In a televised press conference on Friday, Mexico’s Attorney General, Jesús Murillo Karam, announced that the forty-three missing students from the Ayotzinapa Normal School had been executed and incinerated in the municipal dump of Cocula. He added one important qualification: the fragmented remains were too badly burned to permit any quick forensic confirmation of what the Attorney General was presenting, in macabre detail, as fact. Many people in Mexico City told me that they were in tears before the conference was over. The writer and musician Juan Carlos Reyna said that the news conference made him feel “like all of Mexico was being asphyxiated.” He was not alone. That evening in Mexico City, hundreds of people walked over to Avenida Reforma to sit on the steps of the monument known as El Ángel to clear their heads, take deep breaths of the fresher evening air, and share their thoughts. A slogan for Mexico’s civic movement was born that night. Murillo Karam had ended his press conference by saying, “Ya me cansé,”—“I’m finally tired” or, more colloquially, “I’ve had enough.” By the end of that night, #YaMeCansé was spreading on social networks, summoning people to a march in Mexico City the next night: #YaMeCanséDelMiedo. I’ve had enough fear.
Murillo Karam announced, during his press conference, that this new information was the result of testimony gathered just that week from three recently captured young members of the cartel Guerreros Unidos, which traffics heroin to the United States. The three captured delinquents were known as “El Pato,” “El Jona,” and “El Chereje.” According to Murillo Karam, the Iguala municipal police who detained the Ayotzinapa students had turned them over to Guerreros Unidos in the early-morning hours of September 27th, shortly after the police and other gunmen had already killed three students, as well as three other bystanders, in a series of armed attacks in Iguala during the previous night. The initial attacks, and everything that happened after, were allegedly carried out on the orders of the then mayor of Iguala, José Luis Abarca, who became a fugitive for about a month, until he was finally captured last week, along with his wife, in an abandoned-looking house in a working-class Mexico City barrio.
At the press conference, Murillo Karam interspersed his narration of what happened after the students were handed over with video snippets from the declarations of the arrested cartel members. The students were mostly crammed into the back of a cargo truck, piled atop one another (some others were forced into a smaller truck), and then driven to the Cocula municipal dump. According to the detained witnesses, some fifteen of the students were already dead by the time they arrived; several had been wounded during that night’s earlier attacks. The cartel gunmen interrogated those who were still alive about their identities and the reasons they had come to Iguala, and one after another the captives replied that they were students. Then the gunmen executed them.
In one of the interrogation videos, El Chereje acts out how he and others had swung the dead students by hands and feet into a ditch. Tires and stacked wood had been laid at the bottom. The students—some still alive, according to Murillo Karam — were doused with diesel and gasoline and set on fire. The fire burned for more than fourteen hours. The cartel members were then ordered to sift through ashes for remains, to break bones into fragments, to put as much as they could into plastic bags and toss them into a nearby river. Murillo Karam presented images of the forensic experts at work, and of the human remains they’d collected: rows of bone fragments laid out on trays; teeth so carbonized that the slightest touch collapsed them into ash.
If these images were upsetting for anybody to watch, one could only imagine how the victims’ families felt. It was later revealed that many had pleaded with Murillo Karam not to show the images, not only out of respect for their privacy but also because, until those remains had been scientifically identified as those of their sons and brothers and husbands, they would continue to hold out hope that the forty-three were still alive. The Attorney General himself had said that the remains found in Cocula were too badly burned for the Argentine forensic team aiding his office to work with, and that instead would have to be sent to a specialized lab at the University of Innsbruck, in Austria, for DNA testing. Murillo Karam could provide no estimate of how long that process would take, which, he emphasized, was why the students were still to be considered “disappeared.”
Murillo Karam managed to convey that he was not emotionally indifferent to the painful story he was so methodically narrating, but he also seemed committed to fulfilling his political mission: to make the murder of the students seem like a localized crime and not an action of the state. “A crime of state?... Iguala isn’t the Mexican state,” Murillo Karam declared.
The distancing felt dishonest to many in Mexico. All over the country, not just in Iguala, municipal police forces are corrupted by organized crime or else forced into “comply or die” subservience. That reality, which leaves communities all across the country exposed to the depredations of organized crime without any protection from local law enforcement, is ultimately the federal government’s responsibility. According to a report by Human Rights Watch (H.R.W.), the state police and federal army units in Iguala had failed to intervene to protect the students, despite the fact that local human-rights activists had alerted the state government to the crime, and that the buses carrying the students when the police attacked them with gunfire were stopped a hundred metres from the military installation of the 27th Infantry Battalion. The Mexican Army, according to many journalists and other commentators, is the real government authority in Guerrero State. “The army knows that state millimetre by millimetre,” a Mexican legislator pointed out in a recent speech, “and they know minute by minute what’s happening there.”
