Obama Should Not Prop Up Mexico’s Corrupt President

Obama Should Not Prop Up Mexico’s Corrupt President
By Laura Carlsen | 5 / January / 2015

President Obama has nothing to gain, and much to lose, by propping up Mexico’s corrupt President, Peña Nieto. Peña Nieto will be in Washington on Tuesday, seeking to bolster his support in the United States as it rapidly unravels in his own country.



Protests over the murder of six people and the disappearance of 43 students from a rural teachers’ college in Ayotzinapa continue, both inside Mexico and among Latino communities in the United States. Demonstrations attended by hundreds of thousands of Mexicans began with the demand to bring the students back alive and have now broadened into a call for the president’s resignation.

The students were last seen being taken away by the local police of Iguala, Guerrero on the night of September 26. Three were killed when police opened fire on them without warning, and the rest were allegedly handed over to gang members. Protesters call the massacre a “crime of the state.”

The mayor of Iguala, José Luis Abarca, is being held for ordering the attacks and for colluding with the regional drug cartel, Guerreros Unidos. Feeling the heat, the state’s governor, Angel Aguirre Rivero, resigned on October 23. Civil society groups and a Twitter campaign are calling for an investigation of Aguirre for complicity in the crime and for protecting Abarca.

Nor are national authorities exempt. Recent evidence shows that the Mexican Army and Federal Police had knowledge of the incident before, during, and after it occurred. But although they were based just moments away, they did not protect the students. There is also evidence to suggest that they were directly involved in the crime.

Since the killings, the Peña Nieto administration has fumbled along in what appears to be a massive cover-up. The president first insisted that the crime was under the state government’s jurisdiction, despite the fact that transnational criminal organizations were implicated and that international law considers enforced disappearances “by their very nature a crime against humanity.”

More:
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/14307