By the first days of October,
the outdoor basketball court at the Rural Teachers College in
Ayotzinapa, a town in the Mexican state of Guerrero, had become an
open-air waiting room of despair. Pain emanated like heat. Under the
court’s high, corrugated tin roof, the families of 43 missing students
gathered to face the hours between search expeditions, protests, and
meetings with government officials, human-rights workers, and forensic
anthropologists. Assembled in clumps at the court’s edges, sitting on
the concrete floor or in plastic folding chairs formed in semicircles,
they spoke in hushed tones and kept to themselves. Most had traveled
from small, indigenous, campesino communities in Guerrero’s
mountainsides. Many had arrived without a change of clothes. They had
all come to look for their sons.
On the night of September 26, 2014, in the city of Iguala, 80 miles
away, uniformed police ambushed five buses of students from the college
and one bus carrying a professional soccer team. Together with three
unidentified gunmen, they shot and killed six people, wounded more than
20, and “disappeared” 43 students. One victim’s body was found in a
field the next morning. His killers had cut off his face. Soldiers at
the 27th Infantry Battalion army base, located less than two miles away
and tasked with fighting organized crime, did not intercede.
News of the attack was met initially with muted outrage, mostly
because the reports out of Iguala, a highlands city of 110,000, were
confusing. For several days, conflicting counts of the missing students
circulated. It wasn’t until October 4, when state prosecutors announced
that they had uncovered the first in a series of mass graves on the
outskirts of Iguala that the national and international media descended
on the region. When forensic workers confirmed that the first of the 30
charred human remains were not the missing students, anger and horror
became widespread. Throughout October, marches and vigils took place
across the country. In Chilpancingo, the Guerrero state capital,
Ayotzinapa students smashed windows and set state government buildings
on fire. In Iguala, protesters sacked and burned the municipal palace.
Although it was neither an isolated event nor the largest massacre in
recent years, what occurred in Iguala has struck at the core of Mexican
society. Perhaps it was the scale of the violence, or the sheer
brutality, or that the victims were college students, or that the
perpetrators were mostly municipal police, or that the mayor of Iguala,
his wife, and the police chief were probably behind the attack, or that
the state and federal governments were deceptive in their investigation
and callous in their treatment of the mothers and fathers of the
murdered, wounded, and disappeared. Whatever the cause — and it was
likely a combination of all these reasons — it is impossible to
overstate the effect of the attacks on the country. Mexicans speak of
Iguala as shorthand for collective trauma. Mexico is now a nation in
mourning, and at the heart of that grief are those 43 families on the
Ayotzinapa basketball court and their agonizing demand: Bring them back
alive.
Every year, 140 first-year students
arrive at the all-male Raúl Isidro Burgos Rural Teachers College from
some of the most economically battered places in the hemisphere, where
elementary schools are often single-room, adobe structures without
electricity, running water, or indoor plumbing. These are among the most
committed youth of their communities for whom the system says there is
no place: The ones apparently destined to enter the lowest ranks of the
drug-warring armies or to scramble across the Arizona desert and pick
bell peppers in California or wash dishes in Chicago. The teachers
college, known as Ayotzinapa, offers them a different route: a
profession. Ayotzinapa says to them, “You belong here.”
Tuition and board are free. The state government provides a meal
budget that amounts to $3.70 per student per day, which usually means a
diet of eggs, rice, and beans. The students do all the cleaning,
tending, and a large part of the cooking. The first-year dorm rooms are
windowless concrete boxes with no furniture. As many as eight sleep to a
room, laying out cardboard and blankets for bedding. Some fasten empty
milk crates to the walls to use as dressers.
Rural teachers colleges were created after the Mexican Revolution to
promote literacy in the countryside. By the mid-1900s, they numbered as
many as 36. In 1969, the federal government closed numerous schools, and
now only 14 remain. Ayotzinapa was founded in 1926, and, like all the
colleges, has a long tradition of left-wing student organizing. Murals
on school buildings depict not only internationally renowned
revolutionary figures like Che Guevara and Zapatista rebel Subcomandante
Marcos but also ’70s-era guerrilla leaders Lucio Cabañas and Genaro
Vázquez, both Ayotzinapa graduates. Several murals memorialize two
students who were killed by police in 2011 during a protest demanding an
increase in the school’s enrollment and meal budget.
