Mexican police officers shot and killed a student at a rural teachers’ college Thursday evening in the western part of the country. The episode comes at a time of growing tension between the government and college students, linked to one of the worst atrocities in Mexico’s recent history.
The shooting occurred Thursday in the state of Guerrero after state police officers attempted to stop a white pickup truck that had been reported stolen and were shot at, according to state authorities.
Authorities said that in the ensuing shootout, one person in the vehicle, Yanqui Kothan Gómez Peralta, 23, was shot in the head by police and later died in hospital. A second person in the truck was arrested and a firearm and drugs were found in the vehicle, police said.
Guerrero’s state secretary general, Ludwig Reynoso, told reporters after the shooting that Mr. Gómez Peralta was a student at Escuela Normal Rural Raúl Isidro Burgos, a teachers’ college in a rural area of Guerrero with a history of activism and social protest. .
In 2014, a group of 43 students at the school were attacked by armed men, including local police officers whose commanders had taken direct orders from local drug traffickers, as demonstrated by a series of text messages, testimonies and investigative documents .
The students were kidnapped and never seen again. A decade later, the remains of only three bodies have been officially identified.
The teachers’ school on Friday condemned the police action in the encounter with the pickup truck, suggesting it was an unprovoked attack.
“One of our colleagues was brutally shot and killed,” the school said in a statement. “We hold the state government directly responsible for the armed attack.”
State officials said they regretted the killing, but explained that the officers were responding to a crime.
“This is not an attack against a student, since we did not know he was a student, but about a person who was driving a vehicle with a theft report and did not stop at the request of the authorities,” said René Posselt, a spokesman for the government of the state of Guerrero.
The murder of Mr. Gómez Peralta occurred a few days after that of a group of protesters rammed the wooden doors of the National Palacewhere the country’s president lives, demanding answers about the investigation into the case of the 43 missing students – which protesters said the government had blocked.
President Andrés Manuel López Obrador downplayed the protest, calling it a provocation.
After the death of Mr. Gómez Peralta, some students of the teaching college organized a protest in Chilpancingo, the state capital, setting fire to a police vehicle.
José Filiberto Velázquez, a local minister and director of the human rights group Minerva Bello in Guerrero, said a third student who had gotten out of his pickup truck to go to a nearby store alerted the college to the incident.
Other students then called Mr. Velázquez, who disputed the official version that the students attacked the police first.
“For us this was an extrajudicial execution,” Velázquez said. “It is the result of a tendency towards abuse of power, towards police brutality which is already a habit.”
Santiago Aguirre, the lead lawyer representing the families of the 43 missing students, said there had been a pattern of disproportionate use of lethal force by state authorities in Guerrero, adding that human rights groups had documented cases of police officers who deposited evidence at crime scenes.
“Caution requires a thorough investigation that is not conducted in a biased manner and that exhausts all necessary lines of inquiry,” Aguirre said.
On Friday morning, Mr. López Obrador expressed shock at the killing of Mr. Gómez Peralta and said prosecutors would thoroughly investigate Thursday’s incident. He also reiterated his intention to get answers about what happened to the 43 missing students.
“We will not respond in any way with violence. We are not oppressors,” said López Obrador, whose administration is leading the investigation into the missing students. “Knowing what happened, punishing those responsible and finding the young people: this is my commitment and I’m working on it.”
The teachers’ board and the families of the missing students criticized the government’s handling of the investigation.
Last year, an international think tank investigating the students’ abduction announced it would close the investigation and leave the country after members of the group said they had been repeatedly linked to and deceived by the Mexican military about the army actions. role in the crime.
A spokesman for the Mexican army said the country’s Defense Ministry was no longer authorized to talk about the case of the missing students.
“It’s the president who talks about this,” he said.
