This is the fifth part in Francisco Goldman’s series on the recent upheaval in Mexico. 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,” and “An Infrarrealista Revolution.”
In December, revolution seemed possible in Mexico. The source was a nationwide protest movement that some called the Mexican Autumn—ignited by the late-September kidnapping, and then alleged murder, of forty-three students from the Ayotzinapa Normal School, in the small city of Iguala, in the Mexican state of Guerrero. The forty-three were among a larger group of students who were trying to leave Iguala in five commandeered commercial buses that came under a series of armed attacks from local municipal police and other gunmen. Six people were killed in the first hours of the attacks, and forty-three others then seemed to disappear.
Ten days passed before the Procuraduría General de la República (P.G.R.), Mexico’s equivalent to the U.S. Attorney General’s office, began an investigation into the students’ whereabouts. In the months since, a haphazard investigation turned up clandestine grave after grave filled with dismembered bodies. None of them, however, held the students. The world, horrified, discovered the truth about Mexico: that official complicity with organized crime, corruption, and impunity has left ordinary citizens in many parts of the country without protection against predatory violence and lawlessness. The government of President Enrique Peña Nieto and his P.R.I. Party, which had been celebrated abroad for its agenda of neoliberal economic reforms but is much less popular in at home, saw its image of competence—the “saviors of Mexico”—destroyed.
The protests, which emphatically blamed the government for the crime (“It Was the State!”), quieted down over the holidays, especially in Mexico City, when the capital’s secondary schools, colleges, and universities emptied for Christmas vacation. The students had put tens of thousands of young people into the streets. But the parents of the missing group from Ayotzinapa, along with the surviving students, are the movement’s true leaders. The parents told the nation that for them, with their sons missing and their fates still unknown, there would be no Christmas or New Years. On Christmas Eve, in an unseasonably chilly rain, the parents and other relatives marched to the gates of the Presidential residence, Los Pinos, where they were turned away by waiting riot police; on the day after Christmas, there was a march, modest in size, that began at El Ángel, the famous monument on Paseo de la Reforma, and ended not far away, at the Monument to the Revolution, where parents addressed the crowd. You didn’t need to understand Spanish to be brought to tears by the emotion in their voices and words. The parents went out into the streets again on New Years Eve.
Some commentators fretted about an inevitable cooling of passions. On January 23rd, when Amnesty International accused the P.G.R. of having conducted a “deficient” investigation into the disappearances, one of Amnesty’s spokesmen said, “This is what the Mexican government is betting on: they’re betting on forgetting, betting that this will fade.” But then a new semester began. Monday, January 26th, marked four months since the students disappeared in Iguala. Tens of thousands of protesters took to the streets for the year’s first “mega march,” which paralyzed Mexico City. That same day, there were more than forty marches and protest actions throughout the country. The message was clear: Mexicans may like to enjoy their holidays, but they hadn’t forgotten.
The government, meanwhile, wasn’t setting anyone’s mind at ease. In mid-January, the P.G.R., headed by Attorney General Jesús Murillo Karam, formally accused the former mayor of Iguala, José Luis Abarca, of having ordered the municipal police to kidnap the students and turn them over to a group of local drug traffickers known as Guerreros Unidos; his wife, María de los Angeles Pineda, was accused of involvement in “organized crime” for her alleged close association with the group. Abarca, whose party, the P.R.D., has been aligning itself with the ruling P.R.I., had gone into hiding with his wife in October, when the first accusations surfaced; they were captured in November. Two hundred and twenty-one arrest orders have been issued in the case, and ninety-seven people, most of them municipal police officers from Iguala and the neighboring town of Cocula, are now in detention. “All lines of investigation that have arisen during the inquiry have been exhausted,” the head of P.G.R.’s criminal-investigations branch, Tomás Zerón de Lucio, declared at a news conference in mid-January.
