Mexico’s missing students case impacts relations with Uruguay and Chile

Mexico City, Nov 24 (EFE). — Mexico’s political crisis triggered by the disappearance of 43 students two months ago is having international repurcussions following critical comments by Uruguayan President Jose Mujica and the arrest of a Chilean student in the Mexican capital.

In an interview with the magazine Foreign Affairs Latinoamerica, Mujica said: “It’s terrible that such things are happening. It gives one the sense, looking from a distance, that it is a kind of a failed state, that the powerful authorities are totally losing control, that they have decayed.”

Mujica added that in his opinion, the situation in Mexico had been caused by “mass corruption” which has been established as a tacit social custom.

Mexico has demanded an explantion on the remarks from Uruguayan Ambassador Jose Alberto Delgado Fernandez and said that “there is no room for incidents such as those that have occurred, neither in Mexico nor in the world.”

It also reiterated the Mexican government’s commitment to continue conducting investigations with clarity, transparency and responsibility, “as it has been doing so far”.

The 43 students of the Normal Rural School of Ayotzinapa in the southern town of Iguala went missing Sep. 26 after police opened fire on them, killing six people, including three students, and wounding 25 others.

According to the prosecutor’s investigations, the teacher trainees were rounded up at the orders of thenmayor Jose Luis Abarca and handed over to the criminal group Guerreros Unidos who killed them and burned their bodies.

In another diplomatic flare up, Chilean student Lawrence Maxwell, was arrested by the Mexican police in what witnesses claimed was an arbitrary arrest.

Mercedes Rojas, a Chilean doing her PhD at the National Autonomous University of Mexico and a friend of Maxwell, told Efe that her friend did not participate in the protests but was observing the ongoings at the central plaza of Zocalo from a distance and that he was arrested in the stampede that occurred as people tried to flee the police.

Foreigners are prohibited from engaging in the internal political activities of Mexico.

Meanwhile, some 80 people protested outside the Mexican embassy in Chile Sunday against Maxwell’s arrest, demanding that the authorities undertake diplomatic efforts to win his release.