Missing Students Case Also Highlights Racism in Mexico

Missing Students Case Also Highlights Racism in Mexico
By Emilio Godoy

MEXICO CITY, Jan 29 2015 (IPS) - The mother tongue of Celso García, a 51-year-old indigenous Mexican, is Mixteca. As a boy, García, the father of one of the 43 students forcibly disappeared four months ago, had to learn Spanish to make his way in mainstream society in this country where most people are of mixed-race heritage.

García, a father of four, has a small farm where he grows corn, beans, pumpkins and hibiscus flowers near the town of Tecuantepec, some 380 km south of Mexico City, in the state of Guerrero.

But his crops have been abandoned since the night of Sep. 26, when his 21-year-old son Abel, a first-year student at the Escuela Normal Rural de Ayotzinapa rural teachers college, was disappeared along with 42 of his classmates at the hands of municipal police and gunmen from the organised crime group “Guerreros Unidos”, according to the investigation by the national authorities and the testimony of suspects who have confessed their involvement.

“We want our kids to appear,” said García, wearing a long checked shirt, baggy pants that fluttered in the wind, and sandals that hardly protected his feet, calloused from trudging along dirt paths. “That way we can stop losing time; we’re not able to work now,” he told IPS.

More:
http://www.ipsnews.net/2015/01/missing-students-case-also-highlights-racism-in-mexico/