Revisiting Rural Teachers Schools in Mexico: a dissenting approach for memory based on the events of the Ayotzinapa students

Abstract

The disappearance of 43 students of “Raul Isidro Burgos” school in Ayotzinapa, Iguala, in the Mexican state of Guerrero, has caused social outcry throughout the country and in the world. What happened on September 26th and 27th, 2014, highlighted the weakening of the democratic system in Mexico, especially after increasing acts of violence, human rights abuses, and the loss of decency and moral traditions in a period dominated by neoliberalism and drug trafficking. The purpose of this work is to revisit the school system in the rural areas. We find four “constitutive moments”: 1) a post-revolutionary period, which begins in the 1920s, and ends with president Cardenas last years in the government; 2) the effect of Manuel Avila Camacho industrialization policies on the countryside and on education; 3) a period of social unrest, which generated national liberation movements from 1960 to late 1980s, and an era of counterinsurgency policies against rural schools, and 4) one related to neoliberalism, which has broaden the violence climate in the 1980s.