After Mexican officials announced details of the murders of three film students by drug cartel members earlier this week, protesters in Guadalajara marched and demonstrated Thursday, demanding justice for three missing citizens.
Relatives and comrades of the 43 students of the teaching training school in Ayotzinapa who went missing on September 2014 hold a demonstration to mark 43 months since their disappearance, in Mexico City on April 26, 2018. (Photo: YURI CORTEZ/AFP/Getty Images)
The three young male students, Javier Salomón Aceves Gastélum, Jesús Daniel Díaz García and Marco Francisco García Ávalos, were kidnapped and tortured by cartel members disguised as police in March, AFP reports. (RELATED: Cartel Enforcers Dissolve Bodies Of Mexican Film Students In Acid)
Over a month later, after protesters had been demanding the safe return of the three students, police informed the public that their bodies were found to have been dissolved in acid, a popular tactic used by many drug gangs to obliterate all evidence of murder.
The protest attracted more than 12,000 people, Yahoo news reports. Demonstrators wore intimidating masks, held signs, and covered the city with large posters of pictures of the deceased students’ faces. Gastélym, Garía and Ávalos were the symbolic faces of the large protest, but they are only three of thousands of Mexican citizens who have gone missing over the last several years.
Relatives and comrades of the 43 students of the teaching training school in Ayotzinapa who went missing on September 2014 hold a demonstration to mark 43 months since their disappearance, in Mexico City on April 26, 2018. (Photo: YURI CORTEZ/AFP/Getty Images)
Protesters were also demanding justice for 43 students who went missing in September 2014; the cause of their disappearance is still unknown. And population of Mexico’s missing and murdered is ever-increasing.
“According to official figures, more than 200,000 people have been murdered and over 30,000 have disappeared since the government launched a controversial military offensive against organized crime in late 2006, although how many of those incidents were linked to gang activity is unknown,” AFP reports.