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Ayotzinapa,  Tlatlaya,  Polytecnico,  Neoliberalismo  and  Narcotrafic  

James  Creechan,  Independent  researcher,  Toronto  

President Enrique Peña Nieto's dreams for Mexico transformed into a horrible nightmare. His and Grupo Atlacomulco's vision of a modern neo-liberal Mexico slithered down a vortex of violence and protest a few short weeks after his global tour boasting about major legislative reforms and extending invitations to invest in a new Mexico. Such was Enrique Peña Nieto's hubris that he offered to Mexican troops for deployments as global peacekeepers during his stop at the UN. In retrospect, everyone should have seen the signs of a bubbling discontent within Mexico, but most hot spots had been contained by a three-pronged government strategy based on 1) obfuscation, silence and disinformation —the tardy release of statistics about violence and a non-compliance for all requests for information, 2) a well-orchestrated public relations campaign intended to convince the world — primarily investors— that Mexico had things under control, and 3) a security policy emphasizing the arrest of "well-known" capos and a broad strategy seeking the fragmentation of large criminal organizations into smaller "cartelitos". By the end of September, three seemingly unrelated crises converged to unleash holy hell within Mexico and direct the wrath of ordinary Mexicans AND also the outside world against Enrique Peña Nieto's vision of a modern Mexico.

The first blow was delivered by the reports and photographs from the Associated Press and Esquire Magazine (Mexico edition) that offered irrefutable evidence that a squadron of the Mexican army had massacred 22 young people at Tlatalaya near Ecatepec, Mexico State. The reports were widely circulated in traditional media outlets and more widely on the internet; they documented a cold-blooded execution that was later staged over a two hour period to make it appear that there had been an ambush and a fire-fight with narcotraffickers.

The second blow to the administration emerged when student protests at Mexico's Polytecnico University (IPN) showed signs of exploding into something more than commemorative marches. Student leaders had already been planning to march on the 46th anniversary of the massacre of a previous generation of students at Tlatelolco on October 2. Previous marches had been peaceful and uneventful, but there were concerns that the 2014 version might escalate into more disruptive protests after PNI administrators imposed changes on the curriculum and modified graduation requirements. Student leaders, and professors, argued that those modifications had been imposed to conform to a neo-liberal vision that came directly from Los Pinos. The EPN administration and Los Pinos became so concerned about potential violence that Interior Secretary Miguel Angel Osorio Chong took a nearly unprecedented step of agreeing to negotiate directly with student leaders.

Figure 1 : from the cover of Edition 313 of El Chamuco y hijos de Averno

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The third crisis, and eventually the most incendiary, was the execution of 6 young men in Iguala, Guerrero on September 26, followed immediately by the disappearance of 43 student teachers from a Normal School in Ayotzinapa. On the 26th, Iguala municipal police killed 3 students, 2 footballers and another person when they machine-gunned a white mini-van. The police claimed occupants had stolen the van and represented a threat to their safety. One of the dead was left laying face-up in the street inhumanely desecrated— his skin peeled away from his head and eyes gouged out.

In the early morning, at least 50 students marched in protest against the shooting, and mysteriously vanished into thin air. Video suggests that white-unmarked vehicles sped away with young men visible into the cargo area. Some of the missing reappeared over the next few days and reported that local police had forced their companions to march up narrow trails into the hills where they were hunted like dogs reported one of the lucky ones who escaped (http://www.proceso.com.mx/?p=384120 “Nos cazaron como perros”, dice un estudiante que logró escapar de sus captores). Faced with a barrage of national and international outrage, the Federal Procurador Jesus Murillo Karam deployed the newly established Mexican Police Force (La Gendarmarie) and invited Argentinian forensics investigators to come to the area as investigators. Four hillside gravesites (las fosas) were discovered shortly afterwards, and 17 bodies recovered from one of them. Initial reports indicated that victims had been shot in the head, thrown into a hole filled with branches, and incinerated with diesel fuel. An additional 11 bodies were located in other 3 graves, and all 28 were sent to Mexico City for forensic testing. Since early of October, there have additional reports of new gravesites and mangled bodies and bones– but no confirmation that any of the remains belong to the missing 43 normalistas. The fact that the remains are not the missing students provides little consolation – they are all unknown victims of a horrendous murder who were unceremoniously discarded in a part of Mexico where there was little evidence of any government control.

