Feelings ran deep as more than 20,000 students from various University of Guadalajara (UdG) campuses took the day off classes Wednesday to express their indignation at the climate of violence prevailing in Mexico and the depth of government and police corruption here.
Outrage at the disappearance of 43 students in the state of Guerrero had been the original motive for the protest when it was planned last week. But the character of the demonstration changed following the unexplained death of 23-year-old UdG student Ricardo de Jesus Esparza Villegas in Guanajuato last weekend, allegedly at the hands of local police officers.
“It’s time to raise our voices so that those who govern us listen,” Federacion de Estudiantes President Alberto Galarza told the students, many of whom had written slogans on pieces of card pledging their solidarity with the missing students and the family of Esparza Villegas.
Esparza Villegas had traveled to the popular Cervantino Festival in Guanajuato along with a group of friends from the UdG Lagos de Moreno campus.
Shortly after they arrived, the students went to an event in one of the city’s plazas. One of the students later testified that they were harassed by police officers, who eventually took Esparza Villegas away.
The students said they had no further contact with their friend, whose body was discovered the next day on the patio of a house a long way from where he disappeared.
Authorities in Guanajuato have begun an investigation but had made no arrests at press time.
Jalisco Attorney General Carlos Najera said it was too early to jump to conclusions – as he suggested on Wednesday that many media outlets had done – and blame Guanajuato police for the crime. Only a proper investigation, using evidence from surveillance cameras and the testimony of other witnesses, would provide an answer, he said.
Esparza Villegas’ mother Rosa Maria rejected reports in some Guanajuato newspapers that her son may have fallen from a wall while trying to break into the house where he was found. “My son was a principled boy. He didn’t lack for anything,” she told reporters this week.