September 26: On This Day in World History … briefly
Most notable historic snippets or facts extracted from the book ‘On This Day’ first published in 1992 by Octopus Publishing Group Ltd, London, as well as additional supplementary information extracted from Wikipedia.
2014: 43 Students abducted in a mass kidnapping in Iguala, Mexico
On September 26, 2014, 43 male students from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College were forcibly taken then disappeared in Iguala, Guerrero, Mexico. They were allegedly taken into custody by local police members from Cocula and Iguala, colluded with the organized crime. According to official reports, the students’ annual commandeering of several buses to travel to Mexico City to commemorate the anniversary of the 1968 Tlatelolco Massacre turned deadly. During the journey, local police attempted to intercept several of the buses, commandeered by the students, through the use of road blocks and the firing of weapons.
Details of what happened during and after the assault remain unclear, but the government investigation concluded that once 43 of the students were forcibly taken into custody, they were handed over to the local Guerreros Unidos (‘United Warriors’) crime syndicate and presumably killed. This official version from the Mexican government is disputed. In September 2015, the results of a six-month investigation by a panel of experts assembled by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights stated that the government’s claim that the students were killed in a garbage dump because they were mistaken for members of a drug gang was ‘scientifically impossible’ given the setting’s conditions.
Mexican authorities claimed Iguala’s mayor José Luis Abarca Velázquez, a member of the PRD, and his wife, María de los Ángeles Pineda Villa, masterminded the abduction, although neither of them were convicted or even put on trial for the students’ disappearance. There are also reports linking Federal forces to the case, some stating that military personnel in the area deliberately omitted helping the students in distress. Others state a direct involvement of the 27th Infantry Battalion of the Mexican Army in the kidnapping and murder of the students.
Both Abarca and Pineda Villa fled after the incident, but were arrested about a month later in Mexico City, but for another crime previously committed: the murder of activist Arturo Hernández Cardona. Iguala’s police chief, Felipe Flores Velásquez, was arrested in Iguala, in the southern state of Guerrero, on October 21, 2016. The Ayotzinapa students’ mass kidnapping has caused continued international protests and social unrest. It led to the resignation of the Governor of Guerrero, Ángel Aguirre Rivero, in the face of statewide protests. The forced mass disappearance of the students arguably became the biggest political and public security scandal Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto had faced during his administration. It led to nationwide protests, particularly in the state of Guerrero and Mexico City, and international condemnation.
On November 7, 2014, the Mexican Attorney General Jesús Murillo Karam gave a press conference in which he announced that several plastic bags containing human remains, possibly those of the missing students, had been found by a river in Cocula, Guerrero. At least 80 suspects have been arrested in the case, of which 44 were police officers. Two students have been confirmed dead after their remains were identified by the Austria-based University of Innsbruck.
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