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FORTY-THREE MEXICAN STUDENTS WENT MISSING. WHAT REALLY HAPPENED TO
THEM?  
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Alma Guillermoprieto
March 4, 2024
The New Yorker
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_ One night in 2014, a group of young men from a rural teachers’
college vanished. Their families have fought for answers. “I don’t
have a body to mourn,” a father said of his son, one of the missing
students. “I have nothing to hold that is him.” _

Pictures of the 43 missing students line a makeshift camp in downtown
Mexico City, 2019. (Photo credit: Celia Talbot Tobin for The New York
Times),

 

Last year, I drove south from Mexico City, along the highway toward
Apango, a modest hillside town in the state of Guerrero. The highway
ends at Acapulco, but there were no palm trees and no glamour where I
was going. I turned onto a silent two-lane road, and drove past
villages where indigenous languages such as Nahuatl are still spoken.
It was the dry season, and the scrub-forest hills had turned every
shade of dust and brown, punctuated only by the soft white flowers of
the _casahuate_ trees. In Apango, I asked for Estanislao Mendoza
Chocolate, or Don Tanis, as he is respectfully known. I had travelled
here to ask him about his son, who vanished one night in 2014, along
with forty-two other students from a rural teachers’ college, never
to be seen again.

When I arrived, Don Tanis was waiting anxiously in his doorway, a
round-faced, neatly dressed man in his sixties with a lively manner
and eyes so haunted it was hard not to look away. He showed me around
his house, a collection of bare cinder-block rooms with a light bulb
in the center of each one, which he built in the course of two decades
as a seasonal migrant in California. There was a storage room for the
year’s supply of corn—to sell, or to grind for the family’s
tortillas—and, untouched all this time, the room where his son had
lived: a sagging cot, a chair, some fading photographs and posters on
the wall. “I wanted a ranch, with _animalitos_, and he was helping
me set it up, but it’s all abandoned now,” Don Tanis said,
studiously avoiding his son’s name, as he did throughout our
conversation.

His son, Miguel Ángel Mendoza Zacarías, earned his living cutting
hair and working construction jobs. He was tall, with a shock of hair
that he was proud of, to judge from the self-portrait he drew on the
outside wall of the house to advertise his services as a barber.
He’d been thirty-three, a full-grown man, when he applied to the
Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College, in nearby Tixtla—older than
most of his cohort. When I asked why he’d wanted to go, Don Tanis
said, brightly, “It’s never too late to learn!,” adding, “He
loved children, and he always wanted to teach.” I suspect he might
also have wanted an opportunity to get away from working as cheap day
labor. For people from Indigenous and campesino communities—in
Mexico these are neighboring categories—Ayotzinapa provided free
tuition and board, and the possibility of a job teaching somewhere in
a rural district.

Yet students at rural colleges quickly learn that their diplomas will
do little to close the chasm between their lives and those of the rich
and powerful. They often become radicalized, usually in the
old-fashioned Marxist-Leninist sense. This was particularly true at
Ayotzinapa, thanks to a long guerrilla tradition: multiple campesino
movements had flourished in Guerrero in the sixties and seventies, and
two of their leaders, Lucio Cabañas and Genaro Vázquez Rojas, had
close ties to the school. Although their respective movements were
exterminated by military and police forces in a “dirty war,” their
portraits are still painted on some murals at the school, alongside
Lenin, Che, and Marx. The Ayotzis were a rowdy and aggressive
bunch; _revoltosos_, people called them—troublemakers,
punks—tolerated but hardly loved in the region. They often carried
sticks, covered their faces with bandannas, and took over toll booths
to demand payment “for the revolution.” Whenever they needed to
travel as a group—to a protest march somewhere, or to a meeting at
another rural teachers’ school—they would commandeer buses,
leaving the passengers stranded on the asphalt.

On Friday, September 26, 2014, about a hundred students left their
campus in two previously requisitioned buses, and went in search of
several more, in preparation for an upcoming demonstration in Mexico
City that takes place every year. It marks the anniversary of a
massacre on October 2, 1968, when Army and paramilitary troops gunned
down hundreds of demonstrators at an anti-government rally. The march
in Mexico City has become an almost sacred ritual for thousands of
young people across the country, and, for the young Ayotzis, their
search for transportation must have felt heroic: _¡Dos de octubre no
se olvida!_ In the capital of Guerrero, Chilpancingo, fifteen minutes
away from the school, bus takeovers were a frequent, even negotiated
event, but that morning the students were chased away by the police.
After another failed attempt in the afternoon, they ended up on the
outskirts of Iguala, a town some fifty miles from their turf. The
students split into two groups. One group finally managed to take over
a bus bound for the downtown Iguala terminal, and the driver persuaded
them to let him deliver the passengers to their destination before he
returned with the students to campus. But at the terminal he let the
passengers out and swiftly locked the students inside. Soon afterward,
the rest of the Ayotzis arrived to rescue their mates. Shouting and
banging on the doors of buses, they commandeered three others in a
matter of minutes, for a total of five, and prepared to head back to
their school in triumph.

