This is the seventh 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,” “Who is Really Responsible For the Missing Forty-Three?,”and “The Government’s Case Collapses.”
On Sunday, September 6th, in Mexico City, the Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts (GIEI) presented the highly anticipated results of its six-month investigation into the events of September 26 and 27, 2014, in Iguala, Guerrero. That was the date when forty-three students from the Raúl Isidro Burgos Normal School, in Ayotzinapa, disappeared, three more were killed, and many others were injured, some severely. The GIEI’s five experts—a mix of prominent legal and human-rights professionals from Chile, Colombia, Guatemala, and Spain—had been appointed by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, under the aegis of a Mexican government that found itself on the defensive from worldwide protests over its own deeply flawed investigation of—and possible complicity in—the crime. For six months the experts had interviewed survivors, the abductees’ family members, many of the men and women who have been detained in the case so far, police and legal officials, and many others. They conducted their own evidentiary or forensic examinations and studied the case files—one hundred and fifteen volumes of approximately a thousand pages each. They issued requests to the Procuraduría General de la República (P.G.R.)—Mexico’s equivalent to the U.S. Attorney General’s office—for documents or to interview other possible witnesses, in many instances people whom the P.G.R. had not yet spoken to.
The event at which the report was presented, to which journalists had been invited, by e-mail, weeks before, was held in the large auditorium of the Human Rights Commission’s headquarters, in the Federal District. The atmosphere was expectant and even festive, with people greeting each other with hugs and kisses, at least on the side of the room I was on, which was filled with diplomats, activists from prominent human-rights organizations, cultural figures, and well-known journalists from Mexico’s small and ever more beleaguered opposition and independent media. The room was overcrowded, and organizers were trying to herd less-established, younger, and scruffier journalists into the lobby and plaza outside, where they could watch the proceedings via live video feeds. Several Mexican government officials, in sober suits, sat in the front row, press photographers crouching and crawling in front of them like soldiers under fire. The rear of the auditorium, and parts of the outer aisles, were lined with tripods, cameras, and crews.
The other half of the auditorium presented a sharp contrast to ours, with rows of people sitting quietly and sternly, most of them with indigenous features, in rustic clothing and hooded sweatshirts; no one among that group was sending air kisses across the room. These were the family members of the forty-three young men who had disappeared in Iguala, and of the three who were killed. With them were students from the Ayotzinapa Normal School who’d survived the attacks, and other supporters from the hot, rural, poverty-stricken towns and villages where most of the students, who were training to become rural schoolteachers, were from. When the five experts finally came out to take their seats at the long table on the podium, the familiar call-and-response shouts erupted from that side of the room, and the whole auditorium joined in, “¡__Vivos se los llevaron!” (They took them alive!) “¡__Vivos los queremos!” (We want them back alive!)
Each expert in turn narrated or presented an analysis of one part of the group’s investigation. It would be hard to overstate what a demolishment it was of the Mexican government’s official account of the crime—a story already derisively known in Mexico as the “Historical Truth,” ever since the former Attorney General, Jesús Murillo Karam, had emphatically called it that in a press conference, in late January. At that event, Murillo Karam had announced that, according to the conclusions reached by his own P.G.R. investigators, the forty-three missing students had been handed over by Iguala municipal police to gunmen from the drug-dealing gang Guerreros Unidos and incinerated in the dump in the neighboring town of Cocula. The conclusion, the Attorney General declared, was supported by scientific experts and the confessions of drug dealers.
