This is the sixth part in Francisco Goldman’s series on the missing students from the Ayotzinapa Normal School. He has also written “The Disappearance of the Forty-Three,” “Could Mexico’s Missing Students Spark a Revolution?,” “The Protests for the Missing Forty-Three,” “An Infrarrealista Revolution,” and “Who is Really Responsible For the Missing Forty-Three?”
“They’re shooting at us!” “We’re not armed!” “Call an ambulance!” “My phone doesn’t have any credit left!” “Culeros!” “Is there anyone on the bus?” “They’ve killed one of us!”
It was March of this year, and a small group of people had gathered in a room at the Marriott Hotel in Brooklyn, as part of Amnesty International U.S.A.’s annual human-rights conference, to discuss the case of the forty-three students from the Ayotzinapa Normal School, in Mexico, who have been missing since late September of last year. Projected onto a screen in the darkened room were clips from mobile-phone videos taken by students who survived that night’s attacks in the streets of Iguala, edited into one piece. It won’t be easy, I think, for anyone in that audience to forget the immediacy of the terror, chaos, and violence captured in those scenes, or the shouts of the students, terrified, angry, and sometimes defiant. One shadowy video shows a body, presumably a student, lying crumpled and still on the pavement, perhaps bleeding to death or already slain. In the weak glare of street lights, the constant gunfire in the darkness indicated that it was too dangerous for anyone to go to his aid.
“Why are you picking up those bullet shells?” “Notify the press!” “Stop picking up those bullet shells!” “You know what you did, you dog!” “We need an ambulance!” The shooting in the video was now heavy and loud, a dense, methodical barrage of gunfire, each shot like a bomb blast. I counted thirty shots packed into about fifteen seconds.
As we listened, the woman who was showing the videos interjected, in heavily accented English, “It was very dark, even the students couldn’t see who was shooting. Some of them did recognize [that] the federal police that works for the federal government was doing the attack, was doing the shooting. This last part of the video, it was very hot. It was recorded just before the students disappeared.”
The woman who spoke was Anabel Hernández, a noted Mexican journalist who is currently at the Investigative Reporting Program at the University of California at Berkeley, which has been helping to support the reporting that she and her colleague Steve Fisher have been doing on the Ayotzinapa story, for the magazine Proceso. Hernández is in her mid-forties but looks ten years younger; she is a pretty, almost prim-seeming woman with a cheerful demeanor and a voice that rises resonantly when she is impassioned or indignant, as she certainly became while explaining the significance of what we were seeing and especially of what we were hearing.
“You fucking ball-licking dog!” “The police are leaving! The federales are staying, they’re going to want to mess with us.”
Eight months have passed since the forty-three students disappeared in the city of Iguala, in the Mexican state of Guerrero, on the night of September 26th and the predawn hours of the following day. The crime ignited months of street protests and sent Enrique Peña Nieto’s PRI government into an unprecedented credibility crisis (hastened by the exposure of other atrocities and corruption scandals) that prompted condemnation both from within Mexico and internationally.
On January 27th, the Mexican Attorney General Jesús Murillo Karam announced that, after an exhaustive investigation, his office, the P.G.R., could now provide “the historical truth” of how the crime had transpired. The case, he argued, should be considered essentially closed so that it could proceed to the prosecution stage.
According to the government, on the night of September 26th, as many as a hundred Ayotzinapa students, travelling in commandeered buses on the streets of Iguala and a peripheral highway, came under attack by gunfire from municipal police in a series of incidents. Six people were killed, including three students, a woman riding in a taxi, and the driver and a passenger on a bus carrying a Chilpancingo soccer team, which was mistakenly targeted; another Ayotzinapa student, shot in the head, remains in a coma. One student was found dead the next morning, the skin of his face peeled off. And, before dawn, police abducted forty-three of the students and turned them over to a local drug-trafficking gang known as Guerreros Unidos. The forty-three were transported, in two trucks, to the Cocula municipal dump and left in the hands of three of the group’s sicarios, or gunmen. According the Attorney General’s account of the gunmen’s confessions after they were captured, about fifteen of the students were already dead on arrival at the dump, either from gun wounds or because they’d asphyxiated during the short journey. The gang members forced the still-living students to kneel, brusquely interrogated them, and then executed them. The forty-two corpses were laid on a pyre of wood, tires, and plastic; doused in diesel and gasoline; and set aflame, in a fire that burned for fifteen hours, until about four the following afternoon. Then the gunmen gathered the incinerated remains into eight plastic garbage bags, which they tossed into the nearby San Juan River.*
In Murillo Karam’s account, the students left Ayotzinapa on the 26th in two buses and headed for the state capital, Chilpancingo, in order to raise funds by stopping traffic on the highway outside the city and to commandeer more commercial buses for transporting students to Mexico City for the annual commemoration of the 1968 student massacre in the city’s Tlatelolco Plaza, on October 2nd. “But they went directly to Iguala,” Murillo Karam said. “On their way, they’d been instructed that they were to go there to block a political event.”
