Current Events
Name of Article: Iguala one month on: Can Mexico end its wave of violence?
Published: November 1, 2014
URL:
Due Date: November 10, 2014 in The Telegraph
Directions: Read the following article or political cartoon and answer the questions on a current events answer sheet.
1. What was the name of the college that the teacher-trainees were attending?
2. What does TodosSomosAyotzinapa stand for?
3. What is a “narcofosa?”
4. What does clandestine mean?
On the night of September 26, three separate groups were met with violence on aMexicanhighway. There was a third-division football team, the Avispones of Chilpancingo, on their way home from a match. There was a single woman in a taxi. And there was a convoy of buses that was eventually due to transport teacher-trainees from Ayotzinapa College to a peaceful demonstration in Mexico City. In a sudden encounter with police forces from the state of Guerrero, the footballers' coach driver was shot dead. A 15 year-old player, David JosuéGarcía Evangelista, died from gunshot wounds too. ("They're children!" shouted the team's trainer, as 400 bullets hit the bus.) The woman in the taxi, Blanca MontielSánchez, died in the crossfire. And in a massacre that stretched to the city of Iguala, wherethe Mayor's politically ambitious wife was hosting a party, at least four of the students were murdered, and 43 more went missing.
One month on, none of those 43 first-year Ayotzinapa students – bright pupils for whom college was a way out of rural poverty – has been found. The Governor of Guerrero has resigned under pressure, and the Mayor of Iguala and his wife are on the run.
All over Mexico, banners, walls and chalk-inscribed pavements bear the same demand: "They were taken alive. We want them back alive." The world has begun to take notice: the slogan #TodosSomosAyotzinapa (We Are All Ayotzinapa) has gathered momentum on social media. But that idea – that this is about more than just a small corner of a troubled nation, that international forces are at work, that we all have a right to know what happened and why – still needs to gather more force.
When I was growing up in Mexico, words such as "narcofosa" – a clandestine grave dug by traffickers – didn't exist. Returning there now, it's hard not to be struck by the transformation of the language. A "narcofosa" discovered in the state of Veracruz a few days before I arrived was the fifth found there this year, only one of which had been officially acknowledged by the government. The words "balacera", "secuestro", "enfrentamientoarmado" – gunfight, kidnapping, armed confrontation – have become part of everyday vocabulary, as have, inevitably, "asesinados" and "desaparecidos". They have acquired a horrible poetry by force of repetition – in fact, one of the country's best journalists, John Gibler, wrote a book entitled Veintepoemaspara ser leídos en unabalacera – "20 Poems to be Read in a Gunfight". There is a new rhythm to the nation's speech.
It is no longer possible to believe, as many Mexicans have for years, that the "narcos", the drug traffickers, just kill each other. The entire country is caught in the crossfire – if "crossfire" is the correct expression for a series of executions in which the government and the traffickers are not always on opposite sides. Such prolonged denial has been possible because the dissemination of accurate information about any of it is notoriously difficult: the Mexican human rights organization Article 19 has registered 157 attacks on journalists in the first half of this year alone – and 43 per cent of those, they say, were committed by people working for the government.