Classmates of missing Mexican students beaten by police, activists say

More than a dozen students were hospitalized in the southern Mexican state of Guerrero after they were detained and beaten by scores of state and federal police officers, according to human rights activists.

About 150 students from a rural teachers college were traveling in eight buses on the highway from the state capital of Chilpancingo toward the small rural town of Ayotzinapa just after 4 p.m. Wednesday when state police pickups began pursuing them, according to the Guerrero-based human rights group Tlachinollan and witnesses.

Cellphone video provided by one of the students purports to show a police pickup driving up to the back of one of the buses and breaking in the windows.

The students attend the Ayotzinapa teachers school; 43 of their were detained and subsequently disappeared in the nearby city of Iguala in September 2014. The students Wednesday were on their way back from raising money for their campaign on behalf of the missing, Tlachinollan said.

According to Mexican news media, authorities said the students were stopped after taking a gas truck and trying to drive it to the school. Florencio Salazar, secretary of the Guerrero government, told news outlets that “the students blocked the highway. They were going to hand out leaflets about their social struggle.”

He said the students took a number of vehicles, after which “the police went to retrieve the vehicles and a confrontation between the police and the students followed.”

Some students were removed from the buses by police and beaten, some classmates said. Other cellphone video taken from a distance shows police firing tear gas into the group of young people.

At least 13 students were detained but later handed over to a local human rights commission, authorities and rights activists said. Tlachinollan put the number of officers involved at about 300.

Eighteen students were hospitalized with injuries, which included a broken leg and what one student describes in an audiotape distributed by Tlachinollan as “a serious mouth injury from being kicked in the face.”

“They started saying that they were going to kill us,” said the student, who requested anonymity for safety’s sake.

“State agents act with a level of brutality that can’t be justified under any circumstances,” said Roman Hernandez Riva, a lawyer from Tlachinollan. He said federal police and members of the army were also present during the incident.

The disappearance last year of the students from the teachers college — a case known in Mexico as simply “Ayotzinapa” — has been a major scandal that has plagued the administration of President Enrique Peña Nieto. The government alleged that police handed the students over to a drug gang, which executed them. But only two of the missing have been identified from remains found in a trash dump.

Tension between authorities and students at the school, historically strained, has been high since.

Bonello is a special correspondent.

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