English-speaking
readers who are keen to keep up with the news about what has happened
in Mexico since the disappearance of 43 students in the state of
Guerrero in late September would do well to make note of the name John M. Ackerman.
Ackerman,
a law professor at Mexico’s National Autonomous University (UNAM),
editor-in-chief of Mexican Law Review, columnist for Mexican
publications La Jornada and Proceso, frequent contributor or interviewee
to a number of international media outlets including Foreign Policy and
Huffington Post, and prolific tweeter, Ackerman has been a valuable source of information and reporting.
We
spoke via Google Hangout about the significance of Ayotzinapa, the
subsequent months of protests and what to expect in the coming months.
Latin Correspondent:
What
makes the situation with Ayotzinapa so different from any other set of
disappearances and killings in Mexico, and what makes the reaction to
Ayotzinapa so different?
John Ackerman:
What
makes this particularly relevant is the fact that this event
interrupted the narratives of power and control that Mexican society has
been used to hearing for at least the past 10 years, if not 30 years.
That narrative was initiated in terms of the drug war specifically but
it goes far beyond the drug war.
The
narrative that [former Mexican president] Felipe Calderón always pulled
out was that 90 percent of the dead were narco-traffickers; this is
what he would say after every massacre. Governors and other authorities
would always roll out this explanation that somehow the people who were
killed deserved it. This has been a way of covering up a problem that
goes much deeper. In the first place, Mexico has no death penalty. Even
if there was a death penalty, everyone deserves a fair trial. Even if 90
percent of the dead were involved in the drug trade, this would not
justify their deaths. It’s not that this narrative worked, but it
sufficiently deflected attention away from the real issue.
What
makes Ayotzinapa so different are the particulars of the case itself,
which resisted and broke with that narrative of power and control and
distraction that the Mexican government, in complicity with the U.S.
government, has been holding all along and especially over the past 10
years with the incredible explosion of narco-violence. All of a sudden,
this incident broke with that narrative because it so obviously doesn’t
fit with any of those explanations. These [the 43 students who were
“disappeared”] are students, they are activists who are completely
unarmed, they are politically active, and they are obviously innocent.
They can’t be seen just as “collateral damage” of a generalized crisis
of violence. It’s an attack on the Mexican people by the government and
the Mexican government is supported by the U.S. government...
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