That was when the killing started.

It was a busy night in town; the mayor’s wife had just hosted a
lively ceremony in the central square, cafeterias were still open, and
people were strolling home. And yet, less than half an hour after the
buses left the station, members of the Iguala police, in uniform and
in plain sight, opened fire on the students. A statewide surveillance
system registered the fear as frenzied messages zipped through:
“Stay at home, there’s a shooting.” “They’re saying two
people are dead.” “We’ve turned off the lights and put the lock
on.” Rumors flew back and forth: “They’re burning taxis
downtown.” By the next morning, six people were dead, including
three students, and another was left in a coma. But the worst of the
terror was still to come: in the days and weeks that followed, dozens
of families would come to understand that forty-three of their
children were missing. No one knew whether they were alive or dead.

Their absence could easily have been forgotten: there is a low-range
official estimate that more than eighty thousand people have
disappeared in Mexico since 2006, with virtually no official attempt
to find them. But, thanks to their parents and relatives, the missing
students—who became known as _los cuarenta y tres_, or the
Forty-three—became a cause. Unforgiving, stubborn, and extremely
vulnerable, the families marched once a month through central Mexico
City, putting themselves in front of television cameras, shouting,
gathering at the entrance to government buildings, and refusing to
budge, demanding the return of their sons. Within weeks, the number
forty-three was painted on walls, buses, windows, doors—everywhere
in Mexico, and, for a time, throughout Europe and the Americas. As far
away as Australia, people marched. “We are missing forty-three,”
they chanted, and, “Alive they were taken, we want them returned
alive.” “I used to come across protest marches by students or
workers and say, ‘Lazy bums, get back to work,’ ” Don Tanis
told me. “Now I say, ‘I understand.’ ”

There’s a reason the number of disappearances started climbing in
2006. That was the year then President Felipe Calderón ramped up the
so-called War on Drugs, bringing in the military to crack down on an
assortment of powerful groups. As a result, some of the most notorious
drug-clan leaders have been captured or killed, allowing Mexican
Presidents, and their allies in the U.S. Drug Enforcement
Administration, to boast of many victories. In reality, the effort has
been about as effective as trying to get rid of ants by breaking up
one nest: each drug leader’s death or capture leads to the rise of
several small would-be lords. In the ensuing power struggle, paranoid
traffickers turn on close associates and inflict ever more grotesque
forms of violence on their enemies, and on civilians. Nearly three
thousand clandestine graves have been discovered in the past five
years alone. According to the investigative reporting group Quinto
Elemento Lab, for example, just one grave site in the small
municipality of Úrsulo Galván (population thirty thousand) held more
than a hundred bodies. From 2018 to 2023, more than two hundred secret
graves were found in the municipality of Tecomán, which has a little
more than a hundred and fifteen thousand inhabitants. And these are
only the graves that have been found.

Military patrols assigned to destroy crop fields can easily get
corrupted by drug money. Soldiers uproot the poppy plants from a field
or two and file a report: mission accomplished. The situation is
stable, as long as no one oversteps the boundaries of a delicate
agreement. The drug groups are also deeply entangled with officialdom
at even the most local level. A bar owner I know in Mexico City was
having trouble with a drug group that was demanding the right to sell
drugs in his bar and threatening his life. Eventually, he was invited
to have lunch with a local official, and discovered that the other
guest was the boss of the drug group. Governors of the states of
Quintana Roo and Tamaulipas have been convicted of drug-related crimes
in Mexico and abroad. Judges and the security forces are also all too
frequently in the pay of drug groups. It is up to the relatives of the
disappeared, then, to look for their loved ones, searching the ground
for any sign that it has recently been disturbed. Each new discovery
floats in the news cycle for a day, or a week, and vanishes. _Ya nos
acostumbramos_, people will say. We have become accustomed. Or you
might translate the phrase as “It has become part of our customs.”

The families of the Forty-three didn’t want their children’s
stories to unfold this way. On the evening of September 26th, Don
Clemente Rodríguez Moreno, the father of an Ayotzi named Christian
Rodríguez Telumbre, raced to the school when he heard that his son
might be in trouble. “I wanted to grab a machete and go fight
whoever was harming my son, but I was told that it wasn’t the
prudent thing to do,” he said. He waited until morning to go to
Iguala. “I thought, If my boy’s done something wrong, they’ll be
holding him at the jail. But no one gave us any news there, or
anywhere.” By dawn, Vidulfo Rosales, a lawyer and human-rights
defender at the nonprofit Centro de Derechos Humanos de la Montaña
Tlachinollan, in highland Guerrero, had also heard that there was
trouble in Iguala. He got a ride in an old VW Beetle, but at
Chilpancingo his volunteer driver refused to go any farther. “News
of what had happened in Iguala had spread fast,” Rosales explained.
“There were roadblocks everywhere, people were riled up.” When he
finally reached Iguala, he worked frantically with colleagues,
locating survivors, checking the morgue, the main hospital, and
detention centers, and following the progress of official inquiries.
It was only after days of anguish, as survivors got in touch with the
school, that the extent of the tragedy became clear. Dozens of
students remained missing.