On stage, the experts recounted the time line of the case. On September 26th, the students set out from Ayotzinapa with the goal of seizing commercial buses to transport students from their school and other normal schools to a march in Mexico City, on October 2nd, which would commemorate the 1968 Tlatelolco student massacre. The temporary commandeering of buses for such purposes, the GIEI report stated, “has been a traditional practice” of the normal schools throughout Mexico, widely known to authorities and bus companies. It had happened many times before, even in Iguala, almost always “without incidents, reprisals or legal sanction.” The GIEI report established as fact what some journalists had long been reporting: that, on September 26th, at 5:30 P.M., from the moment that approximately one hundred students and three bus drivers left Ayotzinapa, in two previously commandeered Estrella de Oro buses, they were being monitored, as is routine, by the Central Command of the State Police, or C4I4. The C4I4 collects information and shares it with the zone’s federal, state, and local police and the military.
The students originally had intended to commandeer more buses at the highway toll booths outside Chilpancingo, the state capital, but found federal-police patrol cars waiting there. As the C4I4 registered, the students diverted to Iguala at exactly “17:59.” On the outskirts of Iguala, one of the buses, Estrella de Oro No. 1531, parked outside a restaurant in an area known as the Priest’s Ranch, and the other, No. 1568, went on to the Iguala toll booth; in both places they found federal police waiting. They were also being watched by a military-intelligence agent who reported to the commander of the Mexican Army’s 27th Battalion, which is based in Iguala. It wasn’t until “20:15,” according to the report, that the students outside the Priest’s Ranch managed to detain a bus, Costa Line No. 2513; the plan was to leave the bus’s passengers there and for the students in all three buses to return immediately to Ayotzinapa. It wasn’t likely that they’d be able to stop more buses now that night had fallen. But the Costa bus driver insisted on bringing his passengers to the Iguala bus station before turning over the bus. “Five to seven” students went with him.
At the bus station, the driver didn’t keep his word. Instead, he got off the bus and locked the students inside. The students phoned their companions waiting outside Iguala, who responded by driving the other two commandeered buses to the station. The bus station provided a bonanza of sorts: there the students seized three more buses, not merely two more, as the P.G.R. has insisted in all its official accounts, despite the recollections of the surviving students.
The GIEI’s version of the students’ movements up until this point rebutted several of the hypotheses included among the P.G.R.’s “Historic Truths.” The government had long espoused the theory that the students had come to Iguala to boycott or interrupt the political speech that was to be given in the small city’s zócalo that evening by the wife of the mayor, José Luis Abarca. But the students had never intended to enter the city, and by the time they did get there that event was over. Likewise, if the students, who were completely unarmed, had not entered the city intentionally, it wasn’t plausible to suggest, as the government had, a possible criminal motive for their incursion, such as a relation to a rival drug gang that had come to challenge the dominant local narco gang, Guerreros Unidos. Yet the students riding in the five—not four—commandeered buses were soon attacked in a way that was massive and violent and seemingly well coördinated. The assault involved, in various roles, every police branch in the area, as well as the military. This is in contrast to official denials, from the top of the Mexican government on down, that any official Mexican authority other than local municipal police had taken part.
Press accounts of the GIEI report would focus on its categorical repudiation of the heart of the government’s scenario: the mass incineration at the Cocula dump. The government had relied on the finding that, upon examination in a specialized lab, in Austria, badly charred bone fragments, supposedly burned at the dump and then tossed in garbage bags into a nearby creek, had yielded a positive identification of one student, Alexander Mora. But that result was vehemently disputed. The prestigious Argentine forensic group that had signed an accord with the government to monitor the investigation, on behalf of the Ayotzinapa family members, reported that they could not confirm that the Mora bone fragment really had been recovered from the water, nor could they vouch for any other aspect of the government’s chain of custody. They also reported that the Mora bone fragment was “irregular”: it didn’t resemble the others sent with it to Austria.