Why had there been an assault? According to the government, the mayor of Iguala, José Luis Abarca, triggered the police attack by ordering that the students be detained “como sea,” by any means. Abarca’s wife, María de los Ángeles Pineda (who had four brothers, at least three of whom belonged to Guerreros Unidos, though two had been slain) was presiding over the political event, which was meant to position her to succeed her husband as mayor. But when the students reached Iguala, according to Murillo Karam, a halcón, or lookout, for Guerreros Unidos mistook the buses full of students for an incursion by Los Rojos, a rival drug gang, and he passed this information to both the gang and the municipal police. So the students had angered the mayor by coming to Iguala to upend his wife’s event, but they were also mistaken by Guerreros Unidos and by the police for members of Los Rojos. Murillo Karam emphatically reiterated that no federal forces were involved in that night’s events. Both the federal police and the Mexican Army have bases in Iguala, but there was no reason for the P.G.R. to investigate any possible federal role.
Murillo Karam declared that his office had already arrested ninety-nine people. He said, “This is the historical truth of what occurred, based on proofs supported by science, as included in the case record, and which has enabled us so far to take punitive action.” He stressed that an Argentine forensic team participated in all of the crime-scene forensics investigations.
Despite what probably seemed, to untrained observers, like plausible science, Murillo Karam’s infelicitously phrased “historical truth” was met with widespread skepticism and even scorn. This was partly because of significant flaws in the government’s science, including, as scientists from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México noted, the fact that a fire capable of incinerating forty-two bodies is not even physically possible in the space where they say it occurred. It was also, even more important, because so many obvious questions still hadn’t been answered. For example, why did the government insist that there was no reason to even question the Army, when it is known that soldiers encountered the students on the streets that night? How could the Attorney General even speak of closing the case when the remains of only one of the missing students had been positively identified? The fact that the federal government—a government already plunged into a deep crisis of credibility—was obviously feeling an urgent need to close the case inevitably aroused suspicion. “Alternative theories emerged to explain how and where the bodies were disposed of,” the Intercept reported. “Among the most provocative, widely cited in the media: the bodies were destroyed in a trash incinerator or crematorium at an army base.”
In early March, Murillo Karam was removed from his post and replaced by Arely Gómez, a PRI senator who, since her appointment, seems to have been seeking to lower the profile of the Ayotzinapa case. And for good reason: the narrative laid out by Murillo Karam, and unaltered by Gómez, lies in ruins. Over months, journalists, forensics and judicial experts, and human-rights groups, with the help of witnesses and the persistence of the students’ family members, have poked so many holes in the story, exposed so many incongruities, and provided so much contrary information that even elements that once seemed settled as facts, such as the guilt of Mayor Abarca and his wife, are now openly questioned. An international group of five legal and human-rights-abuse experts appointed by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (I.A.C.H.R.), in accordance with the Ayotzinapa victims’ representatives and the Mexican government, has been visiting Mexico since March to assist with the investigation. On May 11th, the group issued a preliminary report, their third so far, that did not hold much good news for the government. Among other findings, the I.A.C.H.R. experts corroborated earlier reports by journalists—including by Anabel Hernández—that federal policing authorities had been monitoring the students from the moment they left Ayotzinapa, at six in the evening on September 26th, and that these authorities knew that the students had come under armed attack in Iguala. The report stated that the students had not come to Iguala to interrupt or protest the mayor’s wife’s political event at all, as Murillo Karam alleged. All along, students who survived the attacks have insisted that they were unaware of José Luis Abarca and his wife. They’d been diverted to Iguala that night after realizing that federal police and other forces were determined to block them from entering Chilpancingo to seize buses; they decided that they would have a better chance of succeeding in the smaller city. In fact, the students arrived in Iguala after the political event ended.