The mayor of Iguala (José Luis Abarca Velasquez) and his wife fled on the 27th, and a massive Interpol manhunt undereway. Twenty-two police from Iguala, and another 8 from a neighbouring town (Cocula) have been arrested and charged with murdering the 6 young men on Sept. 26th and for complicity in the disappearance of 43 students on the 27th. At least one of the arrested led investigators to the gravesites in the hills, and others claimed that they were acting on orders of the mayor. Many of the arrested are thought to be "halcones" (spies) and "sicarios" (hitmen) on the payroll (nomina) of "los Guerreros Unidos" – a gang working directly with the Beltran-Leyva cartel to preserve control of an important drug plaza. Guerrero governor Angel Aguirre, has also been linked to the Beltran-Leyvas, and many believe that he was also directly involved in approving the disappearance of the 43 normalistas.

There have been large protests at most Mexican University and Preparatory Schools, and there have been public marches in more than 50 Mexican cities across 7 different States. The world has also taken notice and there unprecedented news coverage of the Tlatlaya and Iguala events and continuing coverage of the protest marches by all international news bureaus. The European Union has threatened to delay or supend the trade talks that Enrique Peña Nieto hoped to kick-started via his European trip. (http://mexicovoices.blogspot.ca/2014/10/iguala-guerrero-mexico-european.html ) Instead of dealing with the murder of students and the disappearance of 43 others head on, the Mexican government has resorted to a traditional 3 pronged strategy of containment –

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obfuscate, undertake public-relations blitzes, and arrange for show-boat arrests. Enrique Peña Nieto has said nothing substantive relating to the 43 missing normalistas nor the massacre at Tlatlaya, and his silence is deafening (Las Masacres y Silencio por Jorge Ramos Avalos http://www.reforma.com/aplicaciones/editoriales/editorial.aspx?id=38467 ) . In the aftermath of unprecedented negative world press, the secretary of the exterior organized a campaign to minimize the impact by organizing special debriefings for selective foreign press agencies and reporters in Mexican embassies and consulates around the world. ("Descrédito mundial... y contraofensiva diplomática" http://hemeroteca.proceso.com.mx/?page_id=278958&a51dc26366d99bb5fa29cea4747565fec=384496) . Even the "old-faithful" strategy of arrest a big boss was pulled out of the hat. But the "capture two big fish capos" has failed to stem the bad press or quell dissent or control growing unrest or lead to the conclusion that the government was on top of the problem. First, the government announced the capture of Hector "El H" Beltran Leyva — the leader of the notoriously violente Beltran Leyva Cartel— in colonial San Miguel Allende. But, the credibility of the government was undermined because of who was arrested with Beltran Leyva: Hector was with Germán Goyeneche Ortega who was himself arrested as a chief financial officer of the cartel. This created another public relations problem for the Peña Nieto government because Germán Goyeneche is not only the scion of an elite Aguascalientes family, he was also an active member of the Partido Verde —a proxy and close political offshoot of the PRI. The arrest of Hector Beltran Leyva brought down one of their own and reminded the world that the wealthy and the elite are intimately involved in the drug trade.

Perhaps to counteract the bad press that linked Mexico's elite to the cartels and violence, the PGR also captured a long retired capo -Vicente "El Viceroy" Beltran Leyva in bloodless take-down in Torreon, Coahuila. Ten years earlier, this would have been big news, but those-in-the know realize that El Viceroy's days as head of the Juarez Cartel were long past and the Juarez cartel has been in the hands of others for at least 5 years (Controlan el Cártel los hijos de Amado Carrillo http://diario.mx/El_Paso/2014-10-11_3b8e1540/controlan-el-cartel-los-hijos-de-amado-carrillo&ref=1/ ). To summarize, the three standard strategies of control favoured by the PRI and Enrique Peña Nieto have done nothing to quell the growing unrest, and it in fact the reliance on those three techniques is only adding fuel to the flames of discontent and dissent.

Can the Peña Nieto government and Los Pinos wait for protest to go away? Are those protests and palpable anger a sign of a real and expectation of change?