Given the scandalous nature of the crimes, President Enrique Peña
Nieto, a slick but empty politician, was forced to promise an
investigation. Six weeks after the crime, his attorney general, Jesús
Murillo Karam, discussed its status at a press conference. The
students, Murillo declared, had been abducted by crooked municipal
police from Iguala and neighboring towns. Following orders from the
mayor, the police had handed their captives over to a local drug
group, the Guerreros Unidos, or United Warriors. (The mayor did not
respond to a request for comment. He was later convicted of an
unrelated kidnapping and other charges and sentenced to ninety-two
years in prison.) Several members of the group had already been
arrested and confessed. Here, Murillo displayed photographs of a few
men—shabby, dejected, filthy, and, as seasoned reporters immediately
guessed, tortured. The men had taken the students to a trash dump near
the town of Cocula, Murillo said, and killed those who weren’t
already dead. Subsequently, the murderers built an open-pit fire with
tires, gasoline, and wood to burn the youths’ bodies down to ashes
so small that they would forever remain unidentifiable. No members of
the armed forces or the federal police had been involved. It was an
unfortunate episode.

That version of events—which Murillo took to calling the “historic
truth”—has stuck in the minds of many. But the evidence so far
indicates that the Ayotzinapa students did not die at the trash dump,
and that multiple authorities, including the military, were involved.
In 2021, investigators gained access to a video taken one month after
the crime by a drone operated by the Mexican Navy. The video shows two
Navy vehicles parked on the edge of the dump, next to three large
white sacks. A group of men scurry about the terrain, eventually
lighting a fire. Once the smoke clears, the sacks are no longer
visible. Soon afterward, vehicles from the Navy, the Army, and the
attorney general’s office arrive at the site. We know what happened
next: Mercedes Doretti, a member of the renowned Argentine Forensic
Anthropology Team, which was investigating the disappearances on
behalf of the victims’ families, was summoned to the dump while she
was en route to search for bodies a few miles away. Not long
afterward, Murillo gave the press conference that presented the
trash-dump version of events. Doretti’s team was presented with
hundreds of bone fragments that supposedly came from the area, but
almost all were too warped by heat to be used for DNA identification.
Examining the drone video years later, it’s hard not to wonder
whether the fragments had been brought to the dump in the mysterious
sacks, as part of a coverup. (The Mexican Defense Ministry and the
Navy did not respond to requests for comment, nor did Murillo, though
he has publicly defended his investigation, and his lawyers maintain
his innocence.)

Even before the images became public, Murillo’s account had failed
to convince the missing students’ parents. Using common sense, they
reasoned that, since it rained on the night of the attack, a fire
could not have consumed their children’s bodies. “From the
beginning, I knew it wasn’t true,” Don Tanis told me. Always
soft-spoken, he lowered his voice even more, sensing that what he was
about to say would shock me. “When you roast a pig, there is always
a pool of grease at the end,” he said. “But at the trash dump
there was nothing.” The families knew that the government was lying
to them, but they could do little to press for further investigation
by themselves. Fortunately, Don Tanis said, they had the early support
of Centro Tlachinollan.

“By the fourth or fifth day, we realized that we couldn’t do this
work by ourselves,” Rosales told me. Rosales is from the highland
Guerrero town of Totomixtlahuaca, where he was one of only a few
students who made it to high school. He went further, graduating from
law school, joining Tlachinollan, and working on cases involving the
torture, murders, and disappearances of Indigenous and human-rights
activists. “We had certain procedures in place for those
situations,” he said. “But slowly we saw that this was more than
we were prepared for. There were the dead, dozens of disappeared, the
aggressors, and the families.” Rosales drew in other organizations
from Mexico City—chiefly, the Jesuit-founded Miguel Agustín Pro
Juárez Human Rights Center, known as the Centro Prodh. In turn, those
groups called on the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and the
Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team. Meanwhile, the parents of the
Forty-three were beginning to see themselves as a unit. “It was love
for our children that brought us together,” Don Tanis told me.
“We’d never even met before.”