Dr. José Luis Torero, an internationally recognized fire-investigation expert, was hired by the GIEI to conduct an independent examination into the incineration scenario. Torero, a Peruvian who participated in the forensic investigations of the World Trade Center attacks, has a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, and was previously a professor of fire security at the University of Edinburgh. He currently heads the School of Civil Engineering at the University of Queensland, Australia. The incineration of forty-three bodies in an open-air terrain like that of the Cocula dump, Torero concluded, would have required some thirty-three tons of wood or fourteen tons of pneumatic tires, along with the same amount of diesel fuel; the fire would have had to burn for sixty hours, not the twelve that the P.G.R. claimed it had, based on the confessions of captured Guerreros Unidos sicarios. The smoke from such a fire would have risen nearly a thousand feet into the sky and would have been visible for miles around; no such pillar of smoke was spotted, or even captured by satellite imagery.
More analysis and vivid detail was given at the report presentation, and much more is contained in the report itself. But a detail I’ll always remember from the presentation was when the Chilean GIEI expert Francisco Cox described Torero’s analysis of the claim, included in the gang members’ confessions, that they had gotten close to the fire, as if approaching a barbecue pit, to add more fuel while it was burning. Anyone who were to get that close to such a fire, according to Torero, would have been incinerated instantly. In their report, the experts concluded, “The GIEI has formed the conviction that the forty-three students were not incinerated in the Cocula municipal dump. The confessions given by those presumed responsible on this point do not correspond to the reality of the proofs presented by this study.” Nearly a year after the forty-three students disappeared, the truth of what actually happened to them, and where they were now, was still unknown.
At the close of the presentation, the GIEI experts acknowledged that the government had invited them into the country and had facilitated their investigation; they expressed their gratitude and optimism over what might lie ahead. The GIEI had already had its contract extended for two months, and soon it would be for six. Among their most emphatic requests was that the government reverse its stubborn refusal to allow the GIEI to interview members of the Mexican Army’s 27th Battalion. The record that the GIEI was provided of that night’s C4I4 monitoring of the students and the violent events in Iguala had two striking gaps, one immediately following the first armed attacks on the students and the other covering the time period when the second attack took place; the secretary of defense had withheld that information from the GIEI.
When the small delegation of government officials, including representatives of the P.G.R., mounted the stage to receive their copies of the report, they were met with loud shouts from the audience, who chanted the slogan that had reverberated at last fall’s massive protest marches over the disappearances, “It was the state!”
The extent to which the government was affected by the GIEI’s refutation of Murillo Karam and the P.G.R.’s “Historic Truth” was made immediately visible at a hastily called press conference at the Attorney General’s Office a few hours later. Again, a thick forest of camera tripods and war-zone photographers materialized, now crammed into a much smaller space. Eight officials from the P.G.R., five men in dark jackets and ties, one man in a military uniform, and the new Attorney General, the former Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) Senator Arely Gómez González, came out on stage. For a long moment they stood stiffly in line, and I’ve never seen such a row of facial expressions: grim, disturbed, unsettled. Some of the people in that line had previously worked closely with Murillo Karam; they were responsible for the P.G.R.’s investigation and case. The new Attorney General couldn’t be blamed for that, but, at this moment, that fact seemed to provide her with little relief.
Gómez strode to the podium at the left of the stage and gave a terse and brief statement. The investigations into the lamentable acts that had occurred in Iguala would “continue until their ultimate consequences,” she vowed. The P.G.R., “on orders of the President of the Republic,” would now analyze the GIEI report, “and in time evaluate” which parts to incorporate into its own investigation. She and her men filed off the stage while reporters shouted, among other things, “Why did the P.G.R. hide the fifth bus, Attorney General?”
That long and unforgettable Sunday ended with a third press conference, at which Ayotzinapa family members spoke at a community center in the Tabacalera neighborhood. They sat in several rows in arena-like seats, holding banners depicting the names and faces of their disappeared sons and brothers. Their faces, tired, determined, sad, revealed the toll of nearly a year of anguish, grief and uncertainty. A mother addressed the crowd, her voice loud and ringing with anger, on the verge of sobs: “We, the mothers and fathers, were right, we were right all along, we knew our sons hadn’t been burned, that it was a government lie, one more lie. . . . I told Murillo Karam that he didn’t believe his own lies, but now we’ve answered him with scientific proof, not lies. . . . We’re poor, but we’re not stupid. Our children weren’t burned there! We want the truth, we don’t want any more lies. . . . We’ll fight until we find our sons.”