One of the most common “activities,” as the students call their
actions, is commandeering buses. Traveling to observe teachers in rural
areas is an essential part of the curricula, but the school has never
owned many vehicles or had a budget to rent or acquire them. (In early
September, the college had only two buses, two vans, and a pickup truck
at its disposal.) The students have long secured transportation by
heading to nearby bus stations or setting up a highway blockade,
boarding a stopped bus, and informing its driver and passengers that the
vehicle would be used for “the educational purposes of the Ayotzinapa
Teachers College.”
Government officials decry the students’ actions as outright robbery.
The students insist they are not thieves and that they always “reach an
agreement” that includes payment. The bus drivers don’t abandon the
vehicles; sometimes they camp out at the college, with meals provided,
for weeks and occasionally months. When the students block highways,
they typically do so at tollbooths. Surrounded by the students, drivers
are inclined to “donate” the toll to the college’s transportation fund.
None of these tactics is unique to Ayotzinapa, but what distinguishes
them is that they have become integrated into the basic functioning of
the school.
In May 2013,
Televisa reporter Adela Micha interviewed Guerrero Governor Ángel
Aguirre. She asked him how it was possible that the Ayotzinapa students
had made a habitual practice of stealing buses. Aguirre responded that
Ayotzinapa “has become a kind of bunker. Neither the federal nor the
state governments can access the school. It is a place that has been
used by some groups to indoctrinate these youths and cultivate social
resentment amongst them.” Micha asked, “Who is indoctrinating them?”
Aguirre responded, “A few insomniac guerrillas.”
The plan for September 26
was never Iguala. “We were interested in Chilpo,” Iván Cisneros, one of
the second-year students who coordinated the activities that evening,
told me, referring to Chilpancingo. “We always go to do our activities
in Chilpo, but things had heated up there, and we didn’t want to put
people at risk, so we opted to head toward Iguala.”
(The following account of what occurred on the night of September 26
is based on interviews with 14 students who survived the attacks and
with more than ten residents, including four journalists, who also
witnessed them. The names of the surviving students are pseudonyms.)
In mid-September, a group of second-years expropriated two buses at
the Chilpancingo bus station. They needed the vehicles to transport
students for three days of classroom observation. Upon their return,
they held onto the buses — and the drivers — because many in the school
were planning to travel to Mexico City for the October 2 march
commemorating what’s considered the most infamous event in modern
Mexican history: the 1968 army massacre of hundreds of students. The
problem was that Ayotzinapa didn’t have enough buses to take everyone.
To get more buses, student coordinators — almost all
second-years — scheduled an action for the evening of Friday, September
26. They decided, though, to avoid Chilpancingo because riot police had
been posted at the bus station. Instead, the action would take place in
the opposite direction, near Huitzuco, a small town about 70 miles from
the school.
Around 5:30
p.m., coordinators filled the two buses with about 80 first-year
students and headed out. By all accounts, the mood on the buses was
festive. The students had been on campus for about a month. For many,
Friday had been the first day of classes, and now they were about to
participate in one of the school’s rites of passage, their first action.
“We didn’t know what activity we were going to,” a first-year student
told me. “They just told us, let’s go.”
They stopped outside of Huitzuco, and the students began to ask for
donations and to keep an eye out for buses heading to Chilpancingo.
Darkness fell, drivers were hostile, and no buses were coming. Cisneros
called one of the other coordinators and said, “This is hopeless. We’re
not going to be able to grab anything.”
The coordinators were getting ready to head back to Ayotzinapa when a
bus approached. Students came to terms with the driver, who requested
that he first drop off his passengers in Iguala, about 20 minutes away.
The bus reached the city by 8:00 p.m., and all the passengers
disembarked, except the nine students who had commandeered the bus. The
driver said he needed authorization before departing for the college.
“Wait for just a minute,” he told them.
A few blocks away, the political elite of Iguala and some 4,000 acarreados,
people bused in to fill political events, were gathered in the Civic
Plaza to hear what was billed as the second annual report of the
National System for Integral Family Development’s Iguala office. A
regional development agency is hardly one to lavish money on flowers,
lighting, sound, food, and bands for an annual report. Journalists who
covered the event say that it was a thinly veiled pre-campaign party for
the mayor’s wife, María de los Ángeles Pineda, who was hoping to
succeed him. Notable among those present was a colonel of the 27th
Infantry Battalion.