That same week in May, the National Security Archive, in Washington, D.C., made public some documents that it obtained via the Freedom of Information Act, which revealed U.S. government and military unease over the potential role of U.S.-funded Mexican forces in atrocities. In the weeks after the Ayotzinapa students disappeared, searches in the countryside around Iguala turned up numerous clandestine graves filled with the bodies of dozens of executed victims that did not match those of the missing students. One of the documents that was released, an October, 2014, internal report from the U.S. Northern Command, noted that the number of recently unearthed graves raised “alarming questions about the widespread nature of cartel violence in the region and the level of government complicity.”
Furthermore, a few days after Murillo Karam’s statements, the Argentine Anthropological Forensic Team (E.A.A.F.), on which he had relied heavily, took the unusual step of releasing a detailed sixteen-page communiqué distancing itself from, and criticizing, the P.G.R.’s investigation of the Cocula dump and the San Juan River. First, the E.A.A.F. reiterated an earlier statement that its team was not present when plastic bags filled with burned human remains were allegedly recovered from the San Juan River by Mexican Marine divers. They were only shown a plastic bag that was already open, which contained the bone fragments that eventually yielded the sole positive DNA identification of an Ayotzinapa student.
Second, it was only after being shown that bag of burned bones, on October 27th, that the E.A.A.F. began cleaning and sorting and testing the remains from the Cocula dump. As required, the E.A.A.F. and the P.G.R. collaborated on subsequent forensic crime-scene investigations conducted in a small area of the dump, between October 27th and November 6th. At the end of November, the Argentines learned that, on November 15th, an evidentiary investigation had been conducted in the dump without them. In that day’s procedure, the Argentines wrote, “P.G.R. experts recovered evidence consisting of 42 ballistic elements, soil samples, and other non-biological evidence without having informed the E.A.A.F. or asked it to be there.” None of that evidence was found while the independent experts were there; it was discovered only after they left.
Among the verifiable evidence recovered in the Cocula dump, the E.A.A.F. discovered the burned remnants of a dental prosthetic inserted into a jawbone that also included the roots of a human tooth in a socket of the bone. The Argentine experts asked each of the Ayotzinapa families if their missing student relative had worn a prosthetic denture, and in each case the answer was no. So the evidence indicated that the Cocula dump held the incinerated human remains of at least one person who was not an Ayotzinapa student. Also, the E.A.A.F. confidentially obtained a set of satellite images of the Cocula dump showing that three large fires, on three separate dates between 2010 and 2013, had raged in the exact portion of the dump that the E.A.A.F. and the P.G.R. searched for evidence and human remains. “These images,” the Argentines wrote, “show the presence of multiple episodes of fire in the dump at least four years before what the P.G.R. presented as a unique burning event in its January 27, 2015 conference.”
So in eight months, the investigation into what happened in Iguala has turned up dozens of bodies, so far, in clandestine graves throughout the surrounding countryside, and evidence of burned human remains unrelated to the case in the Cocula dump. The government has yet to discover any confirmed trace of the missing students other than one piece of charred bone that was positively identified.
Meanwhile, a number of investigative journalists, including Anabel Hernández, the woman who showed the video of the attack, were doing important work to take apart the government’s case. Hernández is the author of the monumental investigative book “Los Señores del Narco,” which she wrote after the authorities did nothing to investigate the kidnap and murder of her father, an engineer. The book, published in English as “Narcoland: The Mexican Drug Lords and their Godfathers,” provoked serious death threats against Hernández and her family. A mother of two, she decided to leave Mexico for a while.
That day in Brooklyn, Hernández was joined on the podium by Felipe de la Cruz, a graduate of the Ayotzinapa Normal School and a father of a survivor, who has emerged as a leading spokesman for the families, and by Vidulfo Rosales, a prominent Guerrero human-rights leader and attorney representing the families. As part of an initiative called Caravan 43, De la Cruz, Rosales, and other Ayotzinapa family members have been travelling throughout the United States and other countries to talk about the case and to participate in local marches and protests. Rosales explained that at a national assembly of rural normal-school students held in Morelos in mid-September, before the disappearance, the Ayotzinapa School had been charged with the responsibility of providing temporarily commandeered buses to transport students to Mexico City on October 2nd. They needed twenty-five buses, but, as the day approached, they had acquired only eight; that was why, on September 25th, the first weekend leave for the activist freshman students was cancelled, and the next day they set out in two buses, at 6 P.M., from Ayotzinapa, with the intention of bringing back more. During the four hours between when they left the school and when the police attacks in Iguala began, at about 10 P.M., Rosales said, the students’ movements were being monitored via the C4, a federal command and information-gathering post in Chilpancingo to which, he said, only federal police, the Army, and state police have access. In the case records of the Guerrero state prosecutors, Hernández found documentation of the monitoring, showing that the command post had recorded the identification numbers of the two buses the students were travelling in. The purpose of the monitoring may merely have been to prevent the students from commandeering buses in Chilpancingo. But the virulent hostility of state and federal authorities in Guerrero toward the politically radical, poor, mostly indigenous Ayotzinapa Normal School students is an established “historical truth.” On a previous occasion, when Ayotzinapa students gathered to stop traffic to fundraise on the Autopista del Sol, a highway that runs past Chilpancingo to Acapulco, in December, 2011, police murdered two students and wounded five. Hernández said in Brooklyn that she believes the September 26th attack was planned all along.
