“We continue to demonstrate because it was the State, it was the same elements of the Government. “Everyone participated,” Hilda Hernández said as she held a sign with a photo of her son at a protest in Mexico City. César Manuel had moved to Ayotzinapa from another state in the country to fulfill his dream of becoming a rural teacher, but he disappeared ten years ago in what was one of the worst episodes in recent Mexican history.
September 26 marked the tenth anniversary of that tragic night when 43 students aged 17 to 25 from a modest rural teacher training school disappeared after being attacked and arrested by local police. Since then, the remains of only three have been identified and it remains unclear what happened or where the others are. Despite efforts to create a truth commission and invite independent international experts, the investigation repeatedly faces a wall of silence from an increasingly powerful army, accused of withholding information and having links with organized crime.
Ayotzinapa is a paradigmatic example of the impunity and corruption that is choking Mexico and has also become an emblematic case of a much larger crisis of violence and disappearances. Since President Felipe Calderón declared war on drug trafficking in 2006, more than 116,000 people remain missing and more than 30,000 homicides are recorded each year. At that time, the army left its barracks to fight organized crime and carry out public security tasks. Over time, he accumulated more and more power and established complex relationships with those he had to defeat.
Guerrero is a poor state in central Mexico, with vast areas of (illegal) poppy cultivation controlled by a series of ever-evolving organized crime groups and where the line between state and crime does not exist. And it is also a place with a great tradition of struggle and social organization, dating back to the guerrilla movements of the 70s. Thus, the relatives of the 43 missing students from Ayotzinapa remain united and tireless at the foot of the canyon. The disappearance delays their mourning and they continue their search, arguing that until their appearance, they are still alive. “Politically” alive, as they sing in the slogans of the demonstrations.
Andrés Manuel López Obrador leaves his presidency on October 1 in the hands of his successor, Claudia Sheinbaum, without having given the promised answers. “The president took advantage of our pain to tell us that he was going to punish the guilty. We hope that as a woman, as a mother, the new president has heart. We need to know what happened so that it doesn’t continue,” explains Hernández, who lost hope of finding his son six months after the disappearance.
What happened that night?
Perhaps this story begins a long time ago: October 2, 1968. On that day, elements of the army and paramilitary groups who worked in close contact with the president of the day attacked participants in a demonstration against the student repression. It is estimated that between 300 and 400 people died. It’s called the massacre of the Tlatelolco students and since then, year after year, thousands of people gather on that day in Mexico City so as not to forget that this past can repeat itself.
Students from the “Raúl Isidro Burgos” Rural Normal School in Ayotzinapa also plan to participate. In Guerrero, the “hijacking” of buses by normalistas to go to these types of demonstrations is a common practice, tolerated by governments and businesses who turn a blind eye. Thus, on September 26, around a hundred students went to the neighboring town of Iguala, but this time the reaction of the authorities was surprising and excessive. To prevent them from leaving the city with the buses, a group of local police and armed civilians opened fire on the vehicles and blocked the passage of five of them. The attacks continued throughout the night: six people were killed (some executed), more than 40 were injured, and 43 freshmen were arrested. And this is where it becomes more difficult to follow them.
A criminal network protected by the military and police used passenger buses to smuggle heroin into the United States. According to a report from the National Human Rights Commission, it was the case of one of them and atypical violence against students, a message: you do not play with our buses.
The “historical truth”
The usual scapegoat narrative, who was “on the wrong path” [iba por el mal camino] and it was linked to organized crime, it did not fit into this story and the population took to the streets en masse to demand an investigation.
“The federal government tried to involve students in organized crime, then it tried to involve local police and the municipal president…. It was when they realized the social support that they created the historical truth,” summarizes Paulina Barrera, researcher at the Universidad del Atlantico Medio (UNAM).
