Los Angeles

Mothers Demand Answers in 2014 Disappearance of 43 Students in Mexico

Cristina Bautista and Joaquina García protested on Monday in front of the Consulate General of Mexico in Los Angeles

More than four years after the disappearance of 43 students in Ayotzinapa, Mexico, the mothers of two of them protested on Monday in front of the Consulate General of Mexico in Los Angeles and demanded the disappearance to be clarified.

Cristina Bautista and Joaquina García have lived four years and two months of anguish and despair since their children disappeared on Sept. 26, 2014 in Ayotzinapa, Mexico.

Joaquina Garcia says that the last thing her son Martín Sanchez García, 19, told her before he left that day was that he would be back early to have lunch with her.

Garcia never saw her son again.

"That day was the saddest day of our lives," said Garcia. "We went to where the accident happened and we did not find them."

The two moms recall the chaotic day when the students traveled from the town of Ayotzinapa.

"Some of the people looked dislocated, others were without shoes. It was a sad thing," García said.

The students intended to take buses to travel to Mexico City to participate in the annual commemorative march of the student massacre of 1968.

"I will not rest until I find him because my son has to fulfill his dreams of being someone in life," said Bautista about her missing son.

Both women traveled to Los Angeles to continue with their search and to ask current Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador to clarify the disappearance of their children and to punish those responsible.

Bautista said, "I left my harvest. I quit my job. I left everything to come here to demand that the Mexican government gives me my son alive."

López-Obrador met with the families of the disappeared students during his election campaign and assured them that he would seek justice.

According to the Mexican Attorney General's Office, local police opened fire on the students because the couple in charge of the group had an alleged relationship with an organized crime group, and the police thought that the students were going to interrupt a public event.

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