In November, 2014, the parents had their first great triumph: the
Mexican government agreed to bring in an international investigative
team, given the cumbersome name of Interdisciplinary Group of
Independent Experts—or _giei_, by its Spanish acronym. The
following March, the _giei_ arrived in Mexico. One afternoon last
spring, I met with two of its members, Carlos Martín Beristain and
Ángela María Buitrago, at a café in Mexico City. Beristain, a
physician, has worked with trauma victims for human-rights commissions
throughout Latin America. Buitrago, a Colombian prosecutor, put a
number of generals responsible for monstrous human-rights violations
in prison. The pair remembered the moment they first visited the
Ayotzinapa campus. “Even before we entered the school grounds, there
were people waiting to escort us in,” Buitrago said. “Parents,
students, the school’s marching band. They placed one garland of
flowers after another around our necks.” She added, “Every one of
the parents who welcomed us repeated the same thing: the one thing
they asked of us, they said, was to always tell them the truth—not
to lie and not to sell out. I’m a lawyer, I believe in institutions.
But when I heard that phrase, ‘Don’t lie, don’t sell out,’
repeated so many times, I thought this had to be the ultimate
expression of a citizenry that no longer believed in anything at
all.”

Soon, the _giei_ members were learning the Mexican lesson. At the
café, Beristain and Buitrago chuckled as they recalled officials from
the prosecutor’s office giving a presentation and saying things like
“You will never see a more complete investigation than the one we
have carried out.” The _giei_ members’ efforts were impeded at
every turn. For months, they were blocked from obtaining copies of
hundreds of documents. Salvador Cienfuegos, the Secretary of National
Defense, refused to let them question anyone from one of Iguala’s
military battalions. “I will not permit soldiers to be treated like
criminals,” he told the press. It was almost fun to
watch _giei_ press conferences, because Buitrago called out the
government’s lies in a way that is all but unheard of in Mexico’s
institutional discourse. “We were given statements signed by
personnel from the general prosecutor’s office that were false,”
she declared at one point. “There were investigative proceedings in
which all the information was tampered with.”

The _giei_ was forced to spend much of its twelve-month mandate
proving that the government’s account of events was untrue. “They
told us with a straight face that the Guerreros Unidos had incinerated
forty-three corpses with five gallons of fuel,” Buitrago said.
Beristain added, “They took us to the site and showed us a tree from
which two branches of very green wood had recently been cut,”
claiming that the branches had also fed the fire. By the end of its
first year, the _giei_ had issued two reports totalling a thousand
pages, both largely devoted to demonstrating why the “historic
truth” version of events was impossible. The group’s contract was
not renewed, and a farewell ceremony was held in an auditorium in
Mexico City. “One man stood up and shouted, ‘Don’t
leave!,’ ” Beristain said. “And then another stood up, and then
they were all chanting, ‘_No-se-va-yan!_’ Don’t leave us! We
nearly died then, all of us.”

In 2018, Andrés Manuel López Obrador became the first independent
candidate to be elected President in more than seventy years, and he
promised to clean up the mess of his predecessor. He created the
Presidential Commission for Truth and Access to Justice in the
Ayotzinapa Case, headed by Alejandro Encinas, an old ally of his and a
former mayor of Mexico City. A young, obsessive lawyer named Omar
Gómez Trejo, who had been working on the case at the U.N. and with
the _giei_, was chosen to head a new special investigative unit. At
the parents’ insistence, López Obrador agreed to bring back
the _giei_. It was a moment of optimism. “You had the attorney
general’s office, the President, the _giei_, the Inter-American
Commission on Human Rights, the United Nations, and, principally, the
families’ legal representatives, all working to obtain the truth, to
insure that justice was done, to know what happened to the boys,”
Gómez Trejo told me. Beristain said, “I was confident that this
time we were going to be able to do it.”

Last year, I was surprised to find myself in possession of a
confidential and valuable document: the more-than-six-hundred-page
court filing presented before a judge in August of 2022 by Gómez
Trejo’s team. It was the result of the two years that he, along with
the _giei_, had spent digging through files and interviewing hundreds
of suspects, survivors, government officials, bystanders, and
relatives of the disappeared. Thanks to the intricacies of the Mexican
legal system, the document is all but incomprehensible at first read.
But, beneath the legalese, it’s packed with information,
particularly regarding the drug-trafficking organization involved in
the disappearances: the Guerreros Unidos.

The G.U. was born because a major drug boss, Arturo Beltrán Leyva,
was shot and killed by Mexican marines, in 2009. As generally happens,
Beltrán Leyva’s underlings split into several small clans. One of
these called itself los Rojos (“the Reds”), and established itself
in Guerrero state, near the Ayotzinapa campus. The Rojos ran a nice
little business, moving drugs like heroin into the United States.
Another set of people, two of them brothers who, according to a story
in the Chicago _Sun-Times_, had in the past delivered pizzas for a
Chicago restaurant called Mama Luna’s, formed a breakaway group
called the Guerreros Unidos. By 2012, the pizza boys and their
colleagues had set up shop in places including Iguala, a town equipped
with a bus terminal big enough that unusual activity might go
unnoticed, but not so large that it would call attention to itself.
This was key to the group’s success, because its specialty was
fitting secret compartments in passenger buses, such as those
travelling from Iguala to Chicago. The compartments would be stuffed
with drugs and the buses loaded with passengers. In Chicago, the bus
would be met by an associate, named Pablo Vega, who had grown up in a
nearby suburb and worked in local factories. He and others would
unload and distribute the merchandise, replace the product with cash,
and send the bus back to Iguala. (Vega did not respond to a request
for comment, but he has pleaded guilty to drug-conspiracy charges.)

