Justice for the Ayotzinapa 43

It has been nine years and we still don’t know the full truth about what happened in Iguala, Mexico on the night of Sept 26th, 2014 when police disappeared 43 students from the rural teachers college in Ayotzinapa.

Recently, a blockbuster article in the New York Times detailed the complicity and involvement of the Mexican Army and police in cartel activity as well as the disappearance of the 43 students and the murder of 6 people that night. The students had gone to Iguala, Guerrero, Mexico to commandeer buses to travel to Mexico City to participate in protests.

Since 2014, the families of the disappeared, as well as civil society organizations both within Mexico, the United States and beyond, have demanded answers and accountability.

The first, sham investigation from the Peña Nieto administration tried to fool the parents by pointing to a site where the government planted false evidence. President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) committed to finding the students and the truth and bringing the perpetrators to justice. And though his administration took early steps to fulfill his promise, it has since shut down the investigation. There is significant evidence that the Army was monitoring everything, was in telephone communication with police and cartel members, and was present as the students were being disappeared.

Independent investigators under-covered the existence of military documents that could further illuminate the full truth of what happened that night. Both the Army and AMLO deny those documents exist. The families are demanding the information be turned over.

The AMLO administration wants to move on, to achieve only a partial truth that papers over the degree of military complicity, and fails to bring all those responsible to justice.

But the families of the disappeared will not give up, and neither will we. To mark the nine year anniversary of the disappearance, civil society organizations throughout the United States and Mexico are taking action to put pressure on the AMLO government to come clean and pursue justice.

Global Exchange and our partners at the People’s Movement for Peace and Justice are organizing actions in Mexico and here in the U.S. Find more information and how you can take action with us here.

If you cannot make it to one of these in person events, we hope you can take a moment of your time to send a letter to Mexican President Obrador calling for a full accounting of the events of September 26, 2014.

Nine years is far too long. The truth must come out, no matter the cost.

By Ted Lewis and Janice Gallagher

  • A body of independent experts (GIEI), appointed by the Inter-American Human Rights Commission, rejects the government’s conclusions about key elements of last year’s attacks on unarmed students during which six people were killed and 43 forcibly disappeared. The report underlines coordination between local, state, and federal police, as well as the Army during the hours of the attacks and cites official obstruction of justice in the months since the crimes took place.
  • Families of the disappeared reaffirm ongoing struggle and announce major mobilization on September 26th , the first anniversary of the state crime.

Here are ten takeaways from the experts’ 560-page report:

1) Yes: it was the state

Mexico’s own police forces killed six people, disappeared 43 students, and wounded more than 40 on the night of September 26th, 2014. While the involvement of a (police-affiliated) drug cartel is alleged, it is undisputed – even by the Mexican state – that members of two different local police forces perpetrated this violence.

What remains in question is the involvement of federal forces – specifically the federal police and the military. The expert group found that the federal police detained one of the five buses the students were traveling in – a fact denied by the Mexican officials. The experts also found that the military participated in the monitoring of the student movements, and that members of military intelligence were present at two locations where the students were killed and disappeared during the course of the evening.

2) The students were stalked and then killed and/or disappeared by local police forces

When the students attempted to return to their school, about 1 ½ hours away, local and federal police forces blocked their exit and attacked. Police and military forces followed the movements of the students throughout evening of September 26th: they observed the students from the time they left their school at 6pm, until the local police first attacked them at 10pm – and until the attacks ended after midnight.

In one case, the students locked themselves inside one of their bus after being stopped and surrounded by the police. The police then broke off branches from nearby trees, broke the windows of the bus, and threw pepper spray and tear gas inside the bus. The students came out with their hands up, and were forced to lie on the ground. The municipal and federal police forcibly disappeared all the students on this bus, while military intelligence observed.

3) The attack was coordinated and sustained

The attack did not happen in an isolated burst of violence – rather over the course of more than three hours in nine different locations.

The attack was not chaotic: different police and military forces regularly communicated throughout the night, and the expert group suspects that a policeman in downtown Iguala was issuing commands to the various participating groups. The records of communication from that group, called C4, went missing during the height of the attack. There are different explanations of why these records are missing: perhaps they were communicating on an encrypted network, or perhaps the Secretary of National Defense has control of those records.

At no point did municipal, state preventive or soldiers intervene to protect students or other civilians. In a widely reported case, members of the military refused to help a student with a bullet wound to the face who had sought medical attention at a health clinic.

4) Students wanted to raise money and arrange for transport – not disrupt a speech

The students had planned to peacefully commandeer several buses on the night of September 26th, and also to ask for donations from motorists along the highways.

