Mexico's Missing 43
This weekend, a group of eminent international legal experts is leaving Mexico without a clear answer to the question they came for: why did 43 students vanish on the night of September 26th, 2014, never to be seen again? The students were among 100 from the Ayotzinapa teacher’s college, who had commandeered buses from the town of Iguala to get to a protest in Mexico City. Municipal police intercepted the buses, killed and injured several students, and then “disappeared” 43 others.
In response to national and global outcry, the Mexican government invited in that team of legal experts -- which included a Guatemalan attorney general who brought genocide charges against a former dictator and a Colombian prosecutor of military malfeasance -- to examine what happened, and why. Initially, the experts were embraced, but once they began to poke holes in the government's official version of events, their efforts were stymied and likely sabotaged. Francisco Goldman, a novelist and journalist who has been reporting on Mexico's missing 43 for the New Yorker's website, talks with Brooke about how this case has exposed institutionalized violence and corruption in Mexico like never before, and whether it may finally force a kind of reckoning.
Song:
"Flugufrelsarinn" by Kronos Quartet (Sigur Ros cover)
