Mexican student activist Varinia Emiliana, 19, has been taking part in demonstrations in Mexico’s Federal District (DF), ever since news of the disappearance of 43 student teachers in Iguala, Guerrero, sparked national protests.

She is one of many thousands who, tired of widespread poverty, violence and corruption plaguing the country, are demanding that the federal government find the disappeared students and that President Enrique Pena Nieto resign.

Fuelled by public outrage, the abduction of the native student teachers, referred to as “normalistas,” has triggered massive ongoing demonstrations across the country, attended by millions.

Authorities are using harsh methods to deal with demonstrators. In an email interview Emiliana said that national, state and local police are attacking protest marches on a regular basis with tear gas, clubs and live ammunition.

They are also using agent provocateurs to create a pretext to break up demonstrations and arrest protesters.

“This government wants to terrorise the population, but even with so much injustice, corruption, murders, disappearances, etc … it cannot cover this up.”

The story of the missing 43 is well known. On September 26, 43 students from a teacher training college in Iguala were collecting funds so they could join a demonstration in Mexico City to remember the hundreds of protesting students hunted down and killed by the Mexican army in 1968. Then they disappeared.

Federal officials stated that local police, on the orders of a mayor affiliated to the centre-left Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), arrested the students and then handed them over to gunmen from the local drug cartel who then killed the students and burned their bodies to eliminate evidence. Three members of the drug cartel confessed that the mayor ordered the students killed.

While federal and state police and local residents continue to search for the students, uncovering numerous mass graves with human remains, so far the remains of only one disappeared student has been confirmed.

On December 6, federal officials, with the help of an Argentinian forensic team, announced that a DNA test confirmed that bone fragments found near a garbage dump in Guerrero belonged to Alexander Mora Venancio, 19, one of the missing students. A sample was sent to a university laboratory in Innsbruck, Austria, for confirmation.

The right-wing Institutional Revolution Party (PRI) government of Pena Nieto, which came to power assisted by a massive vote-buying scheme and alleged ballot-box rigging in 2012, lacks widespread legitimacy across Mexico.

Millions still believe that Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, who first ran for the PRD in 2006 and officially lost by a narrow margin, is their real president.

Emiliana blamed Federal District PRD governor Miguel Angel Mancera for ordering attacks against demonstrators.

At a November 20 demonstration, attended by tens of thousands in the Zocalo (city square), she saw district police, under the command of Mancera, begin violently dispersing protesters at 8pm.

“In each march that l have gone to, there have been ‘agent provocateurs’, persons sent by the Pena government to provoke demonstrators pretending that they are civilians and on the side of demonstrators.”

She said that protesters at the November 8 demonstration in the Federal District were able to use their mobile phones to make videos of an undercover police agent encouraging protesters to set the doors of the National Palace on fire and then afterwards giving orders to the police to begin arrests.

She said that organisers now take security measures to prevent provocateurs from infiltrating demonstrations. Many activists across Mexico are using mobile phones to make videos of police attacks and then putting them on YouTube and Facebook, according to Emiliana.

Emiliana said police are also abducting key student organisers and leaders.

One student leader from her university was grabbed by the police as he was heading home. But people nearby with mobile phones took videos of the kidnapping along with the car licence plate, allowing them to track down the student leader and free him.

Alejandro Jiminez, a lawyer for the Mexican Institute for Human Rights in Mexico City, complained that government security forces are criminalising and brutalising protesters. He was part of the legal team defending the 11 students arrested by security forces who violently broke up the large peaceful demonstration in the Zocalo on November 20.

Police finally released the 11 students on November 30.

Jiminez said the the police, while focusing on young people, also attacked adults and children at the demonstration. “It is worrisome that they (the police) detained them (the 11), took them to the back of the National Palace, where they were mistreated by military personnel.”

One of the female prisoners was tied down, stripped of her clothes, and then photographed.

Furthermore, police accused the 11 of being tied with organised crime.

“In Mexico, they must change this type of situation because the presumption of innocence is a right, and the government just should not make rhetoric and speeches about this,” Jiminez stated.

Deputies from the PRI, National Action and Green Parties in the National Assembly just approved reforms to articles 11 and 73 of the Constitution that will give federal, state and local governments the right to ban and restrict demonstrations, using the pretext of guaranteeing universal mobility.

Opposition deputies from the PRD, Workers Party and the Citizen Movement condemned the changes, saying they will criminalise protesters and restrict freedom of expression and the right to demonstrate.

Despite government repression and intimidation, protesters are adamant that they will continue demonstrating until the 43 “normalistas” are returned and Pena Nieto resigns.

“Vivos se los llevaron, vivos los queremos” (Alive they took them, alive we want them) has become the universal slogan uniting protesters across the country.