According to de Lucio’s investigation, the forty-three students were driven in two trucks to the Cocula municipal dump. During the drive, the investigators estimated that about fifteen students died of suffocation or from gunshot wounds. At the dump, they were turned over to a handful of Guerreros Unidos sicarios. Three of the sicarios were captured and had confessed that, on orders from their capos, they had murdered the students who were still alive, and then incinerated all of the bodies in a bonfire at the dump, which burned through the night. When the fire was finally extinguished, according to the P.G.R., the sicarios were ordered to clean up the site and throw whatever remains they could recover into a nearby river. Some of these remains were eventually discovered, reportedly, inside plastic bags. Everything was so thoroughly burned, however, that Argentine forensics experts, working with the P.G.R., were unable to recover any DNA. Seventeen samples of the remains found inside the plastic bags were sent to a specialized lab at the University of Innsbruck, in Austria. There, scientists declared that they had identified, from one molar and two centimetres of bone fragment, the DNA of one student, twenty-one-year-old Alexander Mora Venancio. According to Murillo Karam, the identification of Mora, the declarations of some of the detained suspects, and (according to press reports) other information that he did not specify was enough evidence to be able to say that, in the Cocula dump, “at least one was killed.” That, the Attorney General said, “makes me think that they all were.”
The story of the P.G.R.’s “exhaustive investigation” and the announcement, finally, of formal criminal charges against the former mayor and his wife did little to quiet people. One reason is that the charges were long expected. Another was that, ever since people had begun discussing the potential scenario at the dump, earlier in the fall, doubts had grown regarding the P.G.R.’s conclusions. On the day the charges were reported in the newspaper La Jornada, for example, there was another story with the headline “Expert Affirms That the Possibility that the Students Were Cremated in Cocula is ‘Zero.’ ” That story reported on a public presentation given by an National Autonomous University of Mexico professor, Jorge Antonio Montemayor Aldrete, who led a team of scientists from various academic institutions in a study of the government’s Cocula dump-burning scenario. As reported in La Jornada, the study concluded that “incinerating the 43 bodies would require 33 tons of wood … or 995 tires, and these would not have been piled one atop the other but would have had to be spread out over the terrain, requiring 540 square meters,” a space the report indicates is ten times larger than the Cocula dump. Montemayor also noted that, if wood were used, two large trailer trucks would have been needed to transport the load up a slippery and narrow muddy road to the dump. The smoke from the fire would have been visible for miles around. If tires were used, then steel wires, a necessary component in standard automobile tires, would have turned up among the ashes. According to the P.G.R.’s hypothesis, Montemayor said, the September 27th bonfire had reached an unlikely temperature of sixteen hundred degrees centigrade, yet photographs taken in the days after the alleged blaze show abundant grassy growth along the area’s peripheries, an impossibility, according to the scientist, after such an intense fire. Montemayor added that the bodies of the students who were already dead when they reached Cocula would logically have been dragged down the steep slopes of the dump ditch, “so that bits of DNA should have been recoverable from the terrain, such as blood, hair, and even skin that could have struck rocks and been scraped.”
Since November 7th, when the P.G.R. revealed their Cocula scenario at a news conference, journalists who have been to the dump have also been registering their skepticism. There were reports that it had rained heavily in Cocula on September 26th and 27th, which would complicate the P.G.R.’s fire scenario. Proceso reported that when the prize-winning journalist Marcela Turati confronted Murillo Karam after a press conference in Guerrero about the possible rains the Attorney General acknowledged that there had been meteorological reports of rain in the area, but said that these could have been isolated downpours concentrated near but not in Cocula. “Nobody can tell me if it rained there or not—nobody, and I’ve asked everybody,” he said.
“The people in the area say that it did rain,” Turati said.
“The people in the area?” Murillo Karam replied. “Excuse me, but it’s an area like that”—he pointed at an unpopulated hillside. “There’s nobody, not a single house around there, not one, nor people. Cows, yes, I saw them for sure. Skinny, on the loose.”
“Did you talk to the caretakers?”