The most striking revelation from the smartphone videos Hernández showed was the possible presence and even direct involvement of federal police in the lethal attacks. To set that scene, Hernández first recounted the movements of the students and the buses in Iguala that night, and the series of confrontations they had with police and other gunmen. On the Periférico Norte, a highway outside the city, the driver of a bus seized by ten students asked to be allowed to drive to the Iguala station to drop off his passengers before turning his bus over. Once there, the driver stepped outside and then locked the doors to his bus, trapping the students inside. He then went to speak to the station manager, who phoned the municipal police chief, who phoned the Iguala federal police chief to tell him, Hernández said, that students were making trouble in the bus station. Hernández said that she had documentary proof that these calls had been made, collected from the records of the investigation conducted by Guerrero state prosecutors in the days after the crime. Meanwhile, the trapped students phoned their companions out on the highway, who soon arrived in their two buses. The students—approximately eighty of them, many with their heads shaved and wearing bandannas over their faces—were able to overwhelm the small contingent of private security at the station. They seized three more buses, giving them five in all.
The students then tried to flee the city, and two of those buses made it out to the highway. Three buses, trailed by police, became lost trying to make their way out of Iguala and were stopped, with some distance between them, by their attackers on Calle Juan N. Álvarez. Nearly all of the disappeared students were taken from two buses that were the targets of the heaviest gunfire: one that had reached the highway, and the last bus to be trapped on Juan N. Álvarez. “As you saw in the video,” Hernández said, “the municipal police closed the road in front to not let the three buses continue. The federals closed the road in back.” Hernández said that the witness testimonies of Iguala residents “say that the federal police were there.” Students riding in the first two buses were eventually able to flee down side streets or protect themselves from gunfire by hiding under buses. It was the third bus that was found later with its windows shattered, and pools of blood on its seats and floors. Witnesses saw students being pulled from the bus and taken away in patrol trucks. While Hernández and the lawyer Vidulfo Rosales are convinced that federal police were at least present at the scene, other journalists who have been investigating the events in Iguala caution that there is not yet definitive proof of that. As commonly occurs in Mexico, these could have been other men, drug-gang members, disguised in federal-police uniforms, or members of a special unit of the municipal police, known as “los bélicos,” who worked directly for Guerreros Unidos, and whose uniforms resemble those of the federales. It is one more aspect of the case that needs to be investigated.
Yet the P.G.R. under Attorney General Murillo Karam apparently did not even collect the students’ phones and videos as evidence. “The P.G.R. didn’t make a complete investigation,” Hernández said. I asked her how she had she come by the videos (portions of these were later posted on Proceso’s Web site to accompany her reporting). She told me that she’d spoken to Ayotzinapa students who’d told her that they’d turned their phones over to Guerrero state prosecutors in the first days after their companions disappeared. When she went to the Guerrero state prosecutors’ office to ask for the videos, Hernández said, the officials she spoke to were at first disconcerted that she even knew of their existence, but then they turned the phones over to her.
Hernández also gained access to the case files of state and federal prosecutors and investigators and to the depositions of witnesses and the confessions of those arrested. Most of those confessions, Hernández said, were signed by ordinary citizens—a fireman, a schoolteacher, a clothing salesman—who’d never had anything to do with either Guerreros Unidos or the local police. In Proceso’s May 17th issue, Hernández and Fisher published an extended report based on their analysis of twenty-seven of the ninety-nine confessions of people detained in the Ayotzinapa case. The reporters found wildly contradicting and irreconcilable versions of what occurred that night, and much evidence—from the prisoners’ medical reports and from the accounts of relatives who had spoken those imprisoned—that these confessions had been extracted by often severe torture.