In 2022, Gómez Trejo gained access to some twenty-three thousand
BlackBerry text messages collected by the D.E.A. from Vega’s phone
and those of his associates. The texts, which were first reported in
the Mexican press, and later in English by the _Times_, make
stupefyingly boring reading on first pass; they consist mostly of
terse instructions about where to park the “aunt”—the bus—and
how many “vases” to deliver. But a picture eventually emerges of
an inept bunch. On one shipment, the loaded bus crashes, “because it
was raining.” Someone leaves a loaded pickup illegally parked, and
they can’t get it back, because the driver is nabbed by immigration.
A key collaborator vanishes, and days go by while the group makes a
lame attempt to find him. (“What’s his name?” “I just know him
as el Cuate.”) Vega’s wife harangues him constantly, and, when she
does, he messages a girlfriend and asks for a ‘_foto sexi_.’ A
shipment succeeds and tens of thousands of dollars get distributed,
but less than three months later the water is cut off at Vega’s
home, because he can’t pay the bill. His sister-in-law, the widow of
the presumably height-challenged G.U. founder known as el Minicooper,
mopes about, complaining that she’s always the last to be taken into
account. Someone announces that he’s selling tennis shoes to make
ends meet. Worst of all, the group’s members, who are supposed to be
united by mystical links of shared lineage, constantly suspect one
another of treason. (A lawyer who has represented members of the group
did not respond to a request for comment.)

Perhaps because the competition wasn’t that bright, either, the
Guerreros Unidos eventually managed to consolidate its fledgling
operation, and even imbue it with a sort of mystique. As “Juan,” a
G.U. member who eventually turned state’s witness, explained to
investigators in a sworn deposition, “The purpose of every person
who belongs to the organization” is “to send drugs to Chicago, and
to keep watch and do what is necessary. . . . That is why there
should be support by public officials like police officers at every
level.”(Juan could not be reached for comment.) The G.U. often
cleaned its cash through real-estate deals and other traditional
money-laundering methods. The clan saw to it that another associate,
Francisco Salgado Valladares—a pig-eyed man in charge of a ferocious
group of Iguala police known as los Bélicos—was appointed
vice-chief of the force. (Salgado Valladares is currently a fugitive
from the law, and could not be reached for comment.)

The group brought in others: a butcher here, a car-wash operator
there, in addition to dozens of gofers, petty drug peddlers, and
lookouts who kept an eye on the whereabouts of every resident,
visitor, and passerby in the G.U.’s areas of control. Their bosses
wanted reports, particularly on military movements—long sequences of
the twenty-three thousand messages are devoted to minute-by-minute
descriptions of the exact whereabouts of the Army’s daily patrol
units—and, above all, of any sign of the presence of rival groups,
referred to as “contras.” (Unfamiliar cars entering the group’s
territory were stopped and searched for signs of the enemy.) Pursued
by fear of their rivals, the G.U. killed senselessly, adding by the
month to Guerrero’s very high body count. The clan soon had police
and military officers in its pay. The BlackBerry messages include
boasts that a member called el Güero Mugres—Filthy Blondie,
roughly—has the military “in the bag,” and that the group has
established friendly relations with a certain Captain Crespo. Someone
crows that he has acquired other military contacts (“_putos_,” he
calls them) and complains about how much money they are demanding.
When Gómez Trejo read these texts at the D.E.A.’s Chicago office
during the several days he spent on the task, he was euphoric. They
were, he told me, “objective and resounding proof tying an authority
of the state to organized crime—not a declaration by a witness but
objective, verifiable proof.”

It remains unclear why the Guerreros Unidos would carry out an attack
on a hundred unarmed students. Perhaps, as the _giei_ came to
believe, one of the three buses that the students took from the
station was loaded with product. Another theory—there are
many—holds that the G.U. was convinced the Ayotzis had been
infiltrated by the Rojos, and there is some evidence to support that
this was their motivation. The G.U. had been fighting with the Rojos
the week before, and perhaps it expected an attack. The day after the
Iguala attack, one G.U. member texted another, “The contras came all
mixed up with the Ayotzinapas, and shit came dooown!” A massacre on
defenseless youths carried out by paranoid, incompetent, and
bloodthirsty goons: that makes sense.

