When the procession reached Iguala’s city hall a group of two dozen men in hooded sweatshirts and masks charged the building, smashing the windows with stones, pipes, and heavy pieces of wood. They broke down the main door. Standing a few feet away, I heard the crash of glass being smashed, and the boom of exploding computer monitors.
As a man with no shirt on tried to smash down the main entrance gate, members of Guerrero’s citizen police force, the UPOEG, who are volunteering to help look for the missing students, scrambled to remove their belongings from their camp site in front of the building, pushing their trucks out of harms way as flames lapped at the curtains, eating away at the window frames. An air-conditioning unit hissed as it caught fire. “It’s going to blow up!” a man yelled as onlookers scrambled for cover.
A woman standing on a street corner several blocks away from the plaza, out of sight from the fire and out of earshot from the sound of breaking glass, watched the protest parade by. “I hope this helps. I hope this makes them say where the kids are,” she said. With the hot afternoon sun high in the sky a group of locals gathered under a shade-sheltered section of sidewalk. Leopold, a thirty-year old Iguala resident wearing a blue polo shirt watched as an ambulance pushed its way through the crowd. Some of the protesters picked up pieces of wood and tried to smash a Rescue pickup truck that had accompanied the ambulance. “They’re going to set it on fire,” Leopold said. With a percussion soundtrack of crashes and smashing glass in the background, Leopold watched a man carry a water cooler and jug out of the building. “RATERO! (thief) Put it back,” he yelled.
A woman in a grey dress looked on a masked man jumped on top of the pickup truck, pouring a liquid over the cabin and bed, apparently getting ready to set it on fire. She turned to Leopold and asked, “Who will pay for this? We will, the pueblo.” Leopold shook his head in agreement. He said that he thinks the protest is good, but the vandalism and theft are too much. “A good government should be tolerant and with the (now fugitive mayor) people were scared. You didn’t see a lot of protests,” he told me.
As I explained in my Fox News Latino article, Guerrero’s “normalista” agriculture students were one of few groups who spoke out and made it their policy to “use militant tactics such as hijacking trucks, taking over toll booths, commandeering buses, and blocking roads to draw attention to what they see as the underfunding of Guerrero’s rural schools.”
Mexico City based education policy expert David Calderon told me, “The tragedy is that with a corrupt government that’s connected to drug trafficking—the young people’s actions looked like a challenge to authority. The brutal response can be explained as the reaction by a group that doesn’t accept challenges.”
Many parts of Mexico have modernized rapidly and are now competing in the global economy. But many pockets of the country still suffer from high levels of marginalization. David Calderon told me, “Mexico is entering an age of reform, but it’s still a mix of the 21st century and the 18th century.” Carlos, an elementary school teacher who attended the protest while wearing dark reflective sunglasses, a bright blue hoodie, and a rooster-print bandana covering his face told me “There are schools in the sierra that are made out of cardboard and others that have students sit under trees.” While the protest in Iguala was called to raise attention to the case of the missing students and the longstanding issues of complicity between local politicians and organized crime groups in Guerrero it also served as a platform for teachers to complain about what they see as the longstanding underfunding of rural education in Mexico. “This is the only way to get the government’s attention…we’re tired that the government doesn’t do anything … we want a change, we want peace,” Carlos told me.
As I explained in my World Politics Review article, “Over half of all Mexican students leave school by age 15. A 10th of Mexican schools have no bathrooms; in Chiapas, Oaxaca and Guerrero, Calderon says, that proportion is half. According to a survey by Mexico’s National Institute of Statistics and Geography (INEGI), more than a fifth of schools lack running water, and nearly a 10th have no electricity.” Only one in every five Mexican schools has Access to the internet.
Underneath the surface of Iguala there are a swath of clandestine graves and longstanding resentment that Mexico’s political system has failed to address locals needs. Guerrero is Mexico’s second poorest state. As I explained in a recent article for Fox News Latino, “Eight out of ten residents work in informal jobs washing car windows, selling tacos in the street, or working in subsistence agriculture. Most don’t pay taxes and they expect to receive little in terms of government services.”
In his time in office Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto has introduced an education reform designed to modernize the country’s education system and reduce the power of the country’s teachers union.
‘As I explain in my World Politics Review article, “Pena Nieto’s education reform includes a program called ‘Dignified Schools’ that, for the 2014-2015 school year, sets aside $554 million to provide marginalized rural schools with the basic infrastructure necessary to provide students with an education. This spending is in addition to a separate ‘Digital Literacy’ program that will provide 709,000 students with digital tablets.”
But, Peña Nieto still has a lot of work to do when it comes to improving rural education and rural security.
The state of Guerrero has become the symbol for both issues. Mexico is moving forward with telecom and energy reforms that should attract new investment and create jobs. But, for ordinary Mexicans to benefit Mexico’s school system needs to be prepared to educate the next generation of young professionals.
[Via Instagram: see a video I took of the burning building here.]
[See my Fox News Latino Iguala protest slideshow here.]