On the same day as the Ayotzinapa panel in the Brooklyn Marriott, Marcela Turati published a special report in Proceso. Its opening paragraph quoted from a somewhat crudely jotted and cryptic logbook entry of the Mexican Army’s 27th Infantry Battalion, based in Iguala, on the events of September 26th:
The documents finally obtained by Proceso (not without a series of difficulties and obstructions) were redacted and fragmentary, filled with blackened pages, contradictory information, and omissions; ninety-seven numbered and catalogued documents were missing. Yet, Turati wrote, “the reports reveal that from 11:00 PM on the 26th to 6:00 AM of the 27th two units from the battalion’s Reaction Force were patrolling the streets; they saw the corpses, they went to the hospitals and encountered the wounded, they knew about the gunfire and attacks.”
In the early morning of the 27th, the surviving students were searching the streets for their missing companions; others had already begun to give declarations to the state’s Public Ministry. But, at the end of the night, when the two Rapid Reaction units (one of which had an initially aggressive encounter with students who had taken refuge in a private clinic, including a badly wounded student for whom soldiers called an ambulance—an incident that has been confirmed by several journalists) finished their patrolling, they reported that the night had passed “sin novedades,” without unusual activity. But other reports—like those Hernández uncovered about the C4—showed that the Army knew precisely when the students arrived at the bus terminal and about the commandeering of buses there. It also knew about the clashes in the streets between students and police, when students poured out of the buses and threw rocks at the police cars that had followed them from the bus station. And it knew that the police had responded with gunfire.
On the night of May 18th, I had a long conversation with Marcela Turati about the Ayotzinapa case. People aren’t going to forget or forgive what happened in Iguala, she said. The case is unique, partly because of the way it has come to stand for so many other similar massacres and atrocities: the massacre of forty-five indigenous people in Acteal, Chiapas, in 1997; the seventy-two dead Central American migrants found in San Fernando, Tamaulipas, in 2010; the hundred and ninety-three people massacred by Zetas at the La Joya ranch in the same area a year later; the twenty-two young people massacred by the government in a warehouse in Tlatlaya just last year; the massacre of sixteen civilians in Apatzingán in January of this year. The list, which could go on and on, includes cases that Turati, still only in her thirties, has covered closely in her prize-winning career. “What surprises me,” she said, “is the way the patterns are repeated, the way the state operates at all levels—the P.G.R., the Foreign Ministry, down to the lowest levels—to cover up; all those mechanisms of impunity; the way they always coordinate to protect the image of Mexico abroad.” If any forces are found to have done something wrong, she said, these are always described as errors or mistakes. After massacres, she said, there’s always an excuse for not being able to identify the bodies: the corpses are too mixed up, or they’re too badly burned. “Ayotzinapa is different,” she said, “for two reasons. First, the presence of the Argentine forensics group—that the government felt the pressure to open up to the Argentines. And the I.A.C.H.R.”
Of course, the government can ultimately ignore the judgments or recommendations of either or both of these groups. But they did decide to let them in, perhaps after calculating that to keep them out would be more damaging. They did, in the end, in however flawed a manner, turn military documents over to Proceso to comply with the transparency law. The government knows that it cannot completely turn its back on a world of at least symbolically agreed-upon modern democratic, legal, and human-rights norms. And so, even if justice is never achieved in the Ayotzinapa case within the Mexican legal system, it is likely to have a long life in international courts and forums.
The May 11th preliminary report issued by the Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts appointed by the I.A.C.H.R. in many ways corroborated the reporting of Mexican journalists such as Hernández and Turati, and also added information. It harshly criticized the fragmentation of the government’s investigation into more than “13 different criminal cases in six different courts in various cities of the country.” And it went on to note that men arrested by the government have been scattered among courts and prisons as far flung as Tepic, on the western coast, and Matamoros, on the Texas border, the latter being one of the drug war’s most violent cities. Most of the detained men were represented by public-assistance attorneys from Guerrero, who were unlikely to be able to travel to Matamoros.
Those points were emphasized the day before the report was released at a press conference conducted in Mexico City by two members of the panel of experts: Carlos Beristáin, a Spanish physician and psychologist who specializes in the effects of war trauma and political violence on communities, and Claudia Paz y Paz, the noted former Guatemalan Attorney General who brought the genocide case against the former military dictator Efraín Ríos Montt. At the press conference, the experts insisted that the crime was one of “forced disappearance,” not of mere “kidnapping,” as the government prosecution was charging. Due process, the panel found, had been violated throughout the case, especially by the use of torture. Beristáin said that they had spoken to people detained in the case who said that they had been tortured. The experts reported that they had found instances, throughout the government’s investigation, of torture, attempted murder, cover-up, obstruction of justice, and threats against the normal-school students and survivors, all of which needed, they said, to be investigated. The experts revealed that their requests to directly interview members of the 27th Battalion, submitted in the course of a month and a half, had been rebuffed by the government and military authorities. They said that they were also asking to speak to federal police.