A few days later, there was a small meeting between journalists and two of the experts, the Spaniard Carlos Beristain, a human-rights specialist in disappearances and victim trauma, and the Chilean Francisco Cox, an expert consulted by GIEI and a lawyer and specialist in criminal law and human-rights law. Beristain and Cox seemed a bit awed by what they had unleashed. From a conversation whose details were mostly off the record, I came away with the impression that they weren’t sure what to expect in the near future. It was generally assumed by journalists that there would be hard-liners in the government, including Murillo Karam loyalists, who would try to discredit the experts and the report and to defend the “Historical Truth” as far as they could. But Beristain and Cox seemed confident that there were at least some members of the government who were open to re-starting the criminal investigation. However, nobody seemed to know where President Enrique Peña Nieto and the government’s top powers stood, or whether they were united or divided about what to do.
It was at that meeting that I first heard the report described as “historic . . . unprecedented in Mexican history,” by the writer and journalist Juan Villoro. Over the coming days, as people began to read the five-hundred-page report and its import began to sink in, I heard other journalists describe it that way. The report was historic not just because it was the first time that the Mexican government had acquiesced to such an intrusion by foreigners on its authority but, I think, it was also the first time Mexicans had ever seen a real criminal investigation, conducted by independent and autonomous justice professionals rather than by those subservient to a possibly complicit government. But I also heard a journalist say at that meeting, and I later heard some others say it, that the report’s weak link was precisely the forensic report on the dump fire. That’s where, in the short term, the GIEI would be attacked, because it could be presented as just a matter of one scientist’s opinion versus that of the P.G.R.
That was indeed how the report was treated in much of the mainstream Mexican media, most of which faithfully try to represent the government’s point of view and to defend it. These news organizations depend on government leaks, and they reliably go on the offensive on the government’s behalf, commonly disparaging victims through innuendos and smears. They tried to portray the Ayotzinapa students, for example, as vandals, guerrillas, and even as narcos. The reliably pro-government newspaper Milenio provided a telling example of how the fire-forensics controversy could be spun; the writer and journalist Héctor Aguilar Camín noted that, after the GIEI presentation, another of the drug gang’s leaders, El Cabo Gil, had been arrested. According to the P.G.R.’s version, based largely on confessions by other captured gunmen, it was on El Cabo Gil’s orders that the students had been massacred and burned at the dump. Aguilar Camín wrote, “Science is not clearing up the doubts about the Ayotzinapa case. It’s increasing them. The P.G.R.’s experts insist that the bodies of the disappeared were burned in the Cocula dump. The fire expert for the independent commission who studied the case, José Luis Torero, says such a fire was impossible. . . . [T]he conclusions provided by the experts feed doubts, and return the case to the shadows and to whatever anyone chooses to believe. . . . Those who believe that the dump fire is scientifically impossible are required to doubt the confession of Gildardo López Astudillo, ‘El Cabo Gil’, who says that he ordered the normalistas to be killed and burned precisely in that spot.” He concluded, “The argument among the experts helps to consolidate Ayotzinapa as one more episode of that Mexican specialty of believing what you want to believe; in the end, that specialty is to not believe anything.”
Aguilar Camín’s opinion piece cleverly abets the idea of cynicism as an almost folkloric Mexican custom. He posits the P.G.R.’s scientists, unnamed employees of the National Autonomous University of Mexico’s biology department, as equal in expertise to the GIEI’s Torero, a world-renowned fire-forensics expert. That’s not a persuasive argument, but it’s permissible. But Aguilar Camín’s arguments also disregard the skepticism regarding the dump fire previously expressed by the Argentine forensic experts, as well as the results of another study, performed by a team of UNAM physicists, that reached conclusions similar to Torero’s.
