Forgive the offensiveness if any; however, the title fits the theme of the day:
"Marking a year since 43 disappeared; Against odds, seeking hope for Mexican students who vanished a year ago" by Paulina Villegas New York Times September 26, 2015
MEXICO CITY — The color of grief [is] shared by the families of the missing, who have come here this weekend from their farming villages to commemorate the disappearance of their sons, all students at a teachers’ college in Ayotzinapa, in rural Guerrero state. Snatched from buses by the local police in Iguala, the students were hauled off, handed to a violent drug gang, and never seen again.
Exactly one year later, the facts are as unknown as the whereabouts of the victims.
Buried, if you will (blog editor frowns at pun and grits teeth).
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The case struck a nerve with the Mexican public, a tragic distillation of the tangle of corruption and complicity that governs life in parts of Mexico.
It's a global epidemic if you want the truth.
In this case, the suspected involvement of local law enforcement and powerful drug gangs tore open the lives of 43 families whose children were studying to become teachers.
The CIA is the world's largest drug smuggler. It's an unacknowledged (in the pre$$) open secret.
An outside panel of experts that reviewed the investigation concluded that the night the students disappeared, federal police and army officers were aware of the violence and did not intervene.
On Saturday, thousands of people marched through the city to commemorate the tragedy. It was a long way from the protests a year earlier, when the parents were joined by half a million people, [but] while the march was smaller than past demonstrations, the case has served to publicize the thousands who have gone missing since Mexico’s drug war started in 2006....
More casualties of false wars.
The initial public anger over the missing students’ case has given way to a profound cynicism among Mexicans, one that has dragged the president’s poll numbers down to the lowest for any president in two decades. The case in Iguala marked the beginning of a slide in credibility for this government that has continued ever since.
That pretty much sums up my blogging experience, yeah.
Unrelated embarrassments in the last year have only heightened the cynicism, including the escape of the country’s most notorious drug lord from a maximum-security prison and questionable loans taken by the president’s wife from a state contractor.
You can take a stroll through Mexico at your own risk.
“Mexico is not the same after Iguala,” Luis Raúl González, president of Mexico’s National Human Rights Commission, said in a statement in July. “The tragedy transcends Guerrero.”
Mexico's 9/11?
On Thursday, the parents met with President Enrique Peña Nieto, asking him, among other things, to pursue the lines of investigation raised by the outside panel, which said it found no evidence to support the government’s conclusion that the students were killed by the drug gang and their bodies then burned to ashes in a garbage dump.
Nothing new there.
The president agreed to create a specialized prosecutors’ unit for missing people and reminded the parents that 111 people had been arrested in the case.
“We want the same thing, to know what happened to each of their sons and for there to be justice,” the president said in a Twitter post after the meeting....
You can read about a son who vanished with 42 other college students a year ago in southern Mexico.
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Also see: No Mexican Picnic in Egypt