“There aren’t any.”
“Yes, there are,” Turati replied. She had travelled to Cocula with the American journalist John Gibler, who told me that he was waiting farther down the road at the moment Turati encountered some ranch hands. She told him that they were tattooed, tough-looking men who were nevertheless “trembling with fear” as she questioned them. (Whatever they told Turati, which she has not revealed, they could also have told Murillo Karam. Turati says that she spoke to two Cocula residents, who told her that it did, in fact, rain that night.)
Many people who believe that the students weren’t burned at the dump suspect that they were burned elsewhere. Of course, there are some who hold out hope that the students may still be alive, and secretly imprisoned. Others believe that, even if they were burned at the Cocula dump, organizations other than Guerreros Unidos or the local police may have been involved. All three of these scenarios center on one common suspect: the Army. Much has been made, by human-rights groups and journalists, of the inaction by federal police and the military in Iguala on the night of the disappearance, and it is impossible to doubt that soldiers from the local base weren’t aware of what was happening. In one now widely reported incident, soldiers aggressively harassed a group of students at a private clinic where they’d brought a wounded companion, kicked them out of the clinic, and then left them to their fates.
The forty-three missing students, Gibler told me, all came from just two of the five commandeered buses that Ayotzinapa students were riding that night. There are no survivors from those two buses, he said—nobody who can tell what happened. This suggests a chillingly professional operation, not the kind of action that ordinary drug traffickers would seem able to pull off without leaving a trace. The 27th Infantry Battalion has a base in Iguala, and the bases in the area generally have large trash incinerators. Some family members and surviving Ayotzinapa students have told the press that all forty-three students were carrying mobile phones and that they’ve been able to trace the last known G.P.S. signal of some of these phones to the Iguala military base, though these reports, apparently, have not been investigated by the P.G.R. nor independently confirmed. On January 12th, Ayotzinapa students and relatives of the missing who tried to gain entrance to the Iguala military base were violently turned away by military police.
Jorge Antonio Montemayor, the U.N.A.M. physicist, told the news Web site SinEmbargo.com, “Look at all the reports of assassinations carried out by narcotraffickers in the two months since the events of Ayotzinapa: the victims were dismembered, decapitated, cooked in acid, tossed into a metre-and-a-half-deep well filled with gasoline, but I don’t know of a single case where a narco has cremated [victims] and shown any worry about leaving DNA.”
Murillo Karam has dismissed suspicions that the Army could have had something to do with the missing students’ fates as “absurd.” Over and over, he has insisted that the Army is not in any way suspected in the crime, and that there is no reason for them to be investigated. The N.Y.U. professor and former foreign minister Jorge Castañeda wrote in the newspaper Milenio that he believes the government, because of the weakness of the “alternative theories. … I don’t see why the Army or the Federal Police or the Iguala [police] would have wanted to kill the Normal School students.” For him, as for Murillo Karam, that leaves only Guerreros Unidos as a plausible suspect.
Of course, there doesn’t seem to be a rational explanation for such a crime, no matter who committed it. But would the Army have any feasible reason? Omar García, who nearly lost an eye in the clash with military police at the Iguala base, and who has emerged as a leading spokesperson for the Ayotzinapa students, clearly doesn’t see it as a crime that emerged from nowhere. He told La Jornada that the Ayotzinapa students proudly consider themselves political radicals, but that the police and the Army regard them “as vandals and delinquents.” García said, “There is not an ayotzi who has not had a weapon pointed at his chest within two or three weeks of entering the school. The marines, the police, the Army are always coming by, and they aim their weapons at your chest. It’s to test you.” Everyone in the state of Guerrero knew about the students at the Ayotzinapa Normal School: their defiant tradition of political radicalism, the guerrilla leaders who have graduated from the school, and so on. Guerrero state’s governor, Angel Aguirre, was forced to resign in October, and had accused the students of being “bandits manipulated by insomniac guerrillas.”