And why shouldn’t one be skeptical of the statements of El Cabo Gil, the long-sought-after leader of the Guerreros Unidos, who was finally captured in nearby Taxco, Guerrero, on September 17th? The GIEI experts discovered and reported many instances in the P.G.R.’s case of confessions extracted through torture, threats, and other forms of abuse. If the Cocula dump scenario was an orchestrated fiction from the start—the science in the GIEI report implies such a conclusion—any confessions asserting otherwise are implicitly suspicious, especially given the forms of coercion that lie behind the profusion of contradictory and false evidence that the GIEI discovered and reported. The report especially exposes the wildly contradicting confessions of the other Guerreros Unidos gunmen, who said they’d participated, on El Cabo Gil’s orders, in the dump massacre and burning. For example, on Pages 133 and 134 of the report, there is a brief analysis of when the various Guerreros Unidos gunmen who confessed to the fire—thus far the P.G.R.’s central witnesses in the case—said they were ordered to Iguala by “Gil’s right-hand man,” in order to resist an incursion by a rival drug gang known as “los Rojos.” Three of the four men say they were summoned to Iguala between seven-thirty and eight-thirty, an hour of that night “when the normalistas hadn’t yet even entered the city.” It was not until eight-fifteen that the “five or seven” students had first boarded the Costa Line bus outside Iguala and ridden into the city with the driver to discharge his passengers, an event that would not have drawn any attention in itself. It wasn’t until the students were locked into that bus and summoned the students in the other two buses to the station—at least forty-five minutes later—that the night’s violent events were triggered.
Still, the media focus on the dump fire was drawing attention away from the rest of the report. And that report of a criminal investigation was unprecedented, certainly in modern Mexico, because there, within hundreds of pages, facts were objectively laid out so as to accumulate into a complex but coherent narrative of a complex crime. The report doesn’t jump to tendentious conclusions unsupported by its collected evidence, it doesn’t cover up or disregard key evidence, it doesn’t try to fortify its case by ignoring recurring and extreme contradictions in the statements of those so far arrested. And the report expresses due skepticism of testimonies extracted through abuse and torture—including, possibly, those of El Cabo Gil’s companions—of which the GIEI discovered and reported many instances.
Three weeks after the report was presented, on September 26th, the first anniversary of the tragedy, an easy-to-overlook footnote from its five hundred densely detailed pages provided new headlines, and added new urgency to the GIEI’s insistence on being permitted to interview members of the Mexican Army’s 27th Battalion. The footnote included the information that on that night, after the Ayotzinapa students had been detained, a second-in-command of the Cocula Municipal Police, César Nava González, asked a commander of the Iguala police, Francisco Valladares, where the youths were being taken: “to the 27th Battalion or to Cereso,”a local detention center? Nava had provided that brief account in his original statement to P.G.R. investigators, and the GIEI had discovered it, as they did so much else, embedded amid the vast volumes of the case files. A reporter for the online news site La Silla Rota wrote of that provocative nugget of information, “It might have been just a baseless question, or it might reveal a manner of operating and coordinating between municipal police and elements of the Mexican Army.” Nava González, the reporter wrote, was a former member of the 27th Battalion, as were several others among the local municipal police forces; they had deserted. The fugitive former chief of the Iguala police also had served in that battalion.
The soldier from military intelligence, revealed by the C4I4’s records of that night to have been monitoring the students outside Iguala, photographed the police forcing students off one of the buses and taking them away, photographs that he handed into his superiors at the 27th Battalion—that information was included in the P.G.R. case record, but the photographs were not and are missing.