Earlier that week, in Mexico City, the director of the Americas division of H.R.W., José Manuel Vivanco, had described the Iguala murders, and an earlier massacre in Tlatlaya, in the State of Mexico, as “the worst atrocities we’ve seen in Mexico in years, but they are hardly isolated incidents.” He continued: “Instead, these killings and forced disappearances reflect a much broader pattern of abuse and are largely the consequence of the longstanding failure of Mexican authorities to address the problem.” The H.R.W. delegation had visited Guerrero and Mexico City to meet with government officials and the families of the victims. At a press conference, Vivanco accused the Mexican government of having “delayed investigations” into the Ayotzinapa and Tlatlaya massacres.
In Mexico these days, it is common to hear or read that Ayotzinapa was “the drop that made the cup run over.” Mexico is a land of narco graves, filled with the murdered young and poor, because hardly anybody in a position of authority, including the President, considers it in his or her interest to try to put a stop to it. (And because of unabated drug consumption and political irresponsibility in the United States, too.) Mexicans know that the murder of the forty-three students, like so many other Mexican atrocities, wasn’t a local crime but rather a manifestation of the political corruption and impunity that have been tormenting the country for years. Ultimately, no one bears more responsibility than the President and his government.
Murillo Karam’s press conference was a ploy intended to give a veneer of competence and control to a government that in recent weeks had been internationally criticized for lacking both. It was intended to give a sense of impending closure to the case, in order to still the protests and provide the President, Enrique Peña Nieto, with a smooth exit for his economic trip to Asia, which he left for on Sunday despite demands that he not abandon the country during such a moment of crisis. The press conference backfired badly. People were incensed that the requests of the missing students’ parents had been disregarded, their suffering cynically exploited. The protests around the country increased in size and in ferocity.
“The state is dead” is a popular chant at the marches that have been filling Mexico City’s streets over the past week. Another is “Peña and Mancera, the same chingadera”—referring to the unpopular mayor of Mexico City. Traditionally, Mexico City’s mayor is the country’s leading critic of authoritarian federal power. But many in the city believe that Mancera has acted, instead, as a pawn for the ruling Partido Revolucionario Institucional (P.R.I.). No major politician, and certainly none of the main parties, has escaped Ayotzinapa. Every day, demands for Peña Nieto’s resignation grow louder and more widespread. He has four years left in his term, and is not likely to voluntarily step down.
The same day that Peña Nieto flew to Asia, a months-long investigative report, led by the esteemed journalist Carmen Aristegui, appeared in Mexico’s media. It detailed the President’s recently finished mansion, worth approximately seven million dollars. Photographs of the entirely white home showed a chilly “Miami Vice” aesthetic, like the lobby of a South Beach hotel. Peña Nieto, who is of middle-class origins, has only held public-sector jobs, including as governor of the State of Mexico. Government spokespeople responded that it is his wife, a telenovela actress, who owns the mansion. But the house’s legal owner turned out to be not Peña Nieto’s wife but a construction consortium that won lucrative government contracts in the State of Mexico while Peña was governor, and more once he became President.
Peña Nieto’s Presidency is often described as “a performance.” In Mexico and abroad, he sold himself as a neoliberal modernizer and reformer who was going to bring about a “Mexican Moment.” As part of this public-relations strategy, his government adopted a policy to play down the violence and corruption ravaging the country. Father Alejandro Solalinde, a Catholic priest and prominent human-rights activist, told me that one result of Peña Nieto’s “performance” was to actually abet “a massive impunity.” He believes that when the cartels saw that the President and his government were determined not to talk about organized-crime violence anymore, they were emboldened. “The United States has been relating to a mask,” Solalinde said. “The government is a monster with a mask, and behind the mask is this little man. You’ve been negotiating with a mask, that’s what I told the U.S. Ambassador when he phoned me.”
Solalinde, a small, wiry, highly energetic man in his late sixties, first came to national and international attention about a decade ago when he was running a shelter in a part of Oaxaca on the Central American migrants’ trail, waging what was at first nearly a one-man battle to draw attention to the migrants’ plight: the murders, kidnappings, extortions, and rapes they suffer at the hands of cartels, corrupt police, treacherous coyotes and so many others on their treks across Mexico to the U.S. border. Few are better informed than Father Solalinde about what is going on among the various civic, human-rights, local-autonomy, and self-defense groups throughout Mexico. He has become a rare, inspirational figure in the ongoing scandal. “Despite a country that’s drowning in shit, whenever I read about Solalinde in the news, I feel a strange hopefulness,” Brenda Lozano, a young Mexican novelist living in New York, wrote to me. “He doesn’t represent the Church. His motor is his faith, not the Church. If anything is needed during a time of adversity, it’s for there to be a window that shows a way out like the one he doesn’t just propose but opens.”
