Some images from today’s ‘March for Peace’ in Mexico

Some images from today’s ‘March for Peace’ in Mexico City protesting President Felipe Calderon’s ‘war’ again Mexico’s drug cartels and organized crime networks

Some images from today’s ‘March for Peace’ in Mexico City protesting President Felipe Calderon’s ‘war’ again Mexico’s drug cartels and organized crime networks

This is a longer version of an edited interview with the director Christiane Burkhard about her documentary film project, “Tracing Aleida”.

What happened here last week was a sheer massacre.

Thousands of Mexicans took to the streets yesterday to demand justice for the victims of a mass-killing by Government troops on the night of October 2nd forty years ago. But the protests in Mexico City had a bitter end.

Today, people of all ages will march in memory of a massacre that took place forty years ago in Mexico City – an event that remains one of the darkest in the country’s recent and bloody history.

The most important thing that occurred to me as I’ve perused other media’s coverage, my own, and the scene itself, is how frighteningly informal the attitude of the authorities is to the crime scene itself.
Rafael Bucio, a 30 year old car-parking attendant, was out with his wife and two small children in Morelia, Mexico on Monday night enjoying the Independence celebrations when two grenades went off.
Rafael Bucio was waiting for his mother on the corner of the streets Madero and Quintana Roo in Morelia, Michoacan, Mexico Monday night. Behind him, his wife Gloria Alvarez stood in the street with their three-month old child in her arms. They didn’t know that their lives were about to change forever.
“Lots of ambulances and patrol cars started to pass by going to the center – to the cathedral,” explained Bucio Wednesday afternoon from a hospital bed, broken bones in his arm and leg held together by pins. Blood seeped through the bandages onto the white cotton sheet covering the bed.
He was moving closer to his wife, away from the street corner, when he heard a thump.

Yesterday, the public paid their respects at a shrine to the side of the city’s main plaza in Morelia, remembering the seven people killed in Monday night’s bomb attack.
Two explosions during Mexican Independence Day celebrations in the western state of Michoacan killed eight people Monday night and injured dozens more, we reported yesterday.

Even today there is no definitive count of how many pro-democracy demonstrators were slaughtered by Mexican army troops in the Tlatelolco zone of this capital on Oct. 2, 1968. Was the death toll a few dozen, as the government claimed? Or closer to 300, as some intrepid journalists reported? Did President Gustavo Díaz Ordaz approve the attack? No one knows for sure.
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