Are Mexico’s Missing Students the Victims of U.S.-Backed Drug War?

Are Mexico’s Missing Students the Victims of U.S.-Backed Drug War?
Thursday, November 13, 2014

Amidst outrage in Mexico over the disappearance of 43 students, we look at the U.S. role in the country’s violence. According to the Center for International Policy, the United States has spent approximately $3 billion to fund the so-called war on drugs in Mexico. Since the war on drugs began under President Felipe Calderón in 2006, more than 100,000 people have been killed in drug-related violence. U.S. support includes $2.4 billion in taxpayer funds through the Merida Initiative, launched as a three-year aid program for Mexican security forces under the administration of George W. Bush. The Obama administration has extended the Merida Initiative "indefinitely." We are joined by Laura Carlsen, director of the Mexico City-based Americas Policy Program of the Center for International Policy, and journalist John Gibler.

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: We are talking about the disappearance of 43 students at the hands of the police in the southern Mexican state of Guerrero. This is Ernesto Che Cano, a first-year student at Ayotzinapa teachers college who survived the police attack. He’s responding to the claim by Attorney General Jesús Murillo Karam that the students were killed and their bodies burned by a local drug gang.

ERNESTO CHE CANO: (translated) He’s just doing this to wash his hands of the problem and appear that he’s doing something. It’s obvious that it is not that way. It is obvious that the attorney general just seems like he is looking for the compañeros. One thing that really bothers me is that this personality, the attorney general, Murillo Karam, and all the other people in charge of looking for my compañeros, are looking for them as if they are dead instead of alive. If the municipal police took away my compañeros while they were alive, why the heck are those people looking for them dead?

NERMEEN SHAIKH: That was Ernesto Che Cano, a first-year student at Ayotzinapa teachers college. This is Omar García, another student from the school who survived the police attack.

OMAR GARCÍA: (translated) We hope the actions get more intense, so that it is not just all talk. We need real action. We don’t have anything against the buildings or the street pavement. We have everything against the institutions, against the government structure. We want to change this country. We want people who are within these institutions to be honest people, people from our communities, not just people who are there for their own interests. Right now, they are just making it a political issue, pitting one against another, saying, "You knew the mayor," "I went to a dance with him," or "You went out drinking with him." All are involved in some way, including we as a society. We have been accomplices for closing our eyes and keeping silent. We have to end this complicity.

AMY GOODMAN: Special thanks to Andalusia Knoll for this footage, as she is in Guerrero covering these protests. John Gibler with us, author, independent journalist in Mexico, author of Mexico Unconquered, as well as, more recently, To Die in Mexico: Dispatches from Inside the Drug War. As you hear these students talking, the students of the teachers college that was attacked, we still don’t understand—on the day that this happened, why did the mayor have the police round up these students? What was going on that day in town?

More:
http://www.democracynow.org/2014/11/13/are_mexicos_missing_students_the_victims