El Paso Director Charlie Minn on Movie ’43’ About Missing Mexican Students

They say that Mexico is getting much safer. Try telling that to the families of 43 college students who disappeared a little over a year ago near Iguala. The 43 were all students from a teachers college and were on their way to Iguala to protest a conference led by the mayor's wife. Somewhere on the way there, they were apprehended by local police and handed over to a local crime syndicate.

None of them have been seen alive since.

Documentary filmmaker Charlie Minn will be in the KLAQ studios Wednesday to talk about the incident that has received little attention, possibly because it goes against the official narrative that Mexico is a safe country.

Mexican authorities say that Iguala's mayor and his wife gave the order to intercept the students. What was so important that they had to call in a favor from the Guerreros Unidos cartel and have 43 students apprehended and presumably killed? They were going to protest "funding programs and hiring practices that they felt were unfair to teachers from rural areas." That's it. Imagine if someone had something really damaging, like claims of financial impropriety against the mayor or, you know, claims that him and his wife were murderous, scum-sucking monsters.

Here's an illustration of how safe Mexico really is: About a week after the students went missing, Mexican authorities announced that they'd found a mass grave near Iguala that contained 28 bodies that had been tortured and, according to reports, burned alive. But it turns out that forensics tests proved that none of the bodies were of the missing 43 students. In other words, they were an entirely separate group of people who had been tortured and killed in the same vicinity ... that the Mexican cops weren't even looking for.

Why do some party-poopers insist on claiming that Mexico still isn't safe? Charlie Minn will be on the Q MoSho this Wednesday at 8 am MST to discuss his new movie, 43. 

The movie opens in El Paso on Friday. You can get full local listings here.