An educational tradition committed to the underclasses, normal schools ike Ayotzinapa and the student teachers graduating from them have long served peasant and indigenous communities across the Mexican countryside. But the State, has long considered them a threat.
Ayotzinapa touches on structural aspects of the functioning of the Mexican State. Reaching the truth of the forced disappearance of the 43 is a lever for profound change. Knowing the whereabouts of the normalistas implies that this control of lies does not have to be the curse of our society.
Tomorrow, September 26th, 2022 marks the 8-year anniversary of the barbaric mass-disappeance and murder of 43 normalistas (student teachers) who were traveling to Mexico City from their school in Iguala, Guerrero. Though the crime was dismissed by the previous administration as a tragic incident perpetrated by the drug gang, Guerreros Unidos, just over a month ago, the Commission for Truth and Access to Justice published a report indicating that the whole event was a “crime of the state.”
Article translated from Luis Hernández Navarro, in La Jornada.
Whitewashing the past, de-radicalizing it, polishing the sharpest edges of its emancipatory episodes has been a recurrent obsession of our modernizing elites. But, despite the endless repression agains rural normal schools and their students, as Luis Hernández Navarro points out, they are not going away.
An interview with one normalista who lived through last week’s brutal repression by state forces tells the story of the repression, the abuse and why they struggle.
