Ayotzinapa cover-up

The heart-stabbing news about Mexico reported in the U.S. media is written with an appropriate tone of shock and horror. A special international investigative team assigned to uncover what happened to the 43 missing students of Ayotzinapa has reported that its investigation was stonewalled by both local and national authorities.

Information about the murderous police assault on the students — simply because they tried to commandeer local buses to attend an event, something that had become an annual “prank” — was covered up at every level, says the team. Despite the cover-up, a few bodies have been discovered, and their mutilation is sickening to the core, revealing a sadistic brutality that numbs the mind.

But what is left out of all the reporting in this country? The same basic facts that are left unsaid when dealing with the desperate mass emigration that has been going on for years now from Mexico and Central America.

The trade agreement imposed on Mexico by U.S. big business, called NAFTA, has ruined the small farmers who used to be able to survive on what they could grow. They could not compete with U.S. agribusiness, which has taken over the market and the land. The resulting desperate poverty fueled the drug trade and the violence that it breeds. The state itself became part of the instrument of “protection” for what it calls illegal but which it feeds on. The customers for the drugs are, of course, largely in the United States.

A people’s investigation into Ayotzinapa cannot leave out the monstrous crimes of U.S. imperialism toward the Mexican people.