State of Terror: Mumia Abu-Jamal on Ayotzinapa
MEXICO: State of Corruption – State of Terror
Mumia Abu-Jamal
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The disappearance of 43 students in Mexico, made possible by the deep corruption of politicians and police, has rocked the nation in ways not seen since 1968.
Then, as now, students protesting the failures and corruption of the State became breaking points – the sparks of rebellion, and social rejection of the rotten status quo.
With the news that local police in Iguala, Guerrero State, under orders of the corrupt mayor, kidnapped 43 students and delivered them to hitmen for a drug gang, the gates have burst open to national protest and widespread contempt for the government.
For it reveals, in stark clarity, that the State is so corrupt that there is no difference between politicians, cops and drug-dealing gangsters. They’re all in on the same game of money, violence and crime.
They are brothers.
For when the political class betrays the youth, and the police betray their oaths, they are but criminals by another name, aiders and abettors of crime.
They show that under neoliberalism, the State itself is for sale to the highest bidder. And so are gangsters.
For capitalism buys all, and therefore, it corrupts all.
But if you think a mere mayor ordered the liquidation of dozens of students on his own say-so – well- I’ve got a bridge to sell you in Brooklyn!
This points to a system of corruption that ripples throughout the entire government.
American journalist, John Gibler, in his book, To Die in Mexico, (To Die in Mexico: Dispatches from Inside the Drug War (City Lights, 2011), details how corruption in Mexico is indeed systematic, where drug cartels actually run whole states in Mexico.
Gibler explains the dimensions of the so-called ‘drug war’ in Mexico, and its resultant pervasiveness of fear:
In the battle zones of the drug war, where the soldiers sent into the streets to “keep drugs from reaching your children” shoot kids instead, where the cruelest of hired killers is called the Barbie, where police will tell you that they do not investigate murder cases because they are afraid, the ambulances will not take people with bullet wounds to the hospital for fear that the killers will return to finish their victims off enroute, in a place where such incongruity is the norm….
In Mexico, drug cartels buy, and won, governors, mayors, other politicians and entire police departments.
They work for them.
This explains, and makes possible, the attack, ‘arrests’, and massacre of college students from Ayotzinapa, who came to Iguala to protest. Forty-three young men.
What we’re looking at is simple: state terrorism.
