A group of protesters have kicked down the door to Mexico’s presidential palace during a demonstration demanding justice for 43 students who disappeared in 2014.
On Wednesday, local television stations showed footage showing several dozen demonstrators using a pickup truck to smash down the entrance to the National Palace while President Andrés Manuel López Obrador was holding a news conference inside.
Law enforcement set up barriers on the palace grounds to prevent protesters from getting inside. Police fired tear gas to disperse the group. López Obrador called what happened “a very clear plan of provocation.” He told reporters:
They would like us to respond violently. We’re not going to do it. We’re not repressors. The door will be fixed, and there’s no problem.
The students, known as “Ayotzinapa 43,” were from the rural Ayotzinapa Teachers College in the southern state of Guerrero.
They disappeared in September 2014 after hijacking buses as part of an annual tradition to travel to Mexico City to commemorate the 1968 Tlatelolco student massacre. But they were intercepted by police and what happened next is still unknown.
Mexican authorities speculate that the students were handed over to local cartels linked to the police and military and subsequently killed. Charred bone fragments were subsequently found and identified through DNA with the three missing students. The remaining bodies, however, were never found.
In 2022, a government truth commission concluded that the disappearance was a “state crime” given the involvement of local, state and federal authorities in the abduction and subsequent cover-up of the students. Alejandro Encinas, the politician who led the commission, said:
There is no indication the students are alive. All the testimonies and evidence prove that they were cunningly killed and disappeared. It’s a sad reality.
By mid-morning on Wednesday, the situation outside the presidential palace was calm, an eyewitness told Reuters. The door to the palace was cordoned off and there were no protesters inside the building, the eyewitness said.
