The Mexican government has stood by as the country has seen more than 164,000 civilian deaths, 20,000 people go missing and over 70 journalists and media workers killed on its own turf since the drug war’s inception in 2006. But none of those deaths and disappearances made the protection of Mexican citizens a priority for the president. Apparently, it took the deaths of Mexican tourists in the Wahat region of Egypt’s western desert to do that.



President Peña-Nieto has the gumption to ask the Egyptian government this week “to perform an exhaustive investigation” looking into the reasons why Egyptian forces air raided and killed twelve tourists, eight of which were Mexican nationals, after allegedly mistaking them for terrorists. While an investigation is certainly called for, there’s a certain irony in Mexico acting concerned about the death of its citizens abroad as it is not doing enough to investigate municipal officials and police who are accused of actively facilitating the death of its own citizens and covering up these deaths.



The killings in Egypt come at a time when the president is managing the fallout of his own sham investigation surrounding the murders of 43 rural students in Iguala last year. This is on top of the still pending investigations concerning last year’s Tlatlaya massacre as well as the recent killings of journalists Nadia Vera and Rubén Espinosa in Mexico City’s Narvarte neighborhood this year.



President Peña-Nieto and his colleagues in the Senate have expressed outrage, both on Twitter and in the media, at the events that occurred in Egypt. Mexico’s foreign minister, Claudia Ruiz Massiu, flew to Cairo on Tuesday to seek answers from the Egyptian government, saying before her departure: “We face a terrible loss of human lives and an unjustified attack that obligates us to make the protection of our citizens the priority.” But why are some Mexican lives a priority for the Mexican government to protect and not others?



Just last week, an independent report from a group created by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights revealed that the Mexican government’s investigation into the deaths of the 43 students from Ayotzinapa’s rural school was full of contradictions. Details from the independent investigation discredit nearly every major conclusion of the official Mexican investigation and indict municipal, state, federal and military agencies in the coordinated murders and subsequent coverup of the Ayotzinapa students. Yet still, despite scientific evidence that goes against the official Mexican report, Mexico’s Attorney General still insist on the veracity of the investigation.



Both the attorney general investigation and the independent investigation Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, however, agree on one fact: the mayor of Iguala, his wife, Maria de los Angeles Pineda, as well as the town’s police chief, Felipe Flores, collaborated with the Guerreros Unidos cartel to kill these students. These facts have been widely publicized. So have the facts surrounding the Mexican military’s role in the massacre of 22 civilians in Tlatlaya. And, most recently, Javier Duarte, the governor of Veracruz, has come under fire after the deaths of Nadia Vera and Rubén Espinosa, who were notorious critics of his rule. Before her death, Vera had said she holds the state totally responsible for her security, adding “they are the ones who send people to repress us,”

While the Mexican government likes to portray itself internationally as the victim of unruly drug gangs and corrupt local officials, these investigations raise serious questions about the complicity of the federal government in the crimes committed against its citizens. What do you make of a government that is accused of not doing enough to investigate the killings of Mexico’s young people, writers, journalists and yet demands answers from an Egyptian government that – despite a revolution – is still keeping it together, however precariously.



If you’re Egypt, you can only laugh.