Chilling moment: Protesters break down the door of Mexico’s presidential palace with a pickup truck as rioters want answers about students who disappeared in 2014.

This is the shocking moment angry protesters used a van to break down the wooden doors of the presidential palace in Mexico.

Protesters were protesting on Wednesday the kidnapping and murder of 43 students who disappeared in 2014 when they pushed the vehicle through the gates and attacked the colonial-era National Palace in Mexico City, where President Andrés Manuel López Obrador lives and celebrates his daily press conferences. .

The group smashed several windows before security officers forced them to leave the palace, a historic structure dating back to the 18th century that was built on the site of the Aztec emperor’s palace.

The demonstration, like previous ones, was held to protest the mass disappearance of students from the Ayotzinapa Rural Normal School that occurred on September 26, 2014 in Iguala, a city in the state of Guerrero, on the Pacific coast.

President López Obrador called the protest a provocation and claimed that the protesters had sledgehammers and blowtorches.

“This is a movement against us,” López Obrador said. “The plan is to create a provocation.”

But the president also tried to downplay the severity of the protest, saying: “They’ll fix the door, it’s nothing.”

For years, victims’ families and students at rural government normal schools have protested the disappearances. It remains one of Mexico’s most infamous human rights cases.

With López Obrador’s term ending next year, relatives face the prospect of a 10th year of not knowing what happened to their children, but fear the next administration will once again start the error-plagued investigation from scratch.

The group of students was attacked by Iguala municipal police and handed over to a local drug gang who apparently killed them and set their bodies on fire. Since then, only three of his remains have been identified.

After an initial cover-up, a government truth commission last year concluded that local, state and federal authorities conspired with the gang to murder the students in what it called a “state crime.”

López Obrador has complained about the involvement of human rights groups, who he says have prevented him from speaking directly with the parents of the missing students.

Xóchitl Gálvez, who is running against ruling party candidate Claudia Sheinbaum to become the country’s first female president, sharply criticized López Obrador on Wednesday for not meeting with grieving families.

‘The President must stop looking for blame,’ Gálvez wrote on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter. ‘The only person responsible for what happened at the National Palace is he with his arrogance of not receiving the parents and lawyers of the Ayotzinapa teaching students.’

Sheinbaum, the former mayor of Mexico City, addressed the protest Thursday during his campaign and said López Obrador has scheduled a meeting with parents.

Mexico’s radically underfunded rural normal schools have a decades-long tradition of violent protests.

In fact, when they were kidnapped, the students themselves were hijacking passenger buses, which they were going to use to travel to another protest.