Juvenal Becerra, head of a pharmacy trade association, pointed to a 20 percent downturn statewide. That includes $3.8 million in lost business in the last month just in the area around Iguala, where the 43 teachers college students disappeared on Sept. 26 following a police attack in which six people died.
“In Iguala and the communities that surround it, some pharmacies have cut hours. They open later and close earlier,” Becerra said. Organized gangs “never stopped charging extortion or kidnapping or assaults, but since the students disappeared in September, clients leave home less often.”
Investigators say the students were rounded up by local police, turned over to a drug gang and apparently killed, with their corpses charred into ash and dumped into a river.
Authorities have yet to confirm that any human remains found during the search for the youths belong to the students, and officially they are still considered missing.
On Oct. 17, tens of thousands of protesters marched through Acapulco. On Monday, they blocked the city's airport for hours carrying clubs, machetes and gasoline bombs. The following day, demonstrators burned the local headquarters of President Enrique Pena Nieto's Institutional Revolutionary Party in the state capital of Chilpancingo. On Wednesday, the state legislature and an educational building were set on fire.
A dozen state business groups led by the Tourist Hotels Association issued a statement last week recognizing that the protesters have a legitimate demand for justice and urging authorities to clarify the case.
But the statement also criticized what it called “conditions of civil disorder, panic, damage to private property, vandalism, looting, the blockading of roads resulting from the total absence of public order.”
“It all started when the (Oct. 17) mega-march was announced,” Badillo said. “Then came the invasion of the airport on Monday, and the announcement of more marches, and everything falls apart.”
