PARENTS of 43 missing students marked the passage of six months since their disappearance on Thursday with a thousands-strong march urging fellow Mexicans not to abandon them.

Maria Elena Guerrero, the mother of a missing student, told a post-march rally that her pain had turned to fury against the government in the months since her son disappeared.

“They have taken so much from us that they’ve even taken our fear. We’re not afraid,” she said.

Ms Guerrero pleaded with the crowd: “Don’t leave us alone,” sparking a chanted response from the crowd that the families are not alone.

Parents and supporters demonstrated earlier in the day at the federal elections office in Mexico City to ask that voting scheduled for June in the south-western state of Guerrero be suspended.

Dozens of protesters delivered a letter to the office asking that the June 7 elections not go ahead because people could be voting for politicians tied to drug trafficking, as was the case with former mayor of Iguala Jose Luis Abarca who remains in custody.

Parents and their supporters then staged a protest march in the capital, while small groups of activists defaced campaign posters and burned a small bus in the Guerrero state capital of Chilpancingo.

The students from a rural teacher-training college were last seen in Iguala.

Federal investigators determined that the police turned the students over to members of a drug-trafficking gang who took them to a remote rubbish dump near the town of Cocula, killed them, burned the bodies and threw the remains into a river.

The Attorney General’s Office issued a statement on Thursday, reiterating that the government had conducted a transparent and exhaustive investigation of the case, detaining 104 people, including 48 from the Iguala police force.

However, only one victim’s remains have been identified and parents of the young men have continued to demand answers about the events of September 26.

“We came to tell the authorities and the Mexican government that, as parents, we cannot allow the elections to take place,” said parent Meliton Ortega.

“They have been six months of torture, of suffering for us.”

by Our Foreign Desk