
28 corpses recently exhumed from a mass grave did not belong to any of
the missing victims from Iguala's teacher's college.