Elected in 2012, Mayor José Luis Abarca and his wife have long treated
Iguala as their fiefdom. In recent years, they have acquired 31 houses
and apartments, nine businesses, and 13 jewelry stores. The Mexican Army
donated part of the land on which the couple built a $23 million
shopping center on the edge of town. At different times, state and
federal prosecutors have accused Pineda’s parents and three brothers
(two of whom have been murdered) of running an organized crime group
known as Guerreros Unidos, or the United Warriors. In Iguala,
the widely held view is that the police and the Warriors are synonymous.
Pineda once threatened a reporter in public, telling him, “If you keep
it up, I’ll cut your ears off.” Abarca has been accused of murdering a
local activist named Arturo Hernández Cardona in 2013. A witness
testified before federal prosecutors that Abarca shot Cardona in the
chest and face. Cardona had been missing for four days when his tortured
body was found on the side of the road.
Among those who did not know the accusations against Iguala’s
political couple or that they were speaking at a rally a few blocks away
were the nine students impatiently waiting for the bus driver to
return. They watched him, as he continued to talk with the station’s
security guards, who in turn spoke into their phones and radios. Fearing
that the driver would refuse to get back on the bus, the students
called their compatriots out on the highway, whose response was swift:
They gathered rocks, got back on their two buses, and headed for the
station.
When they arrived,
the students parked the buses on the street and charged the station,
their faces covered with T-shirts tied over their heads. The nine
waiting students abandoned their bus and, along with the others,
commandeered three more. Now aboard five buses, the police nowhere in
sight, the students told the drivers to get them out of town as fast as
possible. Two buses drove east toward Periférico Sur Avenue, which
skirts the center of town and offers a direct route to the highway. The
other three buses went north on Galeana Street toward the Civic Plaza.
Ignoring the students’ demands to speed up, the lead driver cruised
slowly down the street. By this time it was around 9:30 p.m. At the
political rally, the talking was over, and the band had started to play.
As the three buses passed the Civic Plaza, police trucks approached
from the side, sirens flashing. One truck pulled in front of the first
bus, bringing the caravan to a halt. Students jumped off to clear the
truck out of the way. More police arrived and started firing in the air.
The students of Ayotzinapa presumed that fighting with the police was a
kind of cat-and-mouse affair: If you were caught, you would be beaten
and arrested, but being gunned down was not part of the game. They
rushed forward, pelting the police truck with rocks and forcing its
driver to pull back.
“I was
in the third bus. When we heard the gunshots, we jumped out into the
street,” Ernesto Guerrero, a first-year student, told me. “One of the
second-year students said, ‘Don’t be afraid. They are shots in the air.’
But as we approached, we realized they weren’t shooting in the air.
They were shooting at the buses and at us. So we decided to defend
ourselves. I found four rocks and threw them.”
With the path clear, the three buses drove by the plaza and down Juan
N. Álvarez Street, which runs some 15 blocks before it reaches
Periférico Norte Avenue, a major thoroughfare. Police trucks pursued,
along their side and from behind, firing repeatedly. The buses were a
few yards from the intersection with Periférico Norte when a police
truck cut them off. This time, the driver abandoned the truck. When
students on the lead bus started to push the truck out of the way,
police opened fire. A student named Aldo Gutiérrez Solano was shot in
the head. In the confusion, the students who were moving the truck
almost ran him over. “They finally saw him on the ground, bleeding from
the bullet wound in his head,” Edgar Yair, a first-year student, told
me. “We wanted to pick him up, but instead of the police letting us lift
him, they fired more intensely at us.” At that moment, the students
realized, everything changed. The presumed rules disintegrated.
The students ran, some jumping back onto the first bus, others hiding
between it and the second bus. More police arrived, firing but not
coming closer. Students shouted for an ambulance. When one finally
arrived, the police prevented it from approaching, but the ambulance
circled back, and paramedics took Solano to the hospital, where he was
pronounced brain dead.
Most
of the police had massed at the rear, behind the third bus, trapping the
students inside. “After awhile, we heard screams,” Jorge Vázquez, a
first-year who hid in the back of the lead bus, told me. “I peeked
through a window and saw where the police were piling a number of
compañeros in the police trucks and taking them away.” During the next
90 minutes, survivors say the police forced the students from the third
bus to lie facedown on the street, hands behind their heads, before
loading them into the back of police trucks and driving off. These
account for 25 to 30 of the students who have not been seen since.
