Seven months have passed since the Mexican government said that there were no bodies: no bones, no teeth, no nothing. All 43 of them were burned up in a pile of trash, Attorney General Jesús Murillo Karam reported, and then he began to enumerate what was thrown on top of the bodies —diesel, gasoline, tires, firewood, plastic— as if that were evidence of some truth. Later, officials discovered one bone, identified one body, and they did it triumphantly. But where were the rest? “With the 43, you can only say that they’ve identified one body,” said journalist Francisco Goldman, who writes for The New Yorker about the events unfolding in Mexico. I interviewed Goldman in February 2015, five months after the students had been forcibly disappeared, and the country was still in the throes of the largest protests in the history of the country. “That’s all you can say. Legally they’re disappeared. Everybody wants to say they’re dead,” explained Goldman. Garissa. Survivors said the attackers had told the students that if they came out of their dorms, their lives would be spared. Once outside, the students were ordered to lie on the ground. They were shot in the back of the head. Others were taunted and told to call their parents and let them know that the assault was payback for Kenya’s involvement in Somalia. They, too, were shot. Yemen. Over 60 percent of the population - 16 million people - were already in need of some form of aid before the recent airstrikes started. |