A test of Peña Nieto’s mettle

AT LUNCHTIME on Sunday November 2nd a group of students, some of them masked, “liberated” the toll booths on the motorway connecting Mexico City and the nearby city of Toluca. Your columnist, along with other queuing motorists, was peremptorily ordered to make a “voluntary contribution in solidarity with Ayotzinapa”. Neither motorway staff nor police were anywhere to be seen.

Daily protests, some as anarchic as that one and some massive, continue six weeks after Mexico was horrified by the disappearance of 43 trainee teachers from a college in Ayotzinapa, in the southern Mexican state of Guerrero, and the killing of six other people. The hijacked buses in which the students were travelling were intercepted by local police in Iguala, a nearby town, on the orders of its mayor, José Luis Abarca, and his wife, who are alleged to be leaders of a drug mafia and were arrested this week.