THEY WANTED TO BURY US. THEY DID NOT KNOW WE WERE SEEDS
Thursday, November 6, 2014
OP/ED by DD
I saw on the news protesters marching in Mexico City. So what! ,
One group of another is always protesting in Mexico City. It is a daily event.
But then I started looking at the news reports about more protests in support of the 43 missing male students from the Raul Isidro Burgos Rural Teachers College of Ayotzinapa, Guerrero.
Something real was happening here A seminal event.
In the northern border region, university students spearheaded a brief blockade of the Santa Fe Bridge connecting Ciudad Juarez and El Paso on the evening of October 31. The action was the fourth closure of an international border crossing by protesters in the northern Mexican city in about three weeks.
On the same day, approximately 400 students, teachers, doctors, garbage collectors, and others occupied a toll booth on the Tijuana-Tecate Highway in Baja California in solidarity with Ayotzinapa.
“What we are doing today in Tijuana might seem insignificant,” said Marco Antonio Pacheco Pena, coordinator for the Teacher Resistance Movement. “But it is a grain in the sand of what is going on at the national level, because this is being repeated in other states, in the sphere of human rights, public education and labor rights.
Students and community members were also on the move in the Sonora border cities of Nogales and San Luis Rio Colorado
in the state capital of Hermosillo, 1,200 rural teacher students attended a Day of the Dead event that prominently featured an altar for the Ayotzinapa students.
On Sunday, November 2, more than 1,000 demonstrators returned to the streets of Tijuana again, demanding the safe return of the Ayotzinapa students
In Oaxaca, meanwhile, a large movement blockaded the Puerto Escondido airport, seized gasoline stations and occupied department stores
Among the biggest October 31 demonstrations was the march held in the old tourist center of Acapulco, Guerrero, where thousands of students, teachers, popular movement activists and relatives of the AyotzinaAcapulco demonstrators also demanded justice for murdered activists like Rocio Mesino, leader of the Campesino Organization of the Southern Sierra Madres gunned down in October 2013, and freedom for Nestora Salgado, Marco Antonio Suastegui and other Guerrero leaders the popular movement regards as political prisoners.
The chief of the community police in Olinala, Guerrero, Salgado sent a message from her jail cell in Nayarit, where she is being held on what supporters insist are kidnapping charges that were trumped up after her policing activities disturbed the interests of organized crime.
“What a shame that I am not here,” Salgado said. “If I were here, I would be at the first in the struggle to uncover the assassins of these companions.”
A day prior to the Acapulco protest, some 5,000 people marched in Tixtla, the town closest to Ayotzinapa and home to 14 of the disappeared students, also demanding the new Guerrero governor’s ouster
On November 2, the Day of the Dead, 60 people held a vigil for the students outside the White House.
Even the most elite of the elite, from the richest families in the US, students from Harvard, MIT, Boston University, Tufts and Berklee and other top universities in the US joined the protest movements against what happened to their “little brothers” who were students from families of dirt poor farmers who barely eke out a living from the soil.
Students from the school have spread out across the county to meet with groups organizing protests and give them first hand information on the school and what happened in Iguala. With one change of clothes and a backpack, Carlos Martínez, a third year student at Ayotzinapa, left his home state of Guerrero to hitchhike more than 2,000 kilometers [
1,200 miles] to the state of Chihuahua to meet with protesters in that state.
