Chilling moment protestors knock down door of Mexico’s presidential palace with pickup truck as rioters want answers about missing students who vanished in 2014
This is the shocking moment angry protesters used a pick-up truck to break down the wooden doors of Mexico’s presidential palace.
The protesters on Wednesday were protesting the 2014 kidnapping and killing of 43 missing students when they pushed the vehicle to break through the doors and stormed into Mexico City’s colonial-era National Palace, where President Andrés Manuel López Obrador lives and his holds daily press conferences. .
The group broke several windows before security officers forced them to withdraw from the palace, a historic structure dating back to the 18th century that was built on the site of the Aztec emperor’s palace.
The demonstration, like others in the past, was held to protest the mass disappearance of students from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College that took place on September 26, 2014 in Iguala, a city in the state of Guerrero on the Pacific coast.
Protesters were captured on video pushing a pickup truck before breaking through the door of the National Palace in Mexico City on Wednesday
Students from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teacher Training College took part in the demonstration on Wednesday to demand justice for 43 missing students at the Presidential Palace in Mexico City
The structure of the National Palace dates back to the 18th century and was built on the site of the Aztec Emperor’s palace
President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said demonstrators protesting outside the National Palace on Wednesday carried sledgehammers and blowtorches
President López Obrador called the protest a provocation and claimed the demonstrators had sledgehammers and blowtorches.
“This is a movement against us,” López Obrador said. “The plan is to create a provocation.”
But the president also tried to downplay the seriousness of the protest, saying, “The door is closing, it’s nothing.”
For years, the victims’ families and students from rural teachers’ colleges have protested the disappearances. It remains one of Mexico’s most infamous human rights cases.
With López Obrador’s term ending next year, family members face the prospect of not knowing what happened to their sons for a decade, but they fear the next administration will restart the error-ridden investigation.
The group of students was attacked by municipal police in Iguala and handed over to a local drug gang who apparently murdered them and set their bodies on fire. Only three of their remains have since been identified.
After an initial cover-up, a government truth commission concluded last year that local, state and federal authorities conspired with the gang to kill the students in what it called a “state crime.”
Protesters push a pickup truck to break down a door at the National Palace – the home of Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador – in Mexico City on Wednesday
A banner reading “We demand dialogue with the president” is seen on the facade of the National Palace on Wednesday during a protest against the kidnapping and murder of 43 student-teachers in September 2014
A group protesting the 2014 disappearance of 43 students from Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College entered the National Palace on Wednesday to protest the government of President Manuel Andrés López Obrador for its lack of results in investigating the case
López Obrador has complained about the involvement of human rights groups, which he says have prevented him from speaking directly to the parents of the missing students.
Xóchitl Gálvez, who is running for ruling party Claudia Sheinbaum to become the country’s first female president, on Wednesday blasted López Obrador for failing to meet with grieving families.
“The president must stop looking for blame,” Gálvez wrote on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter. “The only one responsible for what happened at the National Palace is him, with his arrogance for not receiving the parents and lawyers of the Ayotzinapa teachers.”
Sheinbaum, the former mayor of Mexico City, addressed the protest during his campaign on Thursday, saying López Obrador has scheduled a meeting with the parents.
Mexico’s underfunded radical teachers’ schools in rural areas have a decades-long tradition of violent protests.
When they were kidnapped, the students themselves had hijacked passenger buses, which they were going to use to travel to another protest.