Protests in Mexico City could turn violent

MEXICO CITY, Nov. 15 (UPI) -- A contingent of hundreds of teachers is protesting against the government in Mexico City Saturday.

The protesters are demanding that the government present alive 43 students from Guerrero state that have been missing, and are unofficially presumed dead, since September. Other demands include the repeal of President Enrique Peña Nieto's structural reforms -- particularly education reform -- and the impeachment or resignation of Peña and other high level government officials.

The march has forced the closure of two main avenues that lead downtown, reported local newspaper Reforma. The teachers, affiliated to a teachers' union known as Coordinadora Nacional de Trabajadores de la Educación (CNTE), are also expected to carry out demonstrations at first lady Angelica Rivera's private residence in the rich west Mexico City neighborhood of Lomas de Chapultepec.

Residents of that neighborhood have been warned by community groups to avoid the protests and lock up their homes and businesses.

"We recommend to people who live near or transit through that area to make preparations. Do not leave cars parked on the street and lock your homes and businesses," read a communique released by the Central Committee of the Jewish community in Mexico.

The disappearance of the 43 students in Guerrero -- and the government's delayed and poorly received response -- have sparked unrest. Protesters have shut down major highways, burned Guerrero state capital Chilpancingo's main government building, shut down the Acapulco airport (also in Guerrero) and set fire to the front door of Mexico City's historical seat of national government, the National Palace.

Further outrage was fanned with the president's trip to China for an APEC summit. Viewed by many as ill-timed because of the ongoing crisis, the trip also carried a negative historical connotation. On Oct. 2, 1968, while then-president Gustavo Díaz Ordaz was out of town, army, paramilitary and police forces opened fire on a student protest in Mexico City, killing at least 40 students and detaining thousands.

Adding to Peña's troubles, a report by the Aristegui Noticias website uncovered that his family's private residence in Lomas de Chapultepec is worth nearly $7 million and is owned by Grupo Higa, a consortium that rented private jets and airplanes to his administration when he was a governor.

The government argued the house is being paid for by Rivera, who had a successful career as a soap opera actress before marrying Peña.

The same group, allied with China Railway Construction, won a bid to build a high-speed rail line earlier this year. That bid was later discarded by the government after competing companies argued they had not been given a fair shot at the contract.

The barrage of scandals has ignited calls for the president's resignation. Left-wing politicians and activists, including two-time presidential runner-up Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, have qualified the students' disappearance as a "state crime" and turned that demand into their rallying cry. The president's resignation is unlikely, as federal forces were not involved in the 43 students' disappearance and no Mexican president has resigned since Pascual Ortiz Rubio in 1932.

Maria Amparo Casar, a well-known journalist and academic, qualified the direct accusation against Peña as an "error, product of ignorance, intellectual dishonesty or a purpose other than revealing the true facts" of the case.

After the 43 students, freshmen at a radical teachers' college in Ayotzinapa, Guerrero, disappeared, federal forces took over security operations in many of the state's municipalities. The governor of Guerrero, Ángel Aguirre Rivero, was forced to resign after military and federal police forces found clandestine graves in the region that turned out to contain dozens of bodies unrelated to the Ayotzinapa case.

The night of the disappearance, the students were in the town of Iguala, where Mayor José Luis Abarca and his wife, Maria de los Angeles Pineda -- both members of the opposition leftist Party of the Democratic Revolution -- were holding a rally, presumably to announce Pineda's candidacy to succeed Abarca.

The students had commandeered buses as part of a hazing process run by senior students of the college, and were allegedly looking for more buses to transport their contingent and possibly to disrupt Pineda's rally. Iguala police surrounded the buses and opened fire, killing six people, including a bus driver for a youth soccer team, a teenage footballer possibly mistaken for one of the students and an unrelated woman in a taxi.

The remaining students were rounded up by police and turned over to Guerreros Unidos, a local drug gang. At least 72 people have been arrested in the case, and a member of the gang confessed to killing the students and later burning the bodies and dumping the ashes in a river.

Abarca and Pineda went on the run and were later revealed to be ranking members of Guerreros Unidos. They were arrested on Nov. 4 in Mexico City; Abarca was indicted on murder charges and Pineda is being held in custody pending charges.