Even for Mexico's canons of violence, it was a killing that made the country quiver. Last March three film students from Guadalajara's University of Audiovisual Media — in the western state of Jalisco — were tortured, murdered, and their bodies dissolved in sulfuric acid.
Mexico's Oscar winning film director Guillermo del Toro was speechless. 'Words are not enough to describe the dimension of this madness. Three students are killed and dissolved in acid. The "why" is unthinkable, the "how" is terrifying,' he tweeted.
In April the abysmally slothful Mexican judicial system revealed that the murder of the three students — Javier Salomón Aceves, 25, Marco Francisco Ávalos and Jesús Daniel Díaz, both 20 — was the work of a Jalisco organised criminal group — the so-called Jalisco New Generation Cartel. Apparently the students were mistaken for associates of a rival drug group.
The murders occurred four years after 43 teaching students from the Raúl Isidro Burgos Rural Teachers College in Ayotzinapa, Mexico's Pacific Coast state of Guerrero, vanished. The students had been arrested by the police while remembering the 1968 student massacre of Tlaleloco (committed by the Mexican army) and handed over to a Guerrero criminal organisation. They were murdered and their bodies burnt in a rubbish tip.
In Mexico, every two hours a person vanishes. Most likely they are executed and thrown into narco-fosas — the term given to the thousands of clandestine graves used by narco-organised crime to bury their victims. Most of the victims are young. More than 46,000 young people were killed between 2007 and 2016.
'Being young in this country means that if you are in the wrong place at the wrong time, the smallest mistake in your behavior may involve your torture, death and dissolution in acid,' José Merino, political science professor at the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México, told me.
According to Darwin Franco, an academic at the University of Guadalajara, since the emergence in 2007 of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, the state of Jalisco — where the three cinema students were murdered last March — is one of Mexico's most lethal places for young people. Franco has meticulously documented the murder of young Mexicans since 2011.
"Against the total neglect shown by the Mexican authorities in finding the bodies of the thousands of missing young people, mothers are taken the job into their own hands — literally."
The killing of young people has generated a massive movement of Mexican students who