Late this spring, as I was frantically packing in order to leave New York City at dawn the next day for nine months, I received a phone call from a Columbia University grad student involved in hosting members of Caravan 43 on their visit to the city. Following protests held in New York, most of the caravan had returned to Guerrero, but two women, relatives of two of the disappeared Ayotzinapa students, had stayed in order to speak at an indigenous-peoples forum at the United Nations. Would I like to meet them, he asked. They arrived at my door in Brooklyn a few hours later, and we walked to a small nearby park, where we squeezed ourselves around a tiny table outside an adjacent tiny café, and spoke over lemonades, surrounded by chatting young Cobble Hill moms and baby carriages. María de Jesús Tlatempa Bello is the mother of José Eduardo Bartolo Tlatempa. Her son’s cousin, Jesús Jovany Rodríguez Tlatempa, is also among the disappeared students. When I asked María de Jesús to write her name in my notebook, she appended a sentence of her own: “They are disappeared, their compañeros were detained by police and they didn’t take more because they didn’t fit into the patrol trucks.” The other woman, Anayeli Guerrero de la Cruz, is the sister of the disappeared student Jhosivani Guerrero de la Cruz. She has two cousins among the disappeared _normalistas _as well: Emiliano Alen Gaspar de la Cruz and Everardo Rodríguez Bello. “We’re from the community of San Juan Omeapo municipality of Tixtla,” she wrote in my notebook. How carefully and lovingly they wrote down those sentences and their relatives’ names. Tears flowed freely—these were women whose hearts had been torn out. To lose a son, a brother, and to have to consider the grisly fates that, according to the authorities, had befallen them. In her wonderful novel “Prayers for the Stolen,” Jennifer Clements describes the women of Guerrero as “proud to be the angriest and meanest” people in the world. It wasn’t the first time I had been around Ayotzinapa family members and sensed that they will never stop fighting to learn the truth of their sons’ and brothers’ whereabouts, or for justice.
The two women told me about their close-knit families and rough rural lives, about the pride they felt over a son and a brother having made it through the arduous selection process for Ayotzinapa Normal School students. José Eduardo worked with his father as a stonemason but wanted a career as a teacher. You have to be poor, from the working or agricultural class, and usually indigenous to become an Ayotzi, they told me. Teachers and older students perform home visits to assess applicants for these qualities and skills. You have to know how to till your own fields and raise your own crops. The teachers who graduate from the school, who usually go out into isolated and impoverished rural communities to teach, can’t be begging their neighbors for food; they have to be self-reliant. So one trial for final admission is to show that you can grow your own food. From Day One at the severely underfunded school, the students have to practice self-reliance. José Eduardo and Jhosivani were first-year students, like most of those who disappeared in Iguala. They had finished the trial period and were to begin their first classes on the Monday following that weekend of September 26th and 27th. María de Jesús vividly described for me the last time she saw her son, about a week before that: he was leaving her kitchen to go back to the school after having surprised her by coming home one day for lunch.
Two days before our meeting, María de Jesús and Anayeli spoke about the students at the United Nations, before the Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues. They called upon Mexico to invite the U.N. Special Rapporteur on the rights of indigenous peoples to visit the country and learn about the forced disappearances and state violence. When the two women from Guerrero left the forum and went into the adjacent lobby, they saw that a large and festive cocktail reception was being held to celebrate the reinstallation there of a restored mural by Rufino Tamayo. The Tamayo mural, created in 1968, is called “Fraternidad.” Among those attending in the ceremony were Juan Manuel Gómez Robledo, the Mexican Foreign Ministry’s Undersecretary for Multilateral Affairs and Human Rights, and Susana Malcorra, the United Nations Secretary-General’s chief of staff. The mural shows a shadowy circle of men clasping arms around a large bonfire. According to an account of the event published in El Universal, when Malcorra spoke, she said that “in many ways, this marvelous mural underlines Mexico’s role at the U.N., and its contributions toward securing a sustainable future of peace for all.”
*This paragraph has been updated to clarify details on the exact nature of the assault, and the number of students who were transported to the dump.