While this attack was occurring, the two buses heading directly out of
Iguala became separated. One bus, with 14 students, found itself behind
a bus carrying members of the Avispones, Chilpancingo’s third-division
soccer team, which had won a game against Iguala earlier that day and
was on its way home. “We were at the last overpass,” Alex Rojas, who was
among the 14 students, told me, “when we saw beneath us, right beneath
us, a bus and a whole lot of police trucks with their mounted machine
guns in front of the bus.” This was the fifth bus. The students on it
are among the missing.
Seeing the blockade, the driver of Rojas’s bus tried to turn around when
police came speeding up and forced him to halt. The students abandoned
the bus and began to walk in the opposite direction. Behind them, they
heard the police shouting, “Get the fuck out of here or you will be
dead!” Pursued by the police, the 14 escaped into a nearby field. In the
ensuing three hours, they tried to reach the three buses on Álvarez
Street but were prevented by the police, who shot at them and chased
them up a hillside, where they hid until morning. Gunmen hunted down the
bus carrying the soccer team on the highway to Chilpancingo and killed
the driver, a 14-year-old player, and a woman riding in a taxi passing
by, and wounded at least nine others.
By 11:30 p.m.,
the police left the scene of the first attack, after collecting gun
shells and wiping blood off the street. The students slowly came out of
hiding. They posted lookouts and placed rocks and articles of trash
around the gun shells and bloodstains left behind in an effort to
protect the crime scene. The inside of the third bus, from which police
had taken all the students, was covered in blood. Soon, two vans of
students arrived from Ayotzinapa — they had received distress calls
during the first moments of the attack — and, bit by bit, a few
journalists and residents began to appear.
Near midnight, the journalists, having photographed the bullet holes
in the buses and the casings on the street, requested an interview with
the Ayotzinapa student committee president who had come in one of the
vans. The video cameras and audio recorders had been rolling for about
four minutes when bursts of automatic gunfire rang out. “The students we
were interviewing gave their names, and we started to hear shots,” one
of the journalists told me. “They were machine-gun bursts. We started
hearing the whizzing of the bullets and the sounds of windows breaking.
So we ran toward the buses.” The reporter left his audio recorder on as
he ran. One can hear the volley of gunshots and screams. Two students,
Daniel Solís Gallardo and Julio César Ramírez Nava, fell dead in the
street.
Coyuco Barrientos, a
first-year student, was one of the few who had a look at the gunmen. He
said there were three, dressed in black fatigues, wearing face masks,
and shooting assault rifles from their waists. “The first killer,”
Barrientos told me, “began shooting in the air. Then he started shooting
at us. I turned back and could see the sparks from the bullets hitting
the pavement. They looked like Christmas firecrackers, and all the
sparks were moving toward us. In that instant, we all ran. Then two
others appeared and shot at us. These were nonstop machine-gun bursts.”
Most of the students were able to take refuge in nearby houses a few
blocks away, where the residents turned off the lights and ushered them
into backrooms.
Juan Pérez, a
first-year who had been shot through the flesh of his knee during the
first attack, was running down the street when a classmate next to him
fell. He had been shot in the mouth. Several students helped Pérez carry
the wounded student. A woman shouted from a second-story window that
they could hide in her house, but they pleaded for directions to a
hospital. Down the street, she said, they would find a small, private
clinic. They banged on the door and windows, and two women let them in.
Nearly 25 students and residents rushed in behind. The women lied,
saying the clinic was an X-ray laboratory not a hospital. They pleaded
with the women to call an ambulance.
After 20 minutes, the students heard a knock on the door. Outside were
soldiers from the 27th Infantry Battalion in full uniform and battle
gear. When the students opened the door, the soldiers, with their guns
raised, shouted for everyone to get on the floor. “They took our phones
and photographed us,” Yair told me. “Their comandante said that
we didn’t have any reason to be there, that we were seeking our own
deaths. We started to tell him that we were students from the teachers
college. But he said, no, that for him, we were all just criminals.”
Sometime between 12:30 and 1:00 a.m., the director of the clinic
arrived, but he refused to care for the injured students. He and the
soldiers expelled the students out onto the street. Within a few blocks,
a family provided haven, while a small group of students found a taxi
to take their wounded schoolmate to a hospital.
