The Art of the Protest

"it was the state," main square, Mexico City, October 2014                                  Colectivo Rexiste

One year ago on September 26, 43 students from a teachers college in a rural town in Mexico disappeared. Ironically, they had been part of a group commemorating the 1968 massacre of students in Mexico City. The story told by the government is that the area’s mayor ordered the town's police to arrest the students. There ensued a series of confrontations in which 6 people died and 25 were injured. The 43 who disappeared were, according to authorities, handed over by the police to a local narcogang. What happened to them then has yet to be determined, but whatever it was, the confirmed fact of police collusion with narcogangs, hitherto only suspected, added to Mexicans' outrage, grief, and frustration. As with so many such stories of injustice around the world, after the protests, it is up to the artists to keep the memory and the passion alive and to spread the word around the world (story, photos, some of which are disturbing): http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/photography/2015/09/disappearance_of_43_mexican_students_from_ayotzinapa_in_2014_transformed.html