Mexican students on why they burn down, not sit-in

While recent protest movements around the world have generally tended to peaceful – see Hong Kong and Ferguson —  in southern Mexico, protesters are burning buildings, throwing rocks and hijacking trucks in response to the  recent disappearance of 43 students.

But while the images coming out of southern Mexico stand in stark contrast to the global trend, they can be seen clearly through the prism of a specific radical tradition born in a place where the rule of law has been undermined by decades of corruption, political violence, government neglect and pervasive poverty.

The Ayotzinapa rural teachers college, where the missing students are from, has a long leftist tradition of protest and dissent, going back to the 1960s and continuing through days of the “perfect dictatorship” of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI). One of the school’s more famous alumnus, Lucio Cabanas, was a guerrilla fighter killed by the Mexican army in 1974. In recent times, student protests have tended to focus on more local concerns, such as improved living conditions at the school, where the sleeping quarters look more like cell blocks than college dorms.  The disappearance of the 43 students, allegedly at the hands of the local government working in conjunction with a drug cartel, has changed the dynamic.

“This is a very militant group that has been fighting the government since the 60s or 70s, and they have long history of resistance,” said Vidal Romero, a professor at the ITAM university in Mexico City. “It’s not going to be easy at all for the government to quiet down this group, especially now because they have a claim that is shared by the whole country.”

Indeed, there have been peaceful protests throughout the country organized by other civic and student groups, including a massive march in Mexico City on Oct. 8.

Part of what has caused the entire country to rally around the students is what this case symbolizes: the investigation into the missing students has turned a harsh spotlight on a festering problem in Mexico, where local police are often controlled by drug gangs. For the Ayotzinapa students, they aren’t  protesting against one particular group of corrupt officials, but rather  against an entire corrupt system that directly attacked them.

“Here we say that the government isn’t really the elected officials, it’s actually organized crime,”  said Angel Nery, a student leader a the Ayotzinapa rural teachers’ college. “The government here in Guerrero is very involved with drug traffickers. There isn’t a government but a narco-government.”