The report’s account of the fifth bus offers a perfect example of the GIEI’s thorough investigative methods, and what it exposed about the Mexican government’s handling of the case. In the government’s version, the students left the bus station with three more buses, beyond their initial two, but then quickly abandoned and “destroyed” one just outside the station because it was malfunctioning. But, according to the GIEI report, there “was no evidence that one of the buses was destroyed and left outside the bus station”; the abandoned bus described in the P.G.R.’s account of the crime was clearly a fiction. Bus station security video footage, obtained by the GIEI, yet never included in the P.G.R.’s investigation, showed the three newly commandeered buses leaving the station to join the original two. It also showed that only the Estrella Roja bus—the “fifth bus,” the one supposedly destroyed and abandoned—left by a rear exit. (The GIEI reported on at least three other missing, perhaps destroyed, security videos, filmed from other spots along the routes taken by the buses that night in Iguala, that could have revealed footage of the attacks.)
It is probable that because the Estrella Roja bus left by the rear exit of the station and took a different route through the narrow Iguala city streets than the other four did, it did not quickly come under armed attack by municipal police. The fourteen students on that Estrella Roja bus have maintained all along—though their accounts were also excluded from the P.G.R.’s investigation—that they were driven out of the city by the company’s driver, who, while still inside the city, stopped and waited several long minutes for a woman to bring him some papers, and then continued toward the highway to Chilpancingo, nearly reaching the Palace of Justice, where the Estrella de Oro No. 1531 had already been detained shortly before; all of the students who’d been riding on that Estrella de Oro bus are among the forty-three disappeared. It was there that the Estrella Roja bus was stopped by municipal and also, allegedly, federal police. The students managed to escape, running into the nearby hills. They came under gunfire more than once, including, they allege, by state ministerial police, while trying to elude their pursuers, and they finally found places to hide and wait out the night in surrounding hills and in a house where they were given shelter.
Even though those students gave their statements about what they’d experienced and witnessed the very next day, September 27th, to Guerrero State prosecutors, the P.G.R. did not include their statement in its investigation, not did it make any attempt to speak to the students.
From the GIEI report, on Page 189: “The fact that the bus [the fifth bus, the Estrella Roja bus] wasn’t included as a part of the investigation and that an event that never occurred was narrated in it (that the bus was abandoned and destroyed outside the station) is in itself a suspicious element. Why was it omitted? Why wasn’t it processed, why wasn’t evidence taken from it? Why wasn’t it identified until the GIEI reported its existence?” On April 15th, the GIEI reported what it had learned about the Estrella Roja bus to the P.G.R. Finally, on June 8th, its bus driver provided a statement to the P.G.R., “which was not consistent with what the students” had reported. But the GIEI discovered, apparently forgotten amid the vast case file, a handwritten statement that the bus driver had provided to the P.G.R. on September 26th, the same night of the crimes. There the bus driver’s account coincided almost exactly with that of the students, and was in some details even more specific. The bus driver said it was two federal police patrols that had stopped the bus, and that they had taken the students off the bus at gunpoint.
Subsequently, in Mexico City, after the GIEI had insisted on inspecting the bus, the P.G.R. delivered what they said was the same bus to Mexico City. The independent experts sent photographs of the bus and the original bus station security camera footage to the video forensics expert Brett Hallgren, who studied the images and concluded that, in his opinion, “the bus in the video is not the same bus as in the photographs.” (Page 191.) The experts also discovered a legal proceeding, dated December 8, 2014, in a U.S. Attorney’s Office in Illinois, charging two men there with being member of Guerreros Unidos and with “importing heroin and cocaine from Mexico to Illinois, often hiding the narcotics in commercial buses that travelled from Mexico to Chicago.”