On January 24th, the Guerrero newspaper El Sur reported that the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Unit (E.A.A.F.) had told the Ayotzinapa families that they doubted the remains found at the Cocula dump, which were sent to Innsbruck, correspond to the forty-three Ayotzinapa students, “and expressed their suspicions that the fragments that allowed for the identification of Alexander Mora Venancio … didn’t correspond”—that is, were not in a similar physical state—“to any others found in the Cocula dump.” And the next day, El Universal, Mexico’s largest newspaper, reported that the Argentines had affirmed that, in their opinion, there was “not sufficient evidence” to link the remains found in the plastic bags in the river to a bonfire in the Cocula dump. All the E.A.A.F. will attest to is that they were summoned to the river and shown plastic bags, already opened and containing some burned remains, which investigators said they had found there. The parents now say that the Argentine anthropologists doubt that the other remains the P.G.R. sent to Austria correspond to the students; the parents believe that the anthropologists cannot certify that Alexander Mora's bone fragments were indeed related to events at the Cocula trash dump
On January 27th, Murillo Karam held another major news conference intended to bring closure to the case. But the motive struck many observers as more political than juridical, coming just one day after the massive protest in Mexico City had shown that Mexicans were not about to let the Ayotzinapa students fade from memory.
“This is the historic account of what happened,” Murillo Karam announced at the press conference, “based on proofs supported by science.” There was indeed new science included in this account. Earlier, the U.N.A.M. scientists who had studied the feasibility of the Cocula dump-fire scenario had claimed that steel automobile-tire wires had not been found among the ashes. Now the Attorney General asserted that such wires had indeed been found; he provided new scientific data regarding the physics of the fire itself, the heat it had hypothetically reached, and conclusions reached by U.N.A.M. biologists who, by identifying the dates when fly larva had hatched there, confirmed that there had been a large fire in the dump at the end of September. But the P.G.R.’s “historic” account did not rest primarily on science, nor on forensic evidence proving that the bodies of the students had been burned there. The report emerged more from the declarations of a Guerreros Unidos capo, a man known as the Brush. He had been captured on January 15th and had confessed to taking part in the kidnapping, murder, and burning of the students. In the Brush’s account, twenty-five students were already dead of suffocation and gunshot wounds by the time they reached the Cocoula dump in the two trucks, leaving only eighteen for them to kill. The Brush said that Guerreros Unidos knew that the young men from Ayotzinapa were students, but that they also believed them to be members of a rival drug gang known as Los Rojos, and that this was why they had killed them. Murillo Karam reiterated that the Army was not a suspect in any aspect of the crime, and that there was no conceivable reason to investigate their actions on the night of September 26th. “There is nobody who accuses them of anything,” he said.
“It isn’t a historical truth,” José Miguel Vivanco, the director for the Americas at Human Rights Watch, responded the next day. “It’s an official version.”
Within twenty-four hours of the press conference, Amnesty International, the Washington Office on Latin America, Mexico’s National Commission of Human Rights, and more than seventy Mexican civic groups had condemned what they interpreted as yet another politically motivated attempt by Mexico’s government to put the Ayotzinapa case behind it. Kerry Kennedy, of the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights, said, “It is an affront to the families of the disappeared to close the investigation with so many questions left unanswered—such as the possible role of the military.” The Ayotzinapa family members and other groups and individuals publically provided long lists of plausible refutations of the P.G.R.’s latest scenarios. These included reminders that, in Iguala and Cocula, relations between the military and local political and police authorities were close, and that the latter maintain close ties and are often incorporated into local drug trafficking operations. According to the families, the official case record includes allegations of military complicity with organized crime, including the confession of a captured policeman, Salvador Bravo Bárcenas, who “affirmed, before the [Guerrero] Public Ministry, that the Army knew in 2013 that Guerreros Unidos controlled the Cocoula police, despite which the Armed Forces didn’t investigate those delinquents, but instead provided them with protection.” The families consider the suggestion that the Ayotzinapa students were “mistaken” for rival drug dealers not credible, given how well-known the radical students were throughout Guerrero.
