Mexico City
Relatives of 43 students who went missing last year, along with thousands of workers, marched here Friday during Labor Day protests.
Unions of teachers, laborers, miners and electricians were among the groups demanding better salary and working conditions.
They gathered in front of the antimonument – a makeshift memorial that was spontaneously erected last Sunday by relatives of the 43 students from Ayotzinapa College who disappeared last September in Iguala.
Meliton Ortega, a spokesperson for the parents of the students, asked that the students be found as he emphasized that injustice in Mexico most affects the poor and humble workers.
More than 10,000 protesters gathered in the Zocalo, the main square of the city,
to listen to march leaders.
Union leaders and the parents of the students issued a call to boycott the midterm elections to be held June 7.
“We have to fight together. If we are fighting separately, the government will be able to silence us,” said Fidel Sanchez, spokesman for laborers in Baja California who have been protesting for higher wages for more than a month.
He said several organizations would meet Saturday to organize a national strike to contest the corrupted electoral process.
The 43 students of the teacher training college of Ayotzinapa disappeared Sept. 26 in the state of Guerrero.
They were kidnapped by local police and then murdered and burned by organized crime members, according to the authorities.
Scientists, intellectuals and parents of the students have always contested the official version.