Shortly after nine o’clock on the night of September 26, 2014,
Ayotzinapa students on five buses—the two they had arrived in and
the three they had commandeered in Iguala—were heading home when
they noticed police following them. The buses split up as their
terrified drivers tried to turn onto narrow downtown streets that led
back to the highway, but police cars managed to stop most of them.
When patrols tried blocking their way, students threw rocks at them
and the officers drove off, firing warning shots. A student whom
I’ll call Luis told me, “I got scared, but then I thought, Well,
they’re leaving, they’ve left. But when I turned around, I saw
that there were more police, and they were shooting directly at us.”

Eventually, three of the buses arrived at an intersection with the
ring road that surrounds Iguala. Luis and several other students,
including a boy named Aldo Gutiérrez Solano, tried to move a police
car that was blocking the road, but the steering wheel was locked.
Gutiérrez suddenly fell to the ground. Luis remembers looking dumbly
at the red-hot spent casings all around him, and thinking at first
that they were fireworks. Then he saw blood pooling under
Gutiérrez’s head. “He’s dying!” students yelled, asking the
police to help, still not grasping the situation. (Gutiérrez fell
into a coma and remains in a vegetative state.) A student somewhere
screamed, bleeding from a bullet wound to the hand. Another, called
Pulmón—Lung—was in the throes of a severe panic attack, unable to
breathe. Luis hid between two of the buses as the police fired on a
third. “We saw how they started bringing the compañeros down from
the bus, hands behind their necks,” he said. “I counted twelve or
fifteen of them.” A half-dozen police pickups had moved into place
behind that bus, lights flashing. Officers forced the students to lie
face down on the sidewalk, Luis said, then loaded them in the backs of
their pickups. He would never see his classmates again.

The students travelling in the other two buses were stopped by the
Iguala Palace of Justice, beyond the ring road. Police attacked one of
the buses, shooting tear gas through the windows to force students
out. An anonymous witness cited in the court filing saw policemen tear
switches off nearby trees and hit students with them as they staggered
off the bus. These students were handcuffed and loaded onto pickups,
some of them belonging to police officers from nearby Huitzuco.
Members of the federal police stood by as the scene unfolded. An
intelligence agent from one of the nearby battalions pulled up on a
motorbike, took a few photos on his cell phone, and went back to
inform his superiors. The military also had other ways of staying
abreast of the situation. Troops were constantly monitoring the
statewide surveillance system, which included footage from security
cameras throughout Iguala. The Army had at least one soldier acting as
an informant, who had infiltrated the student body and was with the
group that disappeared. It may also have been monitoring the cell
phones of several members of the G.U., using the surveillance software
Pegasus. But no one in the military intervened. This is the part that
guts Gómez Trejo. “If they knew, why didn’t they save those
boys?” he asks himself to this day.

Two busloads of students were about to vanish forever, and yet the
violence was far from over. On a road out of Iguala, members of the
Guerreros Unidos and the police, some from Huitzuco, mistakenly
attacked a bus carrying a junior-league soccer team, from
Chilpancingo, which was heading home to celebrate a victory. Before
the attackers realized that there were no Ayotzis on the bus, they
shot and killed the driver, a fifteen-year-old player, and a woman in
a passing taxi. Around the same time, a group of Ayotzis raced to
Iguala from the campus and from Chilpancingo to see what was happening
to their schoolmates. They were holding an impromptu street-corner
press conference when several vehicles arrived, and armed men dressed
in black jumped out and opened fire on them. The shots were registered
on a reporter’s audio. Two students lay on the ground, dead. Another
victim, a first-year Ayotzi named Julio César Mondragón, was found
the next morning, lying dead outside a soccer field, according to
officials. Like other students trapped in Iguala, he had texted his
family an ongoing account of the night. His last message to his
partner was a farewell: “Take care of yourself and of my daughter,
tell her that I love her, bye.” He had been severely beaten, and had
multiple broken bones. Much of his face was missing.

Patrol cars roamed the streets in the predawn silence of Saturday the
twenty-seventh. From a rooftop where he had found safety, Luis heard
them whistle, calling out to the remaining Ayotzis. (_We know you’re
hiding!_) One panicky group scrambled to get medical care for a
schoolmate who had been shot through the jaw. Eventually, they found
themselves inside a small clinic, and begged the staff for help, but
didn’t get any. The young men cowered in the waiting room and on the
upper floors, terrified that their attackers might find them. Instead,
sometime after midnight, military vehicles arrived, and a cluster of
soldiers muscled their way in, fanned out, and pointed machine guns at
the students. They were led by an imposing man in uniform, José
Martínez Crespo, who is currently in military prison, accused of
collaboration with the G.U. Some students thought the soldiers were
there to help. “I felt joyful when I saw them,” one student—part
of a group of more than twenty who agreed to testify
anonymously—told investigators.

