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Protest at the Mexican Consulate – 204 S Ashland Ave, Chicago
October 27, 2014, 4:00 PM

They want us to believe that organized crime and “corrupt public officials” are responsible for the disappearance of the 43 students from Ayotzinapa. 22 local police were arrested, cartel members were captured and now the only missing link is the political figures who are on the run. The message is this: the state is solving the crisis. Each new phase is supposed to reassure us that the government’s investigation is progressing, those guilty will be found and punished with the full force of the law. In the name of this justice, the local population is terrorized: massive militarization, home invasions, arbitrary detentions. Iguala is under siege.

We know much of the evidence used to arrest the cops is fake. We know that some heads will roll to pacify us and return to “normal”. Behind the scenes, the Narcostate is experimenting: the game of power stays the same, while some of the players are changing. And the spectacle of producing the guilty is designed to hide the fact that the state itself has orchestrated the crisis. The investigation is a smokescreen.

It is the state that disappears in a war against indigenous peoples and campesin@s, against all those who rebel and all who are made disposable by the logic of profit. It is the state that governs through disappearance, terror and death. 
In this war the rural school model keeps alive a form of existence and autonomy that is a form of rebellion. In this war the state wants to disappear not just the students, but the consciousness they represent. But this is not new, and it is not only 43 normalistas, more than 24,000 people have been disappeared since 2005. The state disappears Nestora Salgado and José Manuel Mireles, those who arm themselves in self-defense against the narcos and government occupation. The state disappears Yaqui tribe spokespersons Mario Luna and Fernando Jimenéz for fighting in defense of ancestral waters and the right to exist. The state disappears those defending the lands from resource extraction, those who refuse to acquiesce to their own destruction. The state disappears all who stand in the way of the neoliberal restructuring of life, those who create autonomy and threaten the interests of multinational corporations. The state disappears migrants across journeys of terror, from Central America to the US Borderlands. The state disappears the women it has displaced to the maquilas. The state disappears people into prisons, into borders, into graveyards, into warehouses, into the living death of servitude and assimilation.

In the massacres and disappearances, the state is the author and executor at the service of capital. The US is the patron of this war, and the Mexican state is its accomplice.

Join us on Monday October 27 at the Mexican Consulate in Chicago. We do not come here to deliver a letter or to dialogue with the representatives of power. We don’t come asking for your justice or for your compassion. We come to put you on trial.