Mexico’s activism has stretched across the country and spilled awareness over its northern border.
Americans are joining Mexico in clamoring for accountability, amid an outcry over the disappearance of 43 student teachers from a small town in the southern state of Guerrero on Sept. 27. The students went missing after police opened fire on a caravan of students and professors traveling to a nearby town, killing six people.
The case of the Ayotzinapa 43, as they have come to be called, has drawn worldwide attention to mass disappearances and killings ordered by its government.
This particular series of demonstrations was organized on social media with the hashtag “#YaMeCanse,” which means
“I’m tired now,” or, more colloquially, “I’m fed up.” The phrase became a rallying cry after Mexico’s attorney general, Jesus Murillo Karam, said it at a press conference about the missing students.
Protesters in Mexico have used it to highlight what they are tired of in their own country: violence, disappearances, mass arrests, murders. For weeks now, they been marching and demanding the current administration resign.
The civil unrest has spread into Tijuana, a city that has been known for many things in the past decade, but rarely, if ever, its political engagement. The demonstrations have been spearheaded by university students, but now they are being joined by families, professors, friends and relatives of people who have disappeared, and citizens who want to show their support.
About 1,500 people showed up at a rally in Tijuana’s Zona Rio on Sunday, including a smattering of people who had crossed the international border to be there.
Angel Olivas, a 24-year-old student at Southwestern College, was part of the crowd. He was born in Mexico, but now lives in Chula Vista. Olivas said he had crossed into Mexico specifically to be part of the demonstration.
“I’m against all of what the (Mexican) government is doing right now,” Olivas said. “The 43 students, the deaths we have seen, I believe that we have to do something, get organized, get out to as many people as we can,” he said.
Olivas said he had barely slept the night before so that he could finish his homework before he came out to the demonstration, and that he intends to be part of as many as he can.
“I’m only one, but one person can make a difference in a march,” he said. “That’s the only way we can do something, organized and united.”
There have been a number of vigils and protests in San Diego, including one in front of the Mexican Consulate.
Another protest is planned in Tijuana for Dec. 1.