A sixth bus, one that was carrying soccer players from a Chilpancingo team and had nothing to do with the Ayotzinapa Normal School, also came under deadly attack that night as it tried to leave Iguala. For a long time many people have felt baffled over the lack of a convincing motive for the severity of the attack perpetrated against the students in Iguala that night. Why slaughter forty-three students whose only crime was the familiar one of commandeering buses? Now the evidence itself suggested at least a plausible hypothesis: the attacks were triggered when a bus used to transport heroin was commandeered by the students, and that the motive—because the municipal police and others involved in the attacks didn’t know which of the commandeered buses had the drugs aboard, or perhaps had been specially outfitted to smuggle drugs without detection—could have been to prevent any bus from leaving Iguala during those hours. It also suggests that not just municipal police but also state and federal authorities and the Mexican Army participated in or did not impede in any way the violent events that unfolded. Soldiers and patrols from the 27th Battalion turn up in several places in the report’s account of that night, monitoring events, patrolling, having at least one encounter with the students in a clinic to which they’d brought a wounded student and tried to take shelter. Isn’t it a responsibility of the federal police and army to try to protect civilians from violent attacks? Were all those elements of local, state, and federal authority in collusion in Iguala? If so, who did they ultimately take their orders from, Guerreros Unidos? Mayor Abarca and his wife, both of whom have since been arrested for their organized-crime links to Guerreros Unidos? What was the role of the then governor of the state, Ángel Aguirre Rivero, a powerful and well-connected member of the Mexican political establishment? In early press accounts, when information was flowing more freely than it would later, Aguirre was repeatedly described as having been extremely close to the Abarcas.
Could it be that the still far-from-solved mystery of the forty-three disappeared Ayotzinapa Normal School students occurred only to prevent the students from leaving Iguala with a bus that the students had no way of knowing was laden with, or was specially outfitted to clandestinely transport, heroin?
Good criminal investigations provide narratives that establish their credibility through the steady accrual of details and actions—evidence—and the questions and conclusions they prompt arise organically, even inevitably, out of what has come before. Descriptions of actual human behavior refute tendentiousness and slander. “The boys were crying, laid out on the ground, while they were shooting at us,” one student said. Because he was wounded and taken by an ambulance to a hospital, he is the only known survivor among the students who were riding in Estrella de Oro No. 1568_._ One only has to read in the report the many accounts of the terror and bewilderment that overtook the students when they came under attack, the many descriptions of them frozen with panic or weeping, to recognize how young they were, many in their late teens, most of them first-year students who had been at the Ayotzinapa Normal School for less than two months—and how utterly unprepared they were for what befell them.
Why did the Mexican government insist for so long that federal police had not been involved in any of the events of that night, and that they had been confined to their barracks? Why did it also insist that the local military forces had absolutely nothing to do with anything that had happened in Iguala and had no information to impart? Why won’t the Mexican government let the GIEI experts even interview the soldiers known to have at least witnessed what went on in Iguala that night? Didn’t President Enrique Peña Nieto and his powerful interior minister, Miguel Ángel Osorio Chong, receive intelligence briefings on what had occurred in Iguala? Didn’t they read, and weren’t they able to understand, the significance of the C4I4’s ongoing monitoring and information-coördinating of the events in Iguala on the night of the 26th and into the 27th of September? Did they see what information was contained in the sections of the C4I4 record of that night that was withheld from the GIEI?
The Mexican government may have been unprepared for the thoroughness of the GIEI investigation, and a resulting report that possessed an investigative authority that few members of that government could ever have encountered before. I heard someone remark—half-jokingly—that the government had expected the experts to do what many foreign delegations do when they come to Mexico: treat it as a working vacation, enjoy the food and their mezcals, rather than spend endless hours reading through thousands and thousands of pages of the chaotically collected case files. The other night, when I met with the Spanish member of the experts group, Carlos Beristain, he was notably proud of what the GIEI had so far accomplished. It had managed to put the rights of the victims—the right to truthful information, to respectful and responsible treatment from authorities—at the heart of the case. He was especially proud, he told me, of how they had been able to diffuse painful tensions by bringing the surviving students and the parents of the missing and slain students together for face-to-face conversations. The first natural instinct of many of the parents was to blame the school and the other students for what had happened to their missing sons, expressed through accusations such as, “Why did you go to Iguala and start all that trouble in the first place?” Now those families and surviving students have grown closer, and work together, in what has become an all-consuming mission, especially for the parents, to find the missing forty-three and learn the truth of what happened in Iguala. Beristain told me of Ayotzinapa students so traumatized by what they’d experienced that night that they were unable to keep their word and show up for an agreed-upon trip into Iguala in order to reconstruct what they’d witnessed there; they were still so frightened, so reluctant to confront that recent nightmare by returning to the scenes of the terrible crimes committed against their fellow students, that they fled back to the school. It was an important step for those students to be able to finally overcome some of their trauma and go into Iguala with the GIEI and contribute to the investigation.
