On September 26, 43 students boarded a coach from their college in Ayotzinapa in the state of Guerrero in Mexico. They never completed their journey. 

What exactly happened remains unclear but it appears that the first six were shot by police after the bus was stopped.  

The outrageous disappearance of these students comes on top of the thousands who have disappeared in Mexico in the past 10 years as part of the “war on drugs.”  

From the Mexican government’s point of view the situation has gone from bad to worse.  

Police instructed to search for the missing students have discovered more and more unmarked graves.  

Every new horror is then DNA tested, but so far none of the missing 43 have been found.  

These newly discovered graves are very often the bodies, often burnt, of desperate Central American migrants trying to cross Mexico to get to the United States in order to survive economically, and send money back to their families in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras.  

The 43 students who lost their lives were on their way to a demonstration and apparently the mayor of Iguala ordered police to prevent them from travelling because he thought they were going to heckle his wife who was due to speak at an event.  

He and his wife were subsequently arrested in Mexico City, but huge questions remain over the link between the police and Mexico’s notorious narco gangs. 

Suspicions have been raised about the inability of Mexican federal authorities to either protect people or to unmask the culprits of this atrocious attack.  

Demonstrations have been held all over the country and last Saturday at the famous Universidad Nacional Autonomia de Mexico was met with robust and brutal action by police. 

While the stories of disappearances in Mexico are now gaining more publicity internationally, it is important to look at neighbouring countries too.  

In Honduras there have been 60,000 homicides since the start of this decade. Honduras has a population of just eight million — giving it one of the highest murder rates in the world.  

Looking more deeply into the figures, it’s also clear that individuals who stand for justice are in greater danger than anyone else.  

Since the coup of 2009, 29 journalists, 74 lawyers and 90 LGBT people have been killed.  

Additionally 92 activists in the Bajo Aguan area have been killed in land disputes, as farmers have lost their land to a World Bank-funded modernisation programme. 

In the case of neighbouring Guatemala there is a similar history of human rights abuses but, like all countries in Central America, many of the population rely on family remittances from the US.  

The growth of nationalism and anti-immigrant feeling in the US has enabled the Obama administration to deport over one million people since he came to office.  

There are 1,000 people per week arriving back in Guatemala, so that’s 1,000 families losing any remittance income, and 1,000 more people competing for work.  

Fundamentally, Central American human rights abuses result from the insatiable appetite for Class A drugs in the US.  The very well-funded and organised narco gangs are able to corrupt police forces and the whole political system.  

And it’s the poorest, most vulnerable and most politically active who suffer the brunt of this.

This year’s Latin American conference will be held on November 29 at Congress House, 23-28 Great Russell St, London WC1B 3LS. You can register via www.latinamerica2014.org.uk.

THE Ebola crisis has brought out the best and the worst in people.  

Many have volunteered to go and work in Sierra Leone and other affected countries, including Liberia and Guinea.  

Six-hundred NHS workers volunteered to go, and notably there was huge, prompt and very effective support given by the Cuban medical service fighting this crisis. 

The wider lessons of the Ebola crisis are that a total lack of access to medical care for the poorest people in the poorest parts of the world eventually affects us all  — and the issue has to be dealt with by examining the way in which African people and economies have been treated by the rest of the world since independence.

What we don’t need is yet another lecture from Bob Geldof with patronising comments about Africa and African people and a refusal to recognise that Western exploitation of the continent is at the heart of the problem.

The campaign group Liberation was founded as the Movement for Colonial Freedom while Fenner Brockway, Tony Benn and many others worked in Parliament to support African independence movements and crucially expose the lies and hypocrisy of the British military actions in Kenya in the 1950s, when castration, mutilation and concentration camps were the British punishment against the Mau Mau.  

This weekend Liberation is holding a conference on Africa’s challenges today which will both examine the history of Africa since independence but also the current challenges of gender inequality and a World Bank-inspired economic model which seeks to privatise public services and export natural resources.

TODAY’S Rochester and Strood by-election is surrounded by talk that Ukip might win a parliamentary seat, this time with Tory defector Mark Reckless as its candidate.  

Reckless, like most of Ukip, is obsessed with immigration. Unfortunately, such xenophobia is permeating the whole political debate in Britain.  

Calls to halt benefit payments to any EU national legally residing in Britain, deport those who are unemployed and so on are both short-sighted and very dangerous.  

Compare this with how easily overseas billionaires investing in the London property market avoid tax. 

It’s also worth considering that other EU member states could take retaliatory action by denying British nationals living in other parts of the EU access to welfare benefits.  

Depressingly, Labour’s shadow work and pensions secretary Rachel Reeves has gone some way in the same direction by putting forward proposals in the Mail Online that she would limit benefit payments to EU migrants.  

She continued by saying: “Low-skilled migration is too high, overall migration from the EU is too high,” thus playing straight into the hands of Ukip and the Tories. 

TOMORROW will see a private member’s Bill put forward by Clive Efford MP, who will try to stop privatisation in the NHS and exempt it from the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership.

The support for this Bill is huge and welcome but we need to go a bit further on TTIP.   

Last Monday, David Cameron, who had already called for a rocket booster to be put under the TTIP talks, bizarrely claimed that the British economy would benefit by £10bn through this highly secretive trade deal between the European Union and the US.  

We should not only be very wary of such claims but recognise that the agenda of TTIP is the privatisation of public services, the destruction of the European-style welfare state and a weakening of employment protection legislation that has been so hard fought for by generations of trade unionists.

At yesterday’s Prime Minister’s question time David Cameron announced his pride in the fact that this government has cut £83 billion from the welfare budget, claiming that 500,000 more people are in work than three years ago.  

He failed to mention that the new jobs being created on the back of the tsunami of public-sector cuts are on lower wages, often on zero-hours contracts and with much worse working conditions, thus creating the next generation of impoverished pensioners.   

In the run-up to the general election Labour must abandon attempts to ape the Tories on immigration or benefits.  

Ed Miliband, in his fightback speech last week, delivered a welcome defence of the NHS and an attack on inequality, zero-hours contracts and insecure employment.  

For all the complaints made by Myleene Klass about the alleged inequity of a mansion tax, we should remember that there are more than 660,000 people who are currently being penalised by the bedroom tax.