But Crespo ordered photographs taken of the scene—twenty-five
despondent, exhausted young men staring at the floor. According to one
student’s testimony, he made some of them strip to the waist and
ordered a soldier to write down everyone’s name. “Make sure you
give the real ones,” Crespo said. “Otherwise, they’ll never find
you later.” Others recalled him saying, “You sons of bitches, you
think you are so tough. Now you are faced with a real motherfucker.
Let’s see how tough you really are.” (Crespo’s lawyer said that
he is innocent of any wrongdoing. Members of the military, including
Crespo, denied in their depositions that they held the students at
gunpoint or recorded their names.) It remains unclear what Crespo’s
intentions were. But at last he left with the other soldiers, saying
that he was off “to see about some corpses nearby,” most likely
the two students killed during the press conference. The students in
the clinic managed to flee, and survived the night.

By midnight, forty-three Ayotzis were in the hands of local police
forces. There is one last glimpse of them before we lose sight of them
forever. A driver from one of the commandeered buses told
investigators that he saw a number of the students at a local police
facility, lying prone on the floor. Another witness, who happened to
walk into the facility the following morning, testified that he saw a
photograph of the students on a screen, and heard a magistrate on duty
(a position like that of a hoosegow sheriff) joking about how the
Ayotzis had been roughed up, and boasting that he himself had beaten
them during their interrogation. (The magistrate, who was granted
asylum in the U.S. in 2020, has denied that the students were brought
there that night, and declined to comment for this piece.)

Investigators pulled this account together slowly in the course of
years, cross-checking hundreds of interviews with survivors,
eyewitnesses, and participants in the events. But the answer to a key
question sought by the students’ parents—what happened to their
children after they were last seen that night long ago?—remains
elusive: of those seven or eight missing hours, only fragments can be
pieced together and the story behind them guessed at. Various
documents, including text messages and testimony in the court filing,
indicate that the police forces of Iguala, Huitzuco, and another
neighboring town, Cocula, distributed the students among various
members of the Guerreros Unidos. (The Iguala and Huitzuco police
departments did not respond to requests for comment. The Cocula
department could not be reached.) A document released by the Mexican
Defense Ministry, which investigators were unable to corroborate,
shows a text exchange between two people whom the ministry identified
as an Iguala police official and a leader of the Guerreros Unidos.
“There are twenty-one people inside the bus that’s leaving,” the
policeman says, and the leader replies, “Yes, hand me all the
detainees.” By this time, some of the students may already have been
dead from injuries sustained during their beatings. The survivors
could talk and create problems. What should be done with them?

Some investigators believe that the decision to kill the students was
made before dawn, when members of the Cocula police visited the house
of one of the G.U.’s leaders for several hours—the only encounter
that night between officers and the group which has been corroborated.
Others believe that the plan was already under way by then. According
to Juan, the G.U. member who turned state’s witness, the order they
received from above was “_pártanles su madre_,” which can be
translated either as “beat the shit” out of the students or, given
the context, “do away” with them. What Juan claims—and this is a
ghastly thing to have to write—is that some of the students were
killed, sometime in the early hours of September 27th, and cut into
pieces. (Why not just shot, one wonders. Why not that small mercy?)
When investigators inspected the safe house where they were taken,
they found incisions on the floor that seemed to have been made by
axes or machetes, and that were consistent with Juan’s testimony.
One man, a lowly gofer, testified that he and others were instructed
to get cleaning supplies and pick up the mutilated corpses, which were
stuffed into plastic garbage bags.

According to these statements, the students’ remains were taken to
local funeral homes to be cremated. Juan told investigators that it
took several days to insure that the remains were cremated thoroughly
enough that no one would be able to identify them. Other remains, he
has said, were never cremated, and were disposed of in the surrounding
area. Some students may have been kept alive longer, or done away with
differently. But Juan, a participant in some fashion in the events of
that evening, is not the most reliable witness, and investigators have
been unable to fully confirm his account. What is true is that the
G.U. seems to have been at pains to make the students truly disappear.
“We didn’t think that this business would be so _mediático_,”
Juan said, irritated by the publicity.

Eight years later, on August 18, 2022, the families of the Ayotzis
gathered for a meeting with the President. López Obrador had met
with them multiple times before. He was always courteous and friendly,
sitting with them to hear their suggestions and concerns about the
investigation. But María Luisa Aguilar Rodríguez, from Centro
Prodh, told me that when they walked into the room she knew something
was wrong. The President spoke at a podium flanked by a good part of
his cabinet, including his attorney general and the defense
minister—figures the parents distrusted. Encinas, the families’
onetime ally, read what he described as the government’s
“conclusions.” The investigators—Gómez Trejo, the _giei_, the
Argentines—and the parents and their representatives have said that
they were not advised of the contents of the report.
Encinas denounced police and military participation in the events.
For the first time, he defined what happened in Iguala as a “crime
of the state”—an important acknowledgment by a Mexican
administration. But he also presented unverified information that
seemed to hark back to the “historic truth,” such as a series of
WhatsApp messages sent by local officials and members of the Guerreros
Unidos, which emphasized the role of the mayor and included graphic
descriptions of what had allegedly happened to the students. (Encinas
said that he had informed investigators of the report the day before,
and denied pushing the “historic truth.”) López Obrador did not
take any questions. “The families were utterly undone,” Aguilar
said. “The mothers were distraught. Men who do not allow themselves
to cry in public were weeping.”