To respond to public pressure, the prosecutor’s office and the government of President Enrique Peña Nieto wanted to close the case with what they called “the historical truth”: that the municipal police handed over the students to the Guerreros Unidos cartel, which mistook them for members of a rival group and were executed and cremated in a landfill.
But independent experts who came from outside Mexico to observe the investigation completely dismissed this version. The Argentine forensic anthropology team, created in the 1980s to find those missing from the country’s dictatorship, as well as the lawyers and doctors who made up the Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts presented the same conclusions: irregularities, contradictions , lack of evidence and dubious testimonies. based on torture. The “historical truth” was not sustainable and they called for new lines of research to be opened.
“There are two criminal dimensions: the disappearance of the boys and the political decision to close the case with a false version,” explains Santiago Aguirre, director of the ProDH Center, a human rights organization which accompanied the relatives in their fight. For Aguirre, “from 2014 to 2018, families resisted the imposition of a lie from power.” It was then that Andrés Manuel López Obrador came to power.
The army’s wall of silence
On December 3, 2018, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador opened the doors of the National Palace to the parents of Ayotzinapa’s 43 students. He had only been in power for two days but, since the campaign, he had taken the case as his standard. One of his first acts was to receive them and order by decree the creation of a Truth Commission to get to the bottom of things. “We will find out what really happened, let us know where the young people are and those responsible will be punished,” he said at the time.
This initial political will has borne fruit. The culprits began to be prosecuted, the lost evidence was recovered, a public apology was issued… In 2020, hopeful news arrived from a genetics laboratory in Austria: the skeletal remains of Christian Rodríguez were identified. A year later, they would identify those of Jhosivani Guerrero. Both were in places other than the Cocula landfill and so the “historical truth” eventually came to light.
In 2022, everything changes. The investigation fails and the need to make the results public marks the fate of the case. “There was a real intention, but in the end time passed and they fell into the same thing: rushing to conclusions that had not been verified,” considers Aguirre.
“The international experts abandoned their task, the file was entrusted to people who did not have the competence, the army was tolerated to hide information…”, he lists.
The Truth Commission and the Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts (GIEI) denounced the fact that the army categorically refused to provide information on the order books and that it was proven that some of the boys spent that night in a military barracks in the area. This isn’t the only time they remain silent. The Dirty War Truth Commission also denounced the opacity of the army, which closed the door to investigations into state crimes against social movements in the last quarter of the 20th century.
Barrera, who studies the concentration of power and the militarization of the country, explains that in Mexico “the armed forces are not willing to give up information or recognition of their responsibilities. If the problem of impunity were not so serious, in a case like this, we would know something more. López Obrador has closed ranks with the armed forces, which he considers “his right arm”. A reform of the Constitution is about to be carried out, opening the door to the militarization of any sector of the country.
At the same time, during his daily press conference, López Obrador attempted to dismantle the movement and delegitimize the families, claiming that they were being manipulated by lawyers and human rights organizations, which he even tried to exclude meetings.
The future of combat
On October 1, a new six-year term begins with Sheinbaum at the helm. The president-elect has already brought forward her meeting with the families of 43. “The families have experience. They appreciate this gesture, but they know that if it does not translate into rapid action, they will not get results,” says Aguirre. For Barrera, “there is no hope that they will give a clear answer to the families soon.”
The last two years have not been favorable to this fight: the institutions responsible for searching for missing people and identifying remains have been abandoned, figures have been manipulated and the army has been given power. “In this broader context, it’s hard to hold out hope in a case like this,” Aguirre says.
For now, the families are demanding that new people be put in charge of the case, that the fugitives be arrested, that they obtain from the army the information they have been asked for and that searches on the ground continue to find the remains, identify them and so that they can mourn. “Until they all appear, the family members will not relax their efforts, they will always be a thorn in the side, questioning each new administration,” says Aguirre. “As parents, we are motivated to continue to uncover the truth, the tangible evidence of what happened to them. There is no one to stop us,” warns Hernández.
