Mexican firebrands mount call for self-rule: 'It’s time for the people to take power'
Mexican firebrands mount call for self-rule: 'It’s time for the people to take power'
Away from the spotlight of protests over the disappearance of 43 student teachers, Guerrero may prove a much more serious challenge to state authority
Jo Tuckman in Tecoanapa
Friday 16 January 2015 08.24 EST
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A community police officer looks on at the Ayotzinapa Teacher Training College before leaving for Iguala with the relatives
of the 43 missing trainee teachers, in Tixtla, Guerrero. Photograph: Jorge Dan Lopez/Reuters
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Milling around the front steps of the town hall, about 20 men with shotguns began the night watch sipping coffee from styrofoam cups and munching cakes. The atmosphere was relaxed, but the message was one of revolution.
“It’s time for the people to take power,” said Jésus, one of the guards. “The government has not been able to fulfill its role – and the people are waking up.”
Over the past three months, dozens of town halls across Mexico’s southern state of Guerrero have been taken over by members of an amorphous movement calling for “popular government”. The protesters – some of whom are armed – have also called for the army to close its bases and leave the region.
Guerrero is a state steeped in a history of rebellion: it was the setting for some of the first uprisings of the Mexican revolution, and home to the country’s most famous rural guerrilla army of the 1970s. But the current wave of unrest was triggered by the disappearance last September of 43 student teachers in the city of Iguala, after they were attacked by municipal police in league with a local drug cartel.
More:
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jan/16/mexican-guerrero-self-rule-protests
