Originally published on It’s Going Down.

September 26, 2025, marks 11 years since the State attack on students from the Ayotzinapa Rural Normal School in Iguala, Guerrero, during which six people were killed, 25 wounded, and 43 students disappeared. The following is the transcript of a Spanish-language audio segment produced by Radio Cósmica Libre in collaboration with the efforts of Communicators for Palestine. It is based on information provided by Eduardo Ibañez from the Mexico City Encampment for the 43. It has been translated into English by Scott Campbell.

Mexico, September 26, 2014. Palestine, July 2014. Two dates that seem unrelated but that resonate with a shared echo.

That night in Iguala, 43 campesino students were uprooted from their dormitories, from their classrooms, from their dreams. That summer in Gaza, more than 2,000 Palestinian lives were taken in a matter of weeks by the military machinery of Israel. What connects a young normalista from Guerrero with a Palestinian girl who will never become a teenager? The answer is in the language of State violence, in the economy of death that connects the Mexican narco-state with Israeli necropolitics.

It is a long story. In Mexico, the rural normal schools emerged in the 1930s to educate the children of poor campesinos and to train teachers committed to their communities. In Palestine, the Nakba of 1948 inaugurated a life under occupation, dispossession, and forced displacement.

Two processes that appear distinct but that share the experience of peoples who were denied the right to exist in conditions of dignity. In 2014, the stories intersected. While Gaza suffered bombardments during July and August, students from the Ayotzinapa rural normal school went out into the streets of Mexico to protest in solidarity.

Just one month later, they themselves were victims of forced disappearance and murder in Iguala. The disappearance did not just erase bodies, it also condemned mothers, sisters, and wives to a life of interminable searching. State violence produces widows, orphans, mutilated families, communities condemned to permanent mourning.

State crime has no passport. Governments that kill in the name of security learn from one another. Necropolitics speaks many languages, but death always says the same thing: “You don’t matter.”

Ayotzinapa and Palestine are wounds that bleed on the same map. When governments are silent, peoples seek each other out. That is what happened days after the disappearance of the 43. Messages of support for the Mexican mothers and fathers arrived from Gaza. They were not diplomatic words; they were echoes of a grief that recognized its reflection on another continent.

In 2019, the Palestinian BDS organization sent a video to the Ayotzinapa parents on the anniversary of the disappearance. In the Zócalo of Mexico City, a popular tribunal was organized on Israel’s role in the militarization of Latin America. There it was documented how the transport and communication equipment used in Iguala was of Israeli origin.

The peoples began to speak of businesses of blood, weapons, spyware, and training sold as security but that in reality sustained repressive regimes. Solidarity is not abstract. Campesina mothers from Guerrero and Palestinian women in refugee camps share the burden of sustaining their fractured communities.

Resistance is woven from the domestic, the scholastic, the communal, with bodies that carry both pain and dignity. If Gaza looked to Ayotzinapa and Ayotzinapa to Palestine, it was not out of romanticism, but because they recognized that the enemy is the same, the State that disappears and the empire that profits off death. If death were a business, Mexico and Israel would be majority partners. And, in fact, they are.

Pegasus is the clearest example. The Israeli spyware was used in Mexico to surveil journalists, activists, and human rights defenders, including the parents of the 43. Their lawyer, Bidulfo Rosales, was one of the victims.

The case of Tomás Zerón demonstrates transnational complicity. Zerón, architect of the so-called “historical truth,” fabricated evidence, covered for those responsible, and tortured the accused. Today he lives protected in Israel, which refuses to extradite him.

They don’t protect him out of compassion, but because Zerón knows too much about the arms contracts and about Pegasus. Digital surveillance is never neutral. Women journalists, woman human rights defenders, sexual dissidents, searching mothers, are the priority targets for espionage.

Patriarchal control is reinforced with occupation technology. The Mexican army, directly implicated in the disappearance of the normalistas, trained with Israeli forces. The National Guard, presented as a trustworthy institution, was also created with the advice and equipment from that country. Public officials such as Rosalinda Trujillo Marial boasted of their closeness with Israel while they authorized multimillion peso purchases of digital spyware. Israel exports occupation as a security model. Mexico buys it as a recipe for reinforcing a narco-state with a democratic façade.

The result is the same. Disposable lives. Subjugated peoples. Guaranteed impunity. Blood businesses. That is what the peoples call what the governments dress up as international cooperation. Pegasus in Mexico. Bombs in Gaza. Million-peso contracts in Tel Aviv. The bill is always paid with the bodies of the poor.

Faced with such impunity, one might expect silence. But what emerges is the opposite: resistance. And resistance does not need a visa. It travels from Guerrero to Gaza, from the fields to the neighborhoods, from the rural classrooms to the refugee camps.

The mothers and fathers of Ayotzinapa have become a symbol against forgetting. The Palestinian people, who have been resisting ongoing genocide for 77 years, are a model of dignity in the face of barbarism.

Mexico demands the extradition of Zerón. Israel blocks it. The UN condemns war crimes in Gaza. Western powers finance them.

Impunity is global. But so is solidarity. The fight against forgetting cannot be separated from those who bear its burden. It is women, searching mothers, Indigenous communities, displaced peoples who uphold memory and put their bodies on the front line. What would happen if the peoples of the South decided to break with the business of blood? What would happen if the struggles of Ayotzinapa and Palestine were not exceptions, but rather the start of a global front against necropolitics? The 43 and Palestine are mirrors. They reflect back to us a world ruled by impunity.

But also the certainty that resistance is transnational. That the cry for justice knows no borders. Because they took them alive, we want them back alive. Because Palestine lives in every dignified struggle. And because memory is our most dangerous weapon.

In the case of Palestine, the demand is clear and urgent. That the Zionist State of Israel stop interfering in the case of Ayotzinapa. That it stop protecting Tomás Zerón and that it extradite him immediately so he may face Mexican justice. Because impunity cannot continue being an export commodity. In the case of Ayotzinapa, the demand is just as forceful. The return, alive, of the 43 normalistas and justice for the fallen in Iguala.

No speeches, no pretenses, no fabricated historical truths. Real justice, complete truth, comprehensive reparation, and punishment for those materially and intellectually responsible. Both struggles, that of Palestine and that of Ayotzinapa, are united by the same slogan.

That peoples cannot continue being merchandise on the market of death, nor the spoils of necropolitics. That solidarity among peoples becomes a wall much stronger than the walls of occupation and silence. To say justice for Ayotzinapa is to say justice for Palestine.

Telling the truth in Mexico is to also demand the truth in Gaza. Memory and dignity cannot be negotiated, they are defended, shouted out loud, and sown like seeds that sooner or later will blossom.

Because they took them alive, we want them back alive.

Because Palestine will be free and because justice knows no borders.