On September 26, a group of students traveled to the city of Iguala in Guerrero, Mexico to protest against the corrupt and discriminatory government they planned to work for as elementary school teachers after finishing their studies. By the next day, three of them had been killed by the police, and forty-three had disappeared. The fate of those who vanished is still unknown but it seems likely that the police — who arrested a high number of protesters in a village close to Iguala called Ayotzinapa — gave the forty-three to one of the local cartels.

The disappearances of the students, who attended a college with a history of radical activism, have rocked Mexico. What began as an isolated incident in a rural town in one of the country’s poorest states has given birth to a nation-wide protest movement (and a stream of viral hashtags) that is strongest in the south-central region of the country.

A quick catalogue of this past month: on November 9, protesters burned the door of the National Palace in Mexico City. On November 11, protesters fought back riot police in Guerrero. On November 15, the same day that Supreme Court judges gave themselves a 6.5 percent raise, police shot a student in UNAM (the National Autonomous University of Mexico, the same school of the 1968 massacred students). On November 16, the parents of the forty-three disappeared students held a remembrance with Zapatistas for the disappeared.