Last Monday, I talked to Solalinde in the courtyard of a convent near the center of Oaxaca. “So many years of government corruption and impunity had made people feel resigned,” he said. “These governments are just going to abuse us more and more.” Like so many others, Solalinde considers the Ayotzinapa tragedy a transformative event for Mexico. “People are losing their fear,” he said. “What’s changed here is that people said basta, enough. Paradigms are falling. And these interior changes are propelling new practices in civic society.”
For Solalinde, the country’s turning point might have come during a five-hour meeting, on October 28th, between the family members of the missing students and the President in Los Pinos. The blunt talk and disappointment expressed by the families was widely publicized. “These were Mexico’s poorest people, who were used to imagining the President as someone unimaginably great. They discovered that our President is small. The little man of Los Pinos, small and weak. The myth of the strong government is falling. People see that our system is corrupt, decadent, weak. People are losing their fear of describing things as they are.”
Two sectors of society, Solalinde said, will drive change in Mexico: the youth and women. “These two, each on their own side, have been the most punished, abused, infiltrated, massacred, disappeared,” he said. “People are going to give their all. This movement isn’t going to stop.”
There are marches and protests nearly every day in Mexico. Here in Mexico City, protesters gather at a meeting point in the city in the late afternoon or at night, then head down Reforma and through the old center to the Zócalo. Tens of thousands of people march and others line the streets, holding up banners and signs. They count from one to forty-three and cry “Justice!” Last week, I went to two marches, and to a protest at which university students surrounded and blocked access to the Attorney General’s headquarters for six hours. The first march, organized by students, had an especially festive air. The second, the more spontaneously organized #YaMeCansé march, was quieter, yet in some ways more moving, drawing people from all different parts of society, including middle-class families and elderly people. The Mexico City marches have emphasized peaceful protest, but there are moments of violence nevertheless. At the protest outside the Attorney General’s headquarters, a handful of people wearing hoodies, scarves, and the Guy Fawkes masks popularized by Anonymous suddenly appeared out of nowhere and hurled a rock that clanged loudly, almost like a small bomb, off the glass-walled building. Instantly, the journalists in the crowd converged around a figure in a mask who only repeated a few words—“It was the State”—before running off after his companions. Throughout this episode, the students chanted loudly against violence. A group of young women turned to me and complained that now all that would appear on the television news that night would be rock-throwing anarchists or encapuchados, “hooded ones.” As the second march came to an end, half filling the immense Zócalo, another group of encapuchados attacked and set fire to an ancient wooden door at the National Palace.
The next day, witness reports, circulated on social media, claimed that at least some of the encapuchados were infiltrated provocateurs (infiltrados)—a man in a Guy Fawkes mask had been seen slipping behind a line of police who seemed to be shielding him. The mainstream Mexican media focussed so much attention on the burning of the door that many people remarked that they seemed to be equating that crime with the kidnapping of the students; even President Peña Nieto, flying to China, denounced the act of vandalism at a press conference in Alaska.
The protests in Guerrero state, by contrast, have been chaotic and filled with fury. Yesterday, in Chilpancingo, Guerrero’s capital, protesters burned down the ruling party’s headquarters and clashed with police. In Acapulco, some family members of the missing Ayotzinapa students led a protest that blocked the airport. A similar rage undoubtedly simmers in all those states—Veracruz, Tamaulipas, Morelos, and several others—where the murderous abuses of narco governments are the daily reality.
Meanwhile, in Mexico City, the usually conservative Catholic Church Episcopal Conference issued a statement saying that they were joining their voice with that of the “Mexican people,” and calling for an end to “corruption, impunity, and violence.”
Father Solalinde believes that the movement that emerges from the tragedy of Ayotzinapa will discredit the traditional parties and bring about a regeneration of civil society, with new leaders. Others predict—and this does not necessarily contradict Solalinde’s view—that the outraged protesters in Guerrero and other states will soon fill the streets of Mexico City to demand real change. Others have been focussing on a clause in the Mexican Constitution that may offer a legal way to force the President to step down, clearing the way for new elections. Indeed, there are elections in Mexico next June. Five hundred seats of the lower house of the Federal Congress will be up for grabs, which means that there is opportunity for change in Mexico, both through civil disobedience and through the ballot box. On Sunday, a young protester from the Ayotzinapa Normal School told a newspaper reporter, “This is just beginning.” He may be right.
