Protestors break down presidential palace door in Mexico

By Laura Gamba

BOGOTA, Colombia (AA) - Dozens of protestors demonstrating against the 2014 Ayotzinapa tragedy knocked down one of the doors of the Mexican presidential palace with a truck Wednesday, while President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador was in his daily news conference.

Footage from media reports showed the truck hitting one of the doors, through which a handful of hooded men and some relatives of the 43 Ayotzinapa school students who disappeared in 2014, then entered.

"It is a movement against us. It is a very clear plan of provocation," Lopez Obrador said when questioned by journalists about what was happening outside the National Palace.

"They would like us to respond violently. We are not going to do it, we are not oppressors. No problem, the door will be fixed," the president added shortly before concluding his news conference.

Protesters are demanding to meet with the president to clarify the case of the forced disappearance of the students on Sept. 26, 2014, in Iguala, Guerrero -- one of the most violent states in Mexico because of fighting between drug trafficking cartels.

"The undersecretary of the Interior Ministry will attend to them," said the president, adding that lawyers who accompany protesters "seek political ends."

Official versions suggest the students were detained by police, who together with the Guerreros Unidos cartel, would have killed them and gotten rid of their bodies.

Lopez Obrador has committed to reviewing the investigations in depth and finding the 43 students.

The doors of the National Palace, built during the colonial period, had been targeted by protesters before, but this is the first time demonstrators managed to knock it down.​​​​​​​