The expert group reports that the practice of commandeering buses and fundraising from motorists “has been traditional amongst the different normales [rural teachers’ colleges] in Mexico,” and had happened for years generally without violence, arrests or legal charges being brought. Bus companies, in response to these practices, developed guidelines for their drivers: they pay them their salary during the time when their bus is taken over, and in turn expect them to stay with their bus.

Despite initial reports claiming the students wanted to disrupt the speech of the mayor’s wife, whose brother is a leader with local criminal group Guerreros Unidos, her speech was in fact over before the students arrived in the town of Iguala.

5) The state’s explanation that the disappeared students were incinerated at the Cocula trash dump was demonstrated to be patently false, even scientifically impossible.

In January 2015, the then-Attorney General of Mexico, Jesús Murillo Karam, claimed that the state had solved the case: the “historical truth”, he said, was that the municipal police had handed over the 43 students to the Guerreros Unidos criminal gang, who then killed them and burned the bodies in the Cocula trash dump.

José Torero, a leading fire expert engaged by the expert group, found that the destruction of 43 corpses in an open air dump would have required many conditions that simply did not exist: 500 cords of wood or 100s of tons of tires; very high heat that would have scorched the surrounding earth and vegetation (they were not scorched); and a fire that would have burned for more than two and a half days — far longer than any of the “witnesses” claimed it had taken. In addition, such a large fire would have produced a plume of smoke hundreds of feet high visible for miles around. No local residents reported seeing such a thing.

6) The official investigation has been discredited by errors, lies, destruction of evidence and the likely use of torture to obtain testimony

It started when officials identified mass graves said to contain the bodies of the Ayotzinapa victims. Closer investigation revealed that those graves held other murder victims.

Then, as former Attorney General, Jesús Murillo Karam sought to gain control over the politically explosive case, the lies deepened and the story about the incineration of bodies at the Cocula trash dump (entirely based on likely coerced testimony) was presented as fact. That lie now stands in ruins as does the entire edifice of the official story.

Faith in the authorities was further undermined by revelations that various CCTV video recordings made on the night of the disappearances – which had been sent to the state investigators handling the case – were destroyed.

7) Widespread practice of enforced disappearance by state forces facilitated the attack

Why did state officials think they could get away with this attack on unarmed civilians? Human rights groups have recently documented what they call “a cycle of impunity and violence.” In this cycle, crime rates continue to increase as the justice system falls further behind in punishing those responsible for committing crimes, especially if those responsible work for the government. This impunity emboldens perpetrators to commit more crime. This cycle has landed Mexico at number two in a worldwide impunity index, and in a recent survey, Mexicans reported that a perpetrator had been indicted in only 7.5% of all crimes.

8) Devastating impact of survivors and families:

The poor handling and dishonesty of the official investigation has added to the pain experienced by the families of the Ayotzinapa disappeared.

At the press conference held by the Ayotzinapa families after the GIEI report launch, Mario César Gonzalez Contreras, the father of one of the missing students commented that, “it became very clear that the garbage dump at Cocula was government theater….the [state version that our children were burned at the] dump has always tortured the families of the 43 disappeared.”

Another family member summarized: “the first death was when we knew our son had been disappeared; the second when they [the state] wanted to turn over the first graves they found; the third death happened when they found even more graves; the fourth when they [claimed our son had been burned in] the Cocula dump.”

9) Context of war on drugs fuels corruption and violence

The state of Guerrero, like all of Mexico, has been deeply affected the drug war. Iguala, where the abductions took place is, according the report, “an important place for heroin trafficking.” The dynamics of the drug war have ensured the profitability of the illicit drug trade and frequently have led to the kind of state-criminal collusion seen in Guerrero. The GIEI report recommends further investigation of the possibility that one of the busses commandeered by the students was (unbeknownst to them) carrying a load of drugs. In the opinion of the experts, this might explain the unprecedented ferocity of the attack on the students.

If this theory –that the students inadvertently commandeered a bus with drugs or cash — is true, the implications about the nature of the Mexican state and U.S. sponsored drug war are politically explosive, given that state actors committed the violence and led the cover up that ensued.

10) The case fueled massive protest – and the report could reignite citizen outrage

Last fall the Ayotzinapa case fueled a massive backlash against President Enrique Peña Nieto. Enormous solidarity marches took place across Mexico and around the world and Peña Nieto’s standing tumbled. Peña Nieto survived with support from Washington, but this new report comes at a moment when his hold on power is further weakened by a falling peso, low oil prices, a resurgence in drug war violence, and the fact that he is entering the traditional weaker second-half of his six year term. Representatives of the Ayotzinapa community who spoke at a press conference Sunday invoked the example of neighboring Guatemala where persistent street protests recently brought down a corrupt president.

Ted Lewis is the Human Rights Program Director at Global Exchange.

