AWARDED THE 2023 TATA VASCO AWARD
March 8, 2024
The José Ma. Morelos y Pavón Regional Center for the Defense of Human Rights (A.C.) strongly condemns the attack against students from the Raúl Isidro Bustos Rural Teachers’ College in Ayotzinapa, where student Yanqui Rothan Gómez Peralta lost his life at the hands of National Guard and State Police officers.
Stop the criminalization and stigmatization of the students of the Ayotzinapa Teachers’ College. Once again, the students have been victims of a bloody attack in which two students from that school lost their lives. The government and authorities immediately prepared a scenario and a version that would exonerate them from the results of the attack, as if it weren’t known how they usually create false positives, planting weapons and drugs to frame the victims.
It is extremely strange that after the events that occurred in Mexico City, where the Ayotzi students, in support of the mothers and fathers of the 43 Ayotzi students, broke down a door of the National Palace and that this attack occurred at night. Now, they are trying to justify it with the pretext that the van they were traveling in had been reported stolen. As if it weren’t common in Guerrero for members of criminal groups to travel around in stolen vehicles and, coincidentally, never arrest them, much less confront them. For most of us who are familiar with the context, there is no doubt that it was a direct, targeted attack against the students.
We still remember that tragic day of December 12, 2011, when the two Ayotzinapa students were killed. Jorge Alexis Herrera Pino and Gabriel Echeverría de Jesús were attacked by police officers on the highway near the Parador del Marqués, or when their eviction from the State Congress building was authorized in 2007, they were brutally repressed. We could list each of the attacks against the Ayotzi students.
The Regional Center for the Defense of Human Rights strongly condemns these events and demands that the federal and state governments stop this bloody onslaught and instead fulfill their obligation to make known what happened to our 43 Ayotzi students, who were disappeared by the army and police in complicity with members of organized crime.
Sincerely,
Teodomira Rosales Sierra