Sometime around 1:30 a.m., after passing through a police roadblock on
the highway, the first group of reporters from Chilpancingo arrived at
the intersection of Periférico Norte and Juan N. Álvarez. They found the
bodies of the two dead students, facedown in the street, buses and cars
riddled with bullets, and masked soldiers standing on the edge of the
scene.
The next morning,
students made their way to the state prosecutor’s office in Iguala. They
identified 22 police officers who attacked them, talked to human-rights
workers, and made a list of the missing. It was then they learned that
the students whom the police had forced off the buses never arrived at
jail. When they called their cell phones, no one answered. Initially, as
many as 57 students were unaccounted for, but then they heard from the
14 students who had escaped to the outskirts of the city.
Around 7 a.m., a photograph began to circulate on social-media sites.
The last time anyone had seen Julio César Mondragón Fontes, a first-year
student from Mexico City — a rarity at Ayotzinapa — was around midnight
on Álvarez. He had been talking to Juan Ramírez, another first-year
student, and was frightened. “He said that he would go home the next
day,” Ramírez told me, “because he didn’t want to risk his life. He said
that he was thinking about his wife and his child, that they were the
most important things to him.” Moments later, the three masked gunmen
opened fire. In the photograph, Mondragón Fontes’s red shirt was pulled
up around his chest, exposing dark bruises ringing his torso. His face
and ears had been cut off. His eyes gouged out. His friends identified
him by the gray scarf around his neck.
When the reports from Iguala
first surfaced, Mexico was supposed to be in the grip of its Moment.
Two years into his six-year term, President Enrique Peña Nieto had
overseen sweeping education and energy reforms and the arrest of Joaquín
“El Chapo” Guzmán, Mexico’s most wanted man. The images of mayhem that
defined the previous administration of Felipe Calderón no longer
dominated the dailies. Time magazine put Peña Nieto on the
cover of its February 2014 issue with the headline “Saving Mexico.” The
mid-September news of an army massacre in Tlatlaya led to the arrest of
implicated soldiers, something that would not have occurred under
Calderón. From a distance, it might have appeared that Mexico was
finally emerging from one of its darkest periods.
Over the past eight years, during the so-called “drug war,” some
100,000 Mexicans have been killed and at least 20,000 have been
disappeared (human-rights organizations believe the number is higher).
These estimates do not include the tens of thousands of Central and
South American migrants murdered and disappeared in Mexico during the
same period. The roll call of massacres has become numbingly familiar.
In September 2008, 24 bodies were found dumped near a park outside of
Mexico City; ten were decapitated. In January 2010, gunmen broke into a
house party and killed 15 high school and college students in Ciudad
Juárez. In August 2010, 72 Central and South American migrants were
found slain in a barn in San Fernando, Tamaulipas. None of these
massacres led to national protests. The mobilizations following the 2011
murder of seven people in the state of Morelos, one of whom was the son
of a respected Catholic poet, voiced the nation’s pain but lost
momentum after attempts to negotiate with the federal government
foundered.
The official
logic of the drug war in Mexico has enabled many to accept as normal
murder, massacre, disappearances, torture, and a political apparatus
that not only allows these crimes to go unpunished but, in far too many
cases, sanctions them. In a 2014 report, Amnesty International found
that the use of torture by the Mexican military and police was
widespread and routine. Indeed, the very concept of corruption in Mexico
has become outmoded: In most of the country, the state forces and
“narcos” are fully integrated, and none of the major political parties
is exempt. Mexicans have a phrase: “The drop that spilled the glass.”
It’s their version of “the straw that broke the camel’s back.” For many,
Iguala was the drop that spilled the glass. It obliterated the
government’s insistence that in the drug war, a clear distinction exists
between good guys and bad, between law and lawlessness.
On September 27, state police arrested the 22 Iguala police officers
whom the students had identified. On September 30, Mayor Abarca, his
wife, and the police chief went into hiding. President Peña Nieto
canceled a previously scheduled trip to Guerrero, citing unfavorable
weather conditions but also giving the impression that the killings and
disappearances were not his concern. He told a reporter that the “state
government must assume its own responsibility to face what’s happening.”
The search efforts during the first week involved state police driving
groups of parents around Iguala, occasionally stopping to suggest that
they knock on a door and ask if their children were hiding there.