Families and human-rights groups also criticized the new centrality in the case being given to the Brush. By the P.G.R.’s own account, the supposed capo had left the Cocula dump at ten that night and had not returned until three the following afternoon, so he hadn’t been present at the alleged fire. Human-rights groups also pointed to Mexico’s known record of extracting politically useful but dubious confessions through torture. Many insisted that the P.G.R.’s case, with only one set of identified remains, still lacks forensic authority. Where are the two trucks in which the students were supposedly transported to the dump, and which presumably would be rife with DNA and other blood evidence? Many ask why the P.R.D. governor of Guerrero, Ángel Aguirre Rivero, a former P.R.I. heavyweight and friend of Peña Nieto, who was directly linked in news reports to corruption in Iguala and to Mayor Abrarca’s wife, hasn’t been arrested or investigated. (He was, however, forced to resign.) And why, finally, the rush to close the case? Why the insistence on the Army’s complete innocence, when it is known that they had at least one aggressive encounter with the students that night? Why not confront the growing international criticism and expressions of skepticism directly, and allow an investigation into the Army’s possible role?
The doubts that Mexicans and others have about the government’s conclusions in the case are also a forceful expression of the doubts they feel toward the Mexican government itself, not only the President but the official authorities at every level who have perpetrated countless transgressions against the Mexican public and the law in recent years, which are almost never punished. They point to the recent corruption accusations against Nieto involving possible financial conflicts of interest, at the very least, over mansions sold to the President’s wife and to his finance minister by a contractor who has received lucrative government contracts. And then there’s the fact that, this past June, Mexican soldiers massacred twenty-two young people who they claimed were drug dealers, in a warehouse in Tlatlaya, in Mexico State. Human-rights groups and journalists exposed the government’s attempt to cover up that incident. A couple of weeks ago, El Universal, usually supportive of the government, published an editorial called “Who Believes the Official Version?,” along with a long news report and analysis of the “collapse” of official explanations in a series of recent crimes. “The first impulse of government functionaries seems to be, invariably, to lie,” the editorial began. It went on to call the Tlatlaya massacre “only the most recent and one of the gravest examples.”
A government of another kind might not see its Attorney General’s vehement assertions of a thorough and honest investigation into the case of the forty-three so quickly subjected to derision. Even Jorge Casteneda, in his Milenio op-ed backhandedly defending the government’s scenario, wrote, “At bottom, the problem [is] political, not juridical. According to polls, nobody believes the government: not about Aytozinapa, or about Tlatlaya, or about the white mansion, or about anything. The problem of the government’s credibility … exceeds the scope of Ayotzinapa and the scandals.” As La Universal, wrote on Sunday, January 18th, “The problem is that the lack of credibility of Mexican institutions has reached such a level that even when attempts at transparency and rigor are genuine, doubts remain.” The public will only become convinced of the impartiality and credibility of government investigations, the newspaper suggested, “when those who lie face the political and legal consequences of their farces.”
The problem is political and juridical, and so are the solutions. In the meantime, the Ayotzinapa families are taking their accusations of a negligent investigation into the crimes committed against their sons to the United Nations Committee on Forced Disappearances. The government’s judicial problem became a political one through its own exposed missteps, and, most of all, through the great awakening of the Mexican public. The movement has created a political void that it now must somehow, however gradually, fill in; or, as Father Alejandro Solalinde, who has emerged as perhaps the leading human-rights and oppositional civic voice in Mexico, likes to say, “to reimagine … reinvent.” As the priest recently told an audience at a forum at UAM Xochimilco university, in Mexico City, “I am talking about a peaceful revolution …. We have to inform people and contribute to organizing from below, and do it without hiding; we should be openly subversive and say to the system: we don’t want you … that from below we are going to organize in order reinvent this bad government.”
