Alfonso Cuarón, Guillermo Del Toro, Alejandro G. Iñárritu Seek Justice For 43 Slain Ayotzinapa Students

The Museum of Modern Art honored Mexican filmmaker Alfonso Cuarón on Monday night and the renown writer, producer and director took the opportunity to demand justice for the 43 missing Ayotzinapa students with his contemporaries Guillermo Del Toro and Alejandro G. Iñárritu.

Before the night began, Del Toro went on stage with Alfonso and Jonas Cuarón to read an official statement from the trio, which was also cosigned by the absent Alejandro G. Iñárritu, about the missing students.

"This past September, 43 students were kidnapped by the local police in the state of Guerrero, Mexico," he read. "After a period of apathy, the authorities only then were forced to search for them, due to the protestations of citizens across the entire country and the world, and they found the first of many, many mass graves. None of these graves contained the remains of the missing students. The bodies within them were those of other anonymous victims. Last week, the general attorney announced that the 43 students were handed over by the police to members of a drug cartel to be executed and burned in a public dumpster. But even of the identity of those charred remains awaits proper DNA."

"The federal government argues that these events are all just local violence — not so," Del Toro continued, asking for justice for the students. "As Human Rights Watch observes, these killings and forced disappearances reflect a much broader pattern of abuse and are largely a consequence of the longstanding failure of the Mexican authorities. ... We believe that these crimes are systemic and indicate a much greater evil: the blurred lines between organized crime and the high-ranking officials in the Mexican government. We must demand the answers about this and we must do it now."

For a brief recap: 43 students — mostly young men studying to become teachers at Escuela Normal Rural de Ayotzinapa — were taken away by the police for protesting unfair hiring practices of teachers on Sept. 26 when they were rounded up by local police, upon the direction of the mayor of Iguala. The students were turned over to gang members to be killed — they were shot, cremated, and some of the remains were dumped in the local San Juan River. Jesús Murillo Karam, from the Attorney General's Office, told the media that the three suspects — Patricia Reyes, El Pato and Agustín García Reyes — have admitted to killing the students upon the orders of their leader and the government has declared the missing students to be dead.