In September 2014, the Mexican town of Ayotzinapa became world-famous overnight, when a group of 43 poor, radical and indigenous students from the local teaching college went missing after being attacked by police in Iguala, a town also located in the narco-dominated state of Guerrero. Facts about the students’ fate were scarce, but it was soon abundantly clear that the Government’s story that they had been kidnapped by drug gangs didn’t hang together and that ministers and military figures were protecting whoever was responsible. Demonstrations demanding truth and justice swept the country, and the number 43 quickly came to symbolise all that was corrupt about how the country was run. [...]
All were keen to stress the basic factual distinctions between the two situations. One major difference highlighted by Rod, an economist who has lived in Mexico City for over 30 years, is that in the case of Grenfell there has been no fairy story, no apparent cover-up by the authorities. Although it’s certainly the case that the Daily Mail and Express both tried to scapegoat first an Ethiopian immigrant and then EU environmental regulations for the fire, those explanations were not at the heart of the State’s explanation. Rod points out that while Theresa May took some responsibility for the deaths and, after some prevarication, did visit the site, Enrique Peña-Nieto, the current president of Mexico, avoided doing so altogether. [...]
For Pablo, both events were characterised by a lack of official interest in protecting the most vulnerable, and the public outrage in both cases partly resulted from decades of inequality. Lisa echoes this, highlighting the fact that both disasters happened to people who have no power and who routinely suffer discrimination. She draws a further analogy with the 1989 human crush at Hillsborough football stadium in Sheffield, in the wake of which the families of the victims were routinely smeared and depicted in the tabloid press as subhuman, in part on the basis of a police disinformation campaign.
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