State Vehicles Set on Fire in Protest Against Police Murder of Normalista in Chilpancingo, Mexico

Report from Abolition Media on recent clashes between Normalistas and police, following the police murder of Yanqui Kothan Gómez Peralta.

This Tuesday, the escape of the Guerrero police officer who murdered the 23-year-old Yanqui Kothan Gómez Peralta on March 7 on the Tixtla highway was confirmed, when three students were preparing for the 98th anniversary of the Ayotzinapa Normal School and in the framework of the intensification of the criminalization and stigmatization of the struggle for the appearance of the 43 normalistas.

President Andrés Manuel López Obrador reported this morning that the police officer who shot the Ayotzinapa student was under administrative arrest in Chilpancingo, but that on Monday “he escaped” because “protocols were not followed.” In response to the president’s statement, students from the Federation of Socialist Peasant Students of Mexico (FECSM) protested at the Guerrero State Attorney General’s Office, where they threw firecrackers at the facilities and burned eleven vehicles.

The students managed to overcome the fence of riot police that stood in front of the Prosecutor’s Office and protested for about half an hour to demand justice for their murdered comrade and the immediate arrest of the Chilpancingo policeman. Moments later, the police fired tear gas at the students to disperse them.

According to AMLO, the policeman’s escape took place while he was in transit through Chilpancingo so that state authorities could hand him over to the FGR. The Guerrero Prosecutor’s Office, for its part, assured that it never detained the police officers involved in the attack on the normalistas on March 7.

“During the development of the investigations, no authority made available to this State Attorney General’s Office the State Police involved in the unfortunate events, where a student of the Raúl Isidro Burgos Rural Normal School, in Ayotzinapa, lost his life,” the FGE published in a statement.

Previously, the parents of the 43 disappeared students from Ayotzinapa and the lawyers accompanying them denounced the irregularities in the official versions of the murder of Gómez Peralta and the attack against the students in Guerrero.

Among the irregularities is also that despite the fact that the experts showed that the bullets were only fired from the outside to the inside of the van where the students were traveling, the authorities claim that the students also fired firearms.

The Ayotzinapa normalistas, in addition to demanding justice for Gómez Peralta, accompany the parents of the 43 students who disappeared in 2014 who demand that the federal government fulfill its commitment to resolve the Ayotzinapa Case.

photo: Screenshot via Azteca Noticias