Protesters Seeking Answers on Students Disappearance Set Fire to National Palace

About 20 masked protesters broke through the security barriers around the National Palace in Mexico City and set fire to the historic building’s main door, an Efe reporter confirmed on the scene.

The incident occurred at the end of a huge march Saturday from the Attorney General’s Office to the Zocalo, the Mexican capital’s main plaza, to demand the return of 43 education students who disappeared on Sept. 26 in Iguala, a city in the southern state of Guerrero.

Thousands of demonstrations dropped to the ground in the plaza at the end of the march to simulate being murdered.

The names of the missing students from the Ayotzinapa Rural Normal School were then read as protesters listened.

Organizers called on the marchers to disperse, but a group of protesters headed to the National Palace, pushed aside the security barriers and tried to enter the building.

The protesters threw different objects, including homemade bombs, at the building, which was constructed between 1522 and 1526.

Federal Police riot units and presidential security service personnel responded to the attack and forced the masked assailants to disperse.

The marchers, who included students, the elderly and parents, demanded that the missing students be returned alive and punishment for the individuals behind the disappearances.

“Alive they took them, alive se want them,” the protesters chanted.

Attorney General Jesus Murillo Karam said Friday, citing statements from three suspects in custody, that the 43 teacher trainees were dead.

Patricio Reyes, Jhonatan Osorio and Agustin Garcia confessed to having killed the students and burned their bodies, the attorney general told a press conference.

More than 70 people, including police and public officials, have been arrested in connection with the events that took place in Iguala on the night of Sept. 26, when municipal police fired gunshots at students from the Ayotzinapa Rural Normal School, a nearby teacher-training facility.

Six people died that night, 25 were wounded and 43 Ayotzinapa students were detained and then handed over to members of the Guerreros Unidos drug cartel.

The cops were allegedly acting on orders from Iguala’s then-mayor, Jose Luis Abarca, and his wife, Maria de los Angeles Pineda, who were tracked down last Monday after weeks on the run.

For the purposes of the investigation, the students will continue to be classified as missing until the remains are definitively identified by specialists at the University of Innsbruck in Austria, the AG said.

Reyes, Osorio and Garcia told investigators they took the 43 students to the Cocula dump and set them on fire, Murillo said.

After watching the bonfire burn for more than 14 hours, the killers collected the ashes and bones in eight garbage bags and then tossed the bags into a nearby river, the attorney general said.

Authorities managed to recover one of the bags intact and the contents will be analyzed to confirm the suspects’ account, the AG said.

Though accustomed to horrific violence after eight years of a murky, many-sided drug war that has claimed some 130,000 lives, Mexicans have been shocked and outraged by the case of the Ayotzinapa students.

Published in Latino Daily News