(20 Sep 2024)
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Tixtla, Mexico – 26 August 2024
++ MUTE ++
1. Aerial of Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College at dawn
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Tixtla, Mexico – 24 August 2024
2. New students with shaved heads standing in line
3. Students holding machetes
4. Students receiving instructions from senior student, UPSOUND (Spanish): "I don’t want any trash left behind"
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Tixtla, Mexico – 26 August 2024
5. Student entering classroom as another student carries table
6. Students before class on first day of school
7. Various of students in class
8. SOUNDBITE (Spanish) Eugenio Hernández García, Math teacher at Ayotzinapa since 1973:
"The boys are fighters — it’s in them. Struggle (for rights) is the ideology of everyone who comes here."
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Tixtla, Mexico – 24 August 2024
9. Students marching next to memorial to 43 missing students
10. Close of Mexican flag with "43" written on it
11. Desks with photos of missing students
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Tixtla, Mexico – 26 August 2024
12. Jesús Castro Rafaela, new student at Ayotzinapa:
Castro: "I really like shouting slogans."
Journalist: "Please tell us what that means."
Castro: "We shout slogans to demand justice for our missing brothers."
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Mexico City, Mexico – 26 August 2024
13. Families of missing students marching
14. Close of missing student’s photo on banner
15. Close of Castro Rafaela chanting
16. Close of students’ feet
17. Various of students shouting and raising their fists, UPSOUND (Spanish): "Bring them back alive"
STORYLINE:
Ten years after the disappearance of 43 students shook Mexico, the rural school where they once studied continues to be haunted by what happened.
Painted by tragedy, students at rural teachers’ colleges are trained to be much more than teachers.
With rigorous military-like training — tuition and board all for free — they learn how to survive with nothing but the clothes on their backs, often becoming radicalized by guerrilla-inspired preachers of old-fashioned Marxism.
On Sept. 26, 2014, a group of students were detained by municipal police in the southern city of Iguala, Guerrero, after they had commandeered buses to drive to the capital, Mexico City, for a protest.
They were allegedly handed over to a local drug gang that apparently killed them and burned their bodies, but many questions about what happened to them remain.
Every year since, on the 26th of each month, the families of the missing students meet at the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College and take a long bus ride to Mexico City to demand answers.
The school’s freshmen — who must keep their heads shaved throughout the first year — are required to join them to shout slogans and sometimes engage in violent protests.
Most student teachers in the country’s remaining rural teachers’ colleges belong to Indigenous and farmers’ communities, which are among Mexico’s most vulnerable.
Becoming teachers where no one else wants to teach could be their only way out of poverty.
In Mexico, these institutions are known as "normal schools," with student teachers being known as "normalistas."
Despite dozens of arrests and the government’s acknowledgment that authorities were involved after an initial cover-up, the Ayotzinapa case remains unsolved and the students are still missing.
Outgoing President Andrés Manuel López Obrador had pledged to solve the case, but activists and human rights organizations say the government has not done enough to investigate what happened and punish the culprits.
AP video by Martín Silva Rey
Production by Maria Verza
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