Panel discussion: Ayotzinapa One Year After

On 26 September 2014, 43 students from the [teaching training college] Normal Rural Raúl Isidro Burgos (Ayotzinapa, Guerrero, Mexico) were abducted by local police. According to a highly contested official investigation, the police handed the students over to a gang of drug-traffickers who killed them, incinerated their bodies, and threw what remained into a river.

The case drew national and international attention and condemnation, and thousands of people took to the streets to demand the return of the students and justice for this case. The European Parliament and the United Nations, among others, expressed their concern about the human rights situation in Mexico and asked the Mexican government to solve this case.

Where is Mexico one year after these events? Did the protests mark a turning point in struggles for human rights, as some observers hoped? This panel gathers scholars from a range of disciplines to discuss the impact of the Ayotzinapa case on different aspects of Mexican society: politics, drug cartels, the military, the human rights movement, and the media.

Chair: Professor Kevin Middlebrook (Professor of Latin American Politics at the Institute of the Americas, UCL)

Panelists:

Rupert Knox (CLACS, IMLR, University of London)

Dr Thomas Rath (Lecturer in Latin American History, UCL History)

Dr Mónica Serrano (Professor of International Relations, El Colegio de México, Mexico)

Dr Benjamin Smith (Professor of Latin American History, University of Warwick)

Dr María De Vecchi (PhD candidate, Institute of the Americas, UCL)