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Hasta Encontrarlos: Missing In Mexico

The parents of 43 missing students from Ayotzinapa teachers school hold their portraits and torches during a march 18 months after their disappearance in Mexico City on April 26, 2016.
YURI CORTEZ/AFP/Getty Images
The parents of 43 missing students from Ayotzinapa teachers school hold their portraits and torches during a march 18 months after their disappearance in Mexico City on April 26, 2016.

On a September night in 2014, 43 male college students were kidnapped in Iguala, Mexico and later turned over to a local drug gang. Their abduction prompted mass protests in Mexico, but few answers about what happened to them.

More than 30,000 people have gone missing in Mexico in the past decade in connection to the country’s ongoing drug war. From The New York Times:

“For more than a decade, cartels across Mexico have taken out their rivals with utter impunity, tossing their remains into unmarked graves across the country. Soldiers and law enforcement officers often adopt the same approach, leaving many families too terrified to ask for help from a government they see as complicit.

It is both highly efficient and cruel: Without a body, there can be no case. And the disappearances inflict a lasting torture on enemies — robbing them of even the finality of death.”

Despite many arrests — including dozens of police officers — families’ search for justice endures. How are elected officials in Mexico addressing their questions and what are they doing to curb the number of vanishing residents?

GUESTS

John Gibler, Journalist; author, “I Couldn’t Even Imagine That They Would Kill Us”

Andalusia Knoll-Soloff, Multimedia journalist based in Mexico City; @andalalucha

María Luisa Aguilar Rodríguez, A human rights activist and Advocacy team of Miguel Agustín Pro Juárez Human Rights Center that legally represents the families of the missing students.

For more, visit https://the1a.org.

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