At this point, it is too early to speak of long term outcomes – especially since there is no effective political opposition to the PRI at any government level within Mexico. The PRD is fractured and discredited by the internal infighting and the MORENA vs. los Chuchos grilla, and PAN has no credibility following Felipe Calderón's disastrous failure to control the cartels. The protest does appear to be spontaneous and leaderless – with perhaps the exception of the inspiration provided by Mexican journalist and the power of social media, and the moral leadership of social activists like Padre Alejandro Solalinde and the poet Javier Sicilia. But it is clear that the traditional PRI strategies of control are not powerful enough to stop the protests in their tracks. The statistics on murder, executions and disappearances may unavailable, but the continuous discovery of graves filled with bodies reminds everyone of the

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atrocities in more powerful way than statistics could ever convey. The silence of the government, the failure to articulate a clear strategy, the inability to locate a missing mayor, the sheer incompetence and failure to locate 43 bodies or missing students, the irrefutable evidence that it IS the "controllers" who are doing the killing, and the sheer number and size of protests are widespread are suggest that this will not disappear quickly. But, many in Mexico are collectively holding their breath and praying that the PRI will not resort to using the 1968 strategy of Gustavo Diaz Ordaz, Luis Echeverria and the army generals that led to the killings at Tlatelolco. One incident last week on the Autopista de Sol connecting Mexico City to Acapulco came very close to producing the same bloody outcome as Iguala and Tlatlelolco. State police mistakenly fired on a van that was clearly marked as a Tec de Monterrey vehicle, and wounded a student passenger— a German national. (Policías ministeriales balean a alumnos del Tec en Guerrero Un joven de origen alemán resultó herido después de que los uniformados atacaron a los estudiantes ya que los confundieran con delincuentes. http://www.milenio.com/estados/atacan_policias_estudiantes_Tec-herido_estudiante_aleman_Tec-Kim_Fritz_Fran_Kaiser_0_389961072.html ) Hugo Aboites, rector at UACM, writes in La Jornada that the tragic events of Tlatlaya, Iguala and the public uprisings have become intimately connected and are unified as a symbol of all that is wrong with Mexico. He also argues that the protests are a sign that the public is weary of the corruption, the impunity, the inaction of the government, and deeply disgusted with the dismissal of public concerns by the government. But he also expresses his fear that even though the level of anger is powerful and growing, it may not make one iota of difference. (http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2014/10/18/opinion/019a1pol De Ayotzinapa al Politécnico)

"Ayotzinapa está haciendo converger, en una corriente cada vez más poderosa, cuestiones que son parte de la material histórica fundamental de la que está hecho este país. Esa modesta normal rural, entre cerros secos y agrestes, es hoy, al mismo tiempo, muchas cosas. Ayotzinapa es parte innegable del legado campesino e indígena con siglos de explotación y marginación. Es parte extrema del desamparo que vive la mayoría de los jóvenes mexicanos, circundados, además, de hostiles políticas sociales: poca escuela, menos empleo y un ambiente de persecución y agresión desbordada. Que en medio de la indignación nacional por la represión en Iguala un destacamento de la policía estatal de Guerrero decida ametrallar un vehículo con estudiantes del Tec de Monterrey en plena Autopista del Sol (y herir a uno de ellos) habla de que a pesar de su intensidad las protestas no han logrado cambiar un milímetro las intolerables prácticas policiacas." "Ayotzinapa is bringing together —in a wave that is growing stronger by the day — questions that are linked to Mexico's fundamental material history and which have made our country. This modest rural teacher college, located between dry hills and rough terrain, is today at the same time many things. Ayotzinapa is an indelible part of our campesino and indigenous past and has experienced centuries of exploitation and marginalization. It is part of the extreme helplessness experienced by the majority of young Mexicanos, surrounded by hostile social politics: little schooling, less work and an environment of persecution and unbounded aggression. And who could imagine that even in the middle of this widespread national indignation about the repression in Iguala there would be a local squadron of Guerrero State police who could think that

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they could shoot (machine-gun) another car with students from Tec de Monterrey right on the major Autopista del Sol (and wound one of them) is evidence that nothing will change one iota in spite of the extent and weight of such intolerable police practices" (translation by JC).

The level of protest is powerful and impressive, but so is the intransigence of those in charge and those who stand to lose their position of privilege and impunity – and they are the ones sho have the weapons and the legal authority to react with impunity. This only points to a continuation of a dangerous tension and the potential for frightening responses.

October 18, 2014