Mario Zavala Navarrete, a leader of alumni of the Raul Isidro Burgos de Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers College in the southern Mexican state of Guerrero, reported that he was assaulted by armed, masked assailants the night of Nov. 22. He said they followed him in a white van as he was heading home to Tixtia on a public bus after leaving the college. They caught him when he left the bus and beat him unconscious.

The alumni have been demanding 75 rural teaching posts. Some 800 teaching students occupied the state legislature in the state capital, Chilpancingo, on Nov. 14 to support the alumni's demands. The protesters blamed a subsequent confrontation with the police on Gov. Zeferino Torreblanca Galindo, of the center-left Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), who refuses to meet with the students or discuss their demands. On Nov. 23 a group of 90 teaching students greeted Torreblanca as he appeared in Mexico City to inaugurate a Guerrero state office in the Coyoacan section. "Ayotzi lives, the struggle continues," they chanted as the governor entered the office. Meanwhile, 15 busloads of students and alumni demonstrated in Ciudad Altamirano, Guerrero, to demand the removal of state education secretary Jose Luis Gonzalez de la Vega. (La Jornada, Nov. 24)

From Weekly News Update on the Americas, Nov. 26

See our last posts on Mexico and the struggle in Guerrero.