Mexican agents shoot dead a student at the Rural Teachers College

Mexican police officers shot dead a student at a rural teacher training college in the country’s western party on Thursday evening. The episode comes at a time of increasing tension between the government and the university’s students, linked to one of the worst atrocities in Mexico’s recent history.

The shooting occurred Thursday in Guerrero state after state police officers tried to stop a white pickup truck that had been reported stolen and was met with gunfire, 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 at a hospital. A second person in the truck was arrested and a firearm and drugs were found in the vehicle, police said.

Guerrero State Secretary General Ludwig Reynoso told reporters after the shooting that Mr Gómez Peralta was a student at the Escuela Normal Rural Raúl Isidro Burgos – a teacher training college in a rural area of ​​Guerrero with a history of activism and social protest.

In 2014, a group of 43 students from the school were attacked by armed men, including local police officers whose commanders had taken direct orders from local drug traffickers – as evidenced by a trove of text messages, witness statements and investigative files.

The students were kidnapped and never seen again. Ten years later, the remains of only three bodies have been officially identified.

The teachers’ council on Friday condemned the actions of police in the pickup truck encounter, suggesting it was an unprovoked attack.

“One of our colleagues was brutally shot,” 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 officers were responding to a crime.

“There is no attack on a student, because we did not know he was a student, but on a person who drove a vehicle with a theft report and did not stop at the request of the authorities,” said René Posselt. a spokesperson for the state government of Guerrero.

The killing of Mr. Gómez Peralta came days after 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 halted.

The president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, downplayed the protest, calling it a provocation.

After the death of Mr. Gómez Peralta, some teacher training students staged 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 got out of the pickup to go to a nearby store alerted the college to what had happened.

Other students then called Mr. Velázquez, who disputed the official story that the students had attacked the police first.

“For us, this was an extrajudicial killing,” Mr. Velázquez said. “It is the result of a tendency to abuse power, of police violence that is already a habit.”

Santiago Aguirre, the lead lawyer representing the families of the 43 missing students, said there has been a pattern of disproportionate use of lethal force by state authorities in Guerrero, adding that human rights groups have documented cases of police officers destroying evidence at crime scenes posted.

“The prudent call is for a thorough investigation that is not conducted with bias and that exhausts all necessary lines of inquiry,” Mr. Aguirre said.

On Friday morning, Mr. López Obrador expressed his dismay over 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 with violence in any way. We are not oppressors,” said Mr. López Obrador, whose government is leading the investigation into the missing students. “Knowing what happened, punishing those responsible and finding the young people – that is my commitment, and I am working on it.”

The teacher training college and the families of the missing students have criticized the government’s handling of the investigation.

Last year, a panel of international experts investigating the students’ kidnapping announced it was ending its investigation and leaving the country after members of the panel said they had been repeatedly lied to and misled by the Mexican armed forces about the military activities of the army. role in the crime.

A spokesman for the Mexican military said the Defense Ministry was no longer authorized to speak on the case of missing students.

“It is the president who is talking about this,” he said.