New posters ask Mexican president: 'What if it were your kids?'
Photographs of the Mexican President’s son and stepdaughter are being plastered on walls across Mexico City with messages asking how the case of the missing 43 students would have turned out differently if they had been related to the country’s rich and powerful families.
“If they took me alive? Would you want me back alive?,” reads the poster, invoking the popular protest slogan: vivos se los llevaron, vivos los queremos (they were taken alive, we want them back alive).
It’s not clear who is behind the poster campaign. The images of the street posters were first uploaded to Facebook by user Daniela Buenfil who spotted them during last weekend’s one year anniversary Ayotzinapa march. The images now appear to be spreading across social media.
“This idea seems like a punch to impunity in Mexico, where justice narratives are completely different between the rich and powerful, and the rest of the population,” Buenfil told Fusion. “What if these were the kids of rich and famous people? We would probably already have an answer.”
On Sept. 26, 2014 a group of student protesters from the Ayotzinapa teachers’ trainee college were kidnapped by police and handed over to a criminal gang that allegedly killed and burned all of their bodies, according to the official version of events. Back in January the government declared with “legal certainty” that all the students were dead. Families of the victims have challenged the government’s account with protests, leading to an independent investigation that has raised more questions than answers.
For many, the Ayotzinapa tragedy laid bare the country’s weak rule of law and the apparent narco-infiltration of some government agencies. According to the official version of events, the mayor of the city of Iguala and his wife ordered the attack on the students.
Some people believe justice might have come about swiftly if the disappeared had been the children of Mexico’s wealthy and influential families, rather than impoverished kids from a leftist school in a rural state.
The new protest posters also include the photographs of the children of some of Mexico’s most popular television anchors.
Neither government officials nor the anchors have publicly reacted to the posters.