Then, on October 4, the state prosecutor announced the discovery of
four mass graves in the hills outside of Iguala. An initial excavation
revealed an unknown number of charred human remains. The method that led
state police to the hidden gravesite was apparently torture. “They
squeezed one of those guys,” an officer told me, “and he sang.” The
following day, the state prosecutor declared that a man in custody had
confessed that he and other drug gang members had murdered, burned, and
buried the students in the graves. By this point, the federal government
had taken over the investigation, enacting its power to assume
jurisdiction over cases involving organized crime, a tacit
acknowledgment by the administration that the political fallout could no
longer be ignored.
After
the announcement about the mass graves, the newly formed parents
committee held a press conference at Ayotzinapa and called on the
government to change its search. Scores of anguished men and women sat
in rows behind three family members they had selected to speak on their
behalf. “We know the government and its police took the students and
they know where they are,” Manuel Martínez, one of the representatives,
told me. “The only thing that will stop our protests is our sons
returning home alive.” The parents announced that an independent team of
Argentine forensic anthropologists would represent them in the
government’s investigation.
Over the next weeks, the parents undertook a series of fierce
protests. They and students blocked federal highways, marched through
cities, smashed the windows of and set fire to the Guerrero state
congress and the governor’s offices. When DNA analyses
confirmed that the remains found in the mass graves were not those of
the students, the protests spread to cities across the country. On
October 23, Governor Aguirre announced his resignation. Six days later,
the parents met with President Peña Nieto and told him that if he was
incapable of finding their children alive, he should follow Aguirre’s
example.
By November, Iguala
had become the worst crisis of Peña Nieto’s tenure. From the beginning,
the administration had underestimated the depth of anger that Iguala
had tapped and found itself, often erratically, trying to control
events. On November 4, federal authorities arrested Mayor Abarca and his
wife in Mexico City. (The police chief remains a fugitive.) Then, on
November 7, Attorney General Jesús Murillo Karam held a press
conference, announcing that the government had video-taped confessions
from three men purported to be members of Guerreros Unidos.
According to Murillo Karam, on the night of the attacks, police
delivered the students to a drug gang who drove them to a trash dump
outside of Cocula, a small town a few miles from Iguala. When the three
men arrived at the open-pit dump, they discovered that 15 of the
students were already dead or unconscious. The men interrogated the
rest, asking why the students had come to Iguala. “They said that they
had come for Abarca’s wife,” one of the men claimed. The men proceeded
to kill the students, pitch their bodies into the dump, and set the
bodies on fire, using wood, tires, gas, and diesel to fuel the flames.
After 15 hours, only bone fragments and ash were left. The men
gathered the remains in plastic trash bags and emptied all but two into
the nearby San Juan River. The other two bags, they said, they threw in
unopened. Murillo Karam explained that federal investigators had
recovered the two bags and the tiny pieces of bone inside, which would
be sent to the University of Innsbruck’s respected DNA
laboratory in Austria. Fifty-eight minutes into the press conference,
after leading reporters through the confessions, Murillo Karam cut short
a reporter’s question by saying, “Ya me cansé” (I’m tired), and soon left.
If the purpose of the press conference was to wrap up the case and to
undercut the protests, it had the opposite effect. Murillo Karam’s words
soon went viral, becoming the object of social-media mockery. Within
hours, Twitter users were flagging #YaMeCansé. Popular responses
included: “If you’re tired, leave,” “I’m tired of fear,” and “I’m tired
of politicians.”
Murillo
Karam’s account raised more questions than it answered. How could three
men subdue 43 young activists? How could they burn 43 bodies in the
rain? Why were there no traces in the dump of the steel fibers from the
tires the killers claimed to use in the fire? Why would the killers
carefully dump six bags of human ash into the river but toss in two
unopened? How could the students have told the men that their protest
was aimed at the mayor’s wife when that had never been part of the
action that night? More troubling, why had the government not presented
the video-taped confessions of the 22 police officers identified by
students as their attackers? Why had the government not released
transcripts from police radios and cell phones, including Abarca’s and
Pineda’s phones, that evening?
To many observers, the government’s story seemed too neat. Murillo
Karam’s version focused so tightly on the three suspected gang members
that Abarca, Pineda, and the police force blurred into the background.