The GIEI experts report is historic because it has opened up breaches in the way the Mexican government has always operated. The challenges represented by the report can’t be wished away or denied or buried by the usual waves of media propaganda and calumnies. The struggle for justice in the Ayotzinapa case is likely to last longer than Peña Nieto’s term in office, which ends in 2018; it is likely to hang over and haunt him, and members of his government, for a long time. The Ayotzinapa family members are certainly never going to stop fighting to find their sons and brothers, or to achieve justice, but unlike so many thousands of other Mexicans also searching for their disappeared loved ones and despairing of ever seeing justice accomplished on their behalf, the cause of Ayotzinapa, which in some ways stands for all those other cases, too, is now internationally visible as the preëminent symbol and test of whether entrenched institutional impunity can be challenged and justice achieved in Mexico, or not. Mexico will somehow have to make way for the case, which implies reforming itself, even despite itself. If it doesn’t—and it very well might not—the case will go forward anyway, in a venue such as the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, where a harsh verdict against the Peña Nieto government and international censure would seem almost inevitable. There is an authoritative five-hundred-page record of an investigation for prosecutors to build a case from now.
On Thursday, two days before the first anniversary of the disappearances in Iguala, the Ayotzinapa family members met with Peña Nieto for the second time in the past year. Among the eight demands they made, one is especially likely to resonate in the future. The Ayotzinapa families have asked the President for a new investigation to be headed “by a special investigative unit under international supervision with two components, one to investigate in depth the students’ whereabouts, and the other to investigate the charade carried out in order to deceive the families.”
Peña Nieto handled the meeting like a politician, giving an appearance of openness to demands for an improved handling of the case, and actually offering a few positive-sounding measures—he proposed that Dr. Torero also participate in the new forensic studies of the Cocula dump—while also slamming the door on the Ayotzinapa family members’ demands. A case as bungled, and of such international importance, as this one certainly merits, at this point, a special prosecutor or investigative unit. What Peña Nieto proposed was a new prosecutor’s office—that is, a new government office, not an autonomous entity, as a special prosecutor would be—in charge of investigating all of Mexico’s recent disappeared, a caseload of tens of thousands. A special prosecution unit would most likely eventually have to look at the withholding of evidence and coverup efforts in the Ayotzinapa case, an investigation that could reach very high into the current government. It would be going very much against its by now well-established character for the Peña Nieto government to take such a risk.
The Ayotzinapa families were infuriated by their meeting. At a press conference in the central plaza of the capital, the zócalo, where some of the family members had embarked on a forty-three-hour hunger strike, the mother of the disappeared student José Eduardo Bartolo Tlatempa said, “We won’t go, and we won’t get tired. We’re going to be the pebble in the shoe. Because we can’t go home without finding out what happened to our sons.” Addressing the Mexican government, she said, “If you can’t resolve this problem, you have to leave it to people who are serious and responsible.”
The Inter-American Human Rights Court’s team of five independent experts, Carlos Beristain, Ángela Buitrago, Francisco Cox, Claudia Paz y Paz, and Alejandro Valencia, will continue their investigation into the Ayotzinapa case for at least six more historic months.
