43 deaths and a cry to kill corruption
The 43 students kidnapped and murdered in Mexico’s poor, rural south in September was outrageous enough. But to learn that the local mayor and police might be responsible?
That appears to be a tipping point in Mexico, sending people into the streets in protests that now, months later, are only getting larger and more widespread. Last week, there were vigils in Tijuana and San Diego, and on Thursday, Revolution Day in Mexico, protests broke out in Mexico City and around the country.
Are outrage and moral disgust — the calls of “Ya me canse!” (I’ve had enough!) — enough to change a nation’s course?
Experts on Mexico say the murders in Iguala, Guerrero, have made people look inward, questioning how the country has tolerated violence, dirty politics, and crime without punishment for decades.
“I suspect that this will be a turning point that will force policymakers to pay greater attention to police and judicial reform and to anti-corruption measures, but citizens are clearly far ahead of the political parties on this issue right now, and it may take a while for the politicians to realize that the discontent isn’t going to go away without concrete responses from government,” said Andrew Selee, of the Wilson Center and a Mexico scholar.
“This is no longer criminal violence,” said Gema Santamaria, a fellow at UC San Diego’s Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies. “This is the state being corrupted and being complicit with the reproduction of criminal violence.”
Others are not persuaded that anything fundamental will change because of this tragedy, however deeply the country was rattled.
“How many innocent lives is it going to take to create enough outrage and social mobilization to provoke a real change,” asked David Shirk, a scholar specializing in Mexico security, who teaches at the University of San Diego.
Why Iguala is different
According to the government, the students were kidnapped by police on the orders of Jose Luis Abarca, then-mayor of Iguala, who didn’t want them disrupting a speech being given by his wife. The students were then handed over to a local drug gang, authorities believe.
About two weeks ago, garbage bags were found that contained dozens of burned human bones, ashes and other remains that could belong to the missing students. There have been dozens of arrests, including Abarca and his wife, but investigators still don’t know exactly what happened to the students.
For years, two categories of violence plagued Mexico: political and criminal. Politicians kidnapped opponents, repressed students and made dissidents disappearance. That was the violence of the “old PRI,” said Santamaria, referring to the Partido Revolucionario Institucional, the party that ruled Mexico for decades.
Such violence was distinct from the criminal violence, which was funded and executed by cartels and gangs.
While the two have blended before — increasingly so, according to Mexico experts — Guerrero is the most blatant example of this new hybrid. “Violence has been morphing in the last few years, and Iguala is the most dramatic and clear, loud expression of this transition,” Santamaria said.
Another difference: the crime is so outrageous that it’s challenging the Mexican public’s tolerance for accepting the government’s rhetoric.
“With this event in Iguala, everything exploded,” said Alfonso Hernandez Valdez, a professor of political science in Guadalajara and a UCSD fellow. “Now it is not enough to change the narrative, you have to change the actual strategy to fight organized crime.”
A third shift: Santamaria said the Guerrero killings signal a less centralized form of political power and violence. In the past, it was the president who would order the killings, she said. Now it’s “political characters at the local level” -- in this case, a mayor -- making these gruesome commands. And that has people horrified.
Finally, Shirk said the death of innocent students to whom many Mexicans could relate has further fanned the flames of indignation.
Five or 10 years ago, Shirk said, “there was a perception that this was bad guys against bad guys. What people are beginning to realize and get concerned about in Mexico -- and what is important about this case -- is that people are realizing it’s bad guys against ordinary people. There’s a higher degree of sympathy and concern for victims of violence in Mexico.”
Such sympathy means people who once turned a blind eye are now getting angry.
Turning point?
Shirk said protests have been more frequent and intense, compared with previous tragedies, where “you didn’t see march after march on a daily basis. Multiple marches, in a single day, in Mexico City.”
Yet there have been other tragedies. Families wiped out. Scores of immigrants mass murdered. Are these latest deaths so outrageous that they could provoke change, and not just talk, in Mexico?
Shirk said that given the country’s track record -- tragedy, then protest, but no lasting upheaval -- it’s unlikely.
Real change would have to happen over months and years, in the ways people vote, and in the way they support after-school and gang intervention programs, he said. Likewise, he said, the influential Roman Catholic church would have to become more involved with combating the social ills that lead to criminality and denouncing these crimes, not just from a far, but at the pulpit level.
Essentially, real change would come when a large swath of the society pivots toward a proactive mentality about gangs, corruption, consequences and security, he said.
Hernandez Valdez said that students are generally unhappy, and Iguala is catalyzing their anger.
“For many young people, the country they are seeing, it’s not the country they’d want to live in, in like 10, 20 years from now. I think that’s what’s behind many of the social demonstrations,” he said. One test of the long-term impact will be if adults and working people get more involved in the student-led protests.
Mexico experts do say the situation is disrupting the country’s political structure. On the left, the killings and cover-up “provoked a big crisis … because the mayor of Iguala was from the leftist party,” and party leaders apparently knew about the mayor’s ties to organized crime before the election but still supported him, Hernandez Valdez said.
On the right, President Enrique Peña Nieto’s already low approval ratings have suffered because he has appeared indifferent.
“This is already a very vulnerable presidency and government. (Guerrero) just added gasoline to the flames, unfortunately, literally. This is a bad moment for the Peña Nieto administration,” Shirk said.
Hernandez Valdez said he hopes the country can finally find a good way forward, politically and otherwise, after decades of difficulties.
“It is not that (Mexicans) don’t like democracy. It’s that democracy has not yet delivered the promised land, I would say. We have been living in an electoral democracy for several years now, but the social conditions have not changed much,” he said. “This is an opportunity to start thinking that democracy alone cannot solve all problems.” Economic and social change are also paramount, he said.