Widespread Protests in Mexico in Name of 43 MIssing Students

Thousands of students across Mexico took part in demonstrations Wednesday to protest the disappearance of 43 education students last month in the southern city of Iguala.

Students from several schools at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, or UNAM, walked out of classes for the second consecutive day to protest the students’ disappearance.

Municipal police in Iguala, a city in the southern state of Guerrero, fired shots at a group of students who had commandeered a bus on Sept. 26, part of a night of violence that left six people, including three students from a teacher training college in the rural town of Ayotzinapa, dead; 25 others injured; and 43 trainee teachers missing.

The missing students were last seen being forced into police vans.

University students in Mexico City plan to march on Wednesday afternoon to the Attorney General’s Office to demand that progress be made in the investigation.

Federal prosecutors took over the investigation two weeks ago, but the missing students have not been found.

The 28 burned bodies found in five clandestine graves near Iguala were not those of any of the missing students, the AG’s office said Tuesday.

President Enrique Peña Nieto, meanwhile, said Wednesday that the violent incidents in Iguala were a “test for the institutions and society” in Mexico.

“Violence will never be the solution or the path to a better future,” Peña Nieto said during a ceremony in Mexico City.

Peña Nieto noted the “collective feeling of outrage, of pain and courage,” in Mexico since the events of Sept. 26.

This shows that “we are united, that we are in solidarity with the suffering of our brothers and, most importantly … that we reject violence … wherever it comes from,” the president said.

Published in Latino Daily News