Janice Gallagher is a postdoctoral fellow at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs. She works on issues of governance, human rights and violence in Latin America.

The story of September 26, 2014, the day 43 Mexican students went missing — and how it might be a turning point for the country.

By John Gibler. John has been based in Mexico since 2006 and is the author of To Die in Mexico and Tzompaxtle: La fuga de un guerrillero.
For original illustrations by Clay Rodery, visit this post here in the January 2015 issue of the California Sunday Magazine.

Also, disponible en Español.

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.

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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.”

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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.

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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.

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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.

The story about the violent police abduction of 43 students from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers College and the subsequent discovery of at least four mass graves with dozens of bodies in Guerrero, Mexico seems to turn worse with every news cycle. The cold pre-meditated nature of the crime is enough to render any of us speechless, but we cannot remain silent.

Condemnation of this atrocious crime of the state has been swift across Mexico and abroad. Meanwhile, Mexico’s Federal government has distanced itself from the crime and has sought to downplay army involvement.

One person who does not believe in the government’s innocence Diego Osorno, a reporter who just two weeks ago won a “Premio Nacional de Periodismo”, Mexico’s top prize for journalism.

Diego drove me from Monterrey to Saltillo last summer and told me during the ride that President Enrique Peña Nieto’s aggressive agenda to frack, mine, deforest, and otherwise despoil and dehumanize Mexico will inspire great resistance and require what he called a hundred Atencos to accomplish.

Atenco, of course, is the site of the notorious 2006 police massacre, repression, and mass sexual abuse perpetrated in the state of Mexico under the direction of then Governor, Enrique Peña Nieto.

Mexican Attorney General, Jesus Murillo says the motives behind the Ayotzinapa massacre are unclear. Diego Osorno disagrees and wrote a blog that I have translated here in full.

It is the best explanation I have seen. The Spanish version has already been shared on Facebook more than 32,000 times.

The Causes of the Iguala Massacre

by Diego Enrique Osorno (translated by Ted Lewis)

“Finally Order is Restored,” blares the eight-column headline of the Diario de Guerrero on the day 43 students of the Rural teachers college of Ayotzinapa, Guerrero disappear. The story summary says: “The action of the State and Military Forces (sic) to prevent vandals from stealing busses in Ayotzinapa is applauded by the public.” A week later, a dozen bodies unearthed from a series of mass graves in Iguala are analyzed by forensic experts with the terrible prospect of some being the young people between 16 and 20 year old who are officially missing. Up to press time no official confirmation.

[There is now confirmation of four mass graves and at least 28 bodies believed to be murdered students.]

What we do know is that the Federal government has long tried to disappear this Rural Teachers College founded by President Lázaro Cárdenas del Río [in the 1930s], calling it unproductive and contentious.

In 2013, the education reform initiative proposed by President Enrique Peña Nieto targeted the school in Ayotzinapa for elimination and had support from all political parties. And it would have passed, if not for the [occupy style] protest actions carried out in the Mexico City by teachers of the dissident CNTE, the vast majority of them from Oaxaca.

But the powers that be have not limited themselves to legal methods to make Ayotzinapa disappear. Since the administration of Salinas de Gortari [1988-1994] to current president, Peña Nieto, Ayotzinapa has come under attack by paramilitary groups that operate in Guerrero with the protection of the army.

The students and their school have been portrayed as criminals with the help of newspapers who sell their editorial judgment to the highest bidder.

I’ve gone to Ayotzinapa several times to interview students. From my long conversations with several of them, I know why there is such rage against them: the students are young, of humble origins, and very studious.

On average they read two or three books a week, in addition to their assigned class work. They also take interest in the social and political problems in their surroundings. That is to say that they are informed and critical students who also tend to be idealistic and put their ideas into action and change things.

Yes, Ayotzinapa is a school for organizers of social struggle and the current regime has no democratic way to confront those who use a stronghold of citizen power to participate in bettering their society. Those who hold power in Mexico despise idealism and are looking to put an end to it.

The slaughter of Iguala was not caused by an American football game [as some officials suggested]. That version is another of those insults to our intelligence with which the powerful create their absurd narrative.

We know the Mexican state is the causes and has the responsibility for the disappearance of these young people. The state has long encouraged and allowed the Army to operate outside the law against those involved in social struggle in Guerrero and elsewhere. The Army, coordinates with police forces, who in turn work with narcos, creating a genuinely criminal force.

Alongside the lead story in the Diario de Guerrero that criminalized the students of Ayotzinapa there is another with the headline: “[Governor] Ángel Aguirre delivers technology and school equipment in Acapulco.”

What the Governor needs to deliver now and quickly is his letter of resignation due to the irresponsible way he sought to “bring order” in Guerrero.