Public forum on Mexico’s human-rights crisis. Please circulate widely
The Ayotzinapa Disappearances and Mexico’s Human Rights Crisis: Public Forum
Sunday, 12 April, 2015, 2-5 pm
Fletcher Challenge Theatre, SFU Harbour Centre
On September 26, 2014, Mexican state security forces attacked a group of students from the teachers’ college in Ayotzinapa, Guerrero, killing 6 people and forcibly disappearing 43 others who have never been seen again. The crime has pulled the veil off an acute human rights crisis in Mexico. The search for the students has uncovered more than 15 mass graves, none of them containing the bodies of the students.
This Sunday the disappearances and their historical and political context will be discussed in a public forum. The speakers will be Hilda Legideño Vargas, a single mother and crafts seller who lost her son in the attack; Jorge Luis Clemente Balbuena, a member of the student committee of the Ayotzinapa teachers’ college; and Tanalís Padilla, a professor of modern Mexican history at Dartmouth College who is currently researching a book that examines the role of school teachers in the Mexican countryside as both agents of state consolidation and activists for social justice.
The event is on Sunday, 12 April, 2-5 pm at the Fletcher Challenge Theatre in the SFU Harbour Centre and is open to the public.
For information on other public events with the delegation from Ayotzinapa in Vancouver and the rest of Canada, please visit: https://www.facebook.com/events/1414697398838703/ and http://makemexicosafe.ca/ayotzinapa2ottawa/#about
Organizers: Amnesty International Canada, CoDevelopment Canada, CIPO-Vancouver
Sponsors: UBC First Nations and Indigenous Studies Program, UBC Department of Sociology, UBC Program of Latin American Studies, SFU Institute for the Humanities, SFU Department of History, SFU School of Criminology, SFU Graduate Student Society, BC Teachers Federation, United Food and Commercial Workers Canada, United Steelworkers Canada, Ontario Teachers Federation, Canadian Union of Public Employees