The contradictions and anomalies in the official account fed
well-grounded fears that the federal government was more interested in a
cover-up than a rigorous investigation.
Such an investigation would look into numerous reports of how the
Iguala police force itself constituted an organized crime gang.
According to one local journalist, the municipal police “is a façade.
They are not municipal police. They are narcos with police uniforms,
weapons, and guns. They are called ‘the belligerents’ (los bélicos). They are police inside the police.” According to a local official, los bélicos
“are under the command of Pineda’s brother. They are police with squad
cars and everything, but they patrol masked at night grabbing people on
the street and giving them an hour to come up with $1,000 or else.” An
investigation would examine how Iguala had become a “narco
municipality,” in the words of Mario Patrón, director of the Miguel
Agustín Pro Juárez Human Rights Center. An investigation would ask how
such a narco municipality has been allowed to operate with an army base
in town.
The day after the
press conference, the parents watched from across the street as
Ayotzinapa students threw rocks at the Guerrero state congress’s
remaining windows and drove trucks up onto the entryway steps and set
the vehicles on fire. Soon after, parents and students embarked in three
caravans, traveling across the country to call for support. On November
20, the 104th anniversary of the Mexican Revolution, the caravans
convened in Mexico City and led tens of thousands of people into the
Zócalo, the city’s main square and the symbolic heart of the nation.
In the days both leading up to and following the march, everywhere one
turned Ayotzinapa was there: on newspaper front pages and magazine
covers, on radio talk shows, in overheard conversations, in graffiti and
stencil art. In the hip Roma neighborhood, there was an untended altar
of candles and poster-board signs demanding justice for the 43. In the
working-class Obrera neighborhood, there was a large, white wall with
5-foot-tall red-block letters declaring: “Ayotzinapa: Fue el Estado” (Ayotzinapa: It was the State). The sports tabloid Record ran a blacked-out front page with the headline: “#INDIGNATION:
Mexico has had enough; Mexico is in mourning.” Figures as diverse as
Pope Francis, Mexican soccer star Chicharito, and the Grammy-winning
band Calle 13 made statements supporting the families and students.
Early one Sunday, some 700 runners organized an impromptu race down the
length of Reforma Avenue, all of them wearing the number 043.
On December 6, the Austrian lab confirmed that the identity of one of
the bone fragments was a 19-year-old student named Alexander Mora
Venancio, one of the missing 43. In a press conference, Murillo Karam
summed up the government’s investigation, saying they had arrested 80
suspects including Abarca, Pineda, and more than 40 metropolitan police.
“This scientific proof,” he said, “confirms that the remains found at
one of the scenes coincide with the evidence in the investigation and
with the testimonies of the detained, in the sense that in said location
and manner a group of people were deprived of life.”
Murillo Karam’s words confirmed many observers’ worst fears: The
government was doing everything it could to close the case. The
Argentine forensic team that had been working alongside the government
quickly distanced itself from Murillo Karam’s account. “At the moment,”
it said in a December 7 press release, “there is not enough scientific
certainty or physical evidence to claim that the remains recovered from
the San Juan River by authorities … correspond to those removed from the
Cocula trash dump in the manner indicated by the accused.”
Which meant that 11 weeks after the attacks, the parents possessed
little more information about their sons than what they had been told in
the days immediately after the disappearances. This is what they knew.
This is what we know. The police, aided by gunmen, killed three people,
wounded more than 20, and disappeared 43. Three masked gunmen in
civilian clothes returned to the scene of one of the attacks and killed
two students and wounded others. Someone murdered and mutilated Julio
César Mondragón Fontes. Someone murdered and burned Alexander Mora
Venancio. The army forcibly removed wounded students from a private
hospital but otherwise did not intercede. Everything else about what
happened to the students after the police took them is either rumor,
speculation, or based on dubious confessions.
In response to Murillo Karam’s statement, the parents warned of more
protests. Many of them learned the news during a march in Mexico City
and announced it while standing before Monumento a la Revolución, the
towering edifice to the Mexican Revolution. Felipe de la Cruz, one of
the fathers, told the crowd: “We will not sit down and cry. We will
continue in our struggle to bring back alive the 42.” By then this
demand — this heartbreaking and irreproachable demand — had come to
speak not only for the disappeared sons of Ayotzinapa but also for the
profound yearning to bring Mexico itself back from all the horror.
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