Up to that moment, it had seemed that justice was within reach. As the
meeting with the President was starting, Gómez Trejo’s team was
requesting warrants for the arrest of eighty-three participants in the
events. Among them were G.U. members; soldiers; police officers; the
magistrate at the Iguala police facility; a judge in Chilpancingo who
was accused of facilitating the destruction of state surveillance
footage from the night of the event; the state attorney general at the
time, Iñaki Blanco; José Martínez Crespo; and the commanders of the
two Iguala battalions. (A lawyer representing the commanders of the
military battalions said that they are innocent.) Gómez Trejo left
immediately for Israel, in an effort to obtain the extradition of the
former attorney general Murillo’s chief of criminal investigations.
He returned to a different world. His investigators had been sent away
for “retraining.” A team of auditors took possession of every file
in his office. He was told that he would not be allowed to open any
new lines of investigation. And, at the request of the attorney
general’s office, the same judge who had authorized the arrest
warrants days earlier now rescinded twenty-one of them, including the
ones for the state attorney general and the judge in Chilpancingo. A
few days later, Gómez Trejo resigned, and his security detail was
removed. Later, I learned that, as Gómez Trejo weighed his
resignation, a high-ranking official took him aside, draped an arm
confidentially over his shoulder, and said that Gómez Trejo had
really managed to piss off the President. López Obrador
had negotiated the arrest of five military members with the high
command of the armed forces, the official told Gómez Trejo, but he
had issued orders for twenty. (The attorney general’s office
declined to comment. López Obrador did not respond to a request for
comment.)

It was a startling indication of the power of the Mexican military.
Under López Obrador, the Army has been given control of the
construction and administration of airports, roads, railroad lines,
customs offices, and tourist agencies, to name only a few of its
powers. In 2020, General Salvador Cienfuegos, who had tried to stop
the _giei_ investigators from interviewing members of the military,
was arrested in the Los Angeles airport on charges that, as Secretary
of National Defense, he had helped the H-2 drug clan with its
operations trafficking cocaine and methamphetamine. (Cienfuegos did
not respond to a request for comment, but his lawyer has issued a
statement saying that he is innocent.) The arrest created a diplomatic
standoff. President López Obrador reportedly threatened to suspend
the D.E.A.’s operations in Mexico, although he later denied having
done so, and U.S. prosecutors were forced to return Cienfuegos to
Mexico, where he walked off the plane a free man. “We view this not
as an act of impunity, but of respect towards Mexico and our armed
forces,” Marcelo Ebrard, Mexico’s then Foreign Secretary, said.
Two months later, Mexican justice officials declared that there was no
evidence that the General had any relationship with the H-2 group. In
October, President López Obrador gave him a medal.

Gómez Trejo moved to the U.S. with his wife and child, fearing for
his family’s safety. When I had lunch with him in New York recently,
he looked rested—not as haggard as when he first moved here. He’s
working as an international consultant on human-rights issues. Two
members of the _giei_, feeling that they would be legitimizing fraud
if they stayed, also stepped down and left the country. The remaining
two, Buitrago and Beristain, held a press conference this past July,
demanding answers, then resigned a few days later. The President
appointed a new special investigator, who quietly reinstated several
of the twenty-one arrest orders that had been revoked. There is now a
sense that, for all practical purposes, the investigation into the
disappearance of the Forty-three has come to an end.

One recent afternoon, I spoke with Santiago Aguirre Espinosa, a member
of the parents’ legal team, who, along with his colleague Aguilar,
spent years in Guerrero at the Centro Tlachinollan. They are both
perpetually cheerful and extremely slender, possibly because they seem
always to be racing from one appointment to another. I asked what
Aguirre made of the last nine years of effort. “From the point of
view of the families, their main objective was to find their sons, and
that was not achieved,” he replied. “They are angry and sad, and
some of them have doubts as to whether their fight was worth it.”
For his part, Beristain, who has now returned to his home in Spain,
lamented that the extent of the military’s involvement in the saga
remains unclear. There are hundreds of pages of military records that
are still missing, he said—pages the _giei_ believes can shed
light on what exactly happened to the students, and why two
administrations have felt the need to cover it up.

These days, the President has taken to denouncing Centro Prodh and
Centro Tlachinollan’s Vidulfo Rosales at his daily press
conferences. Encinas’s phone, and those of several human-rights
defenders, have been infiltrated by Pegasus. As his six-year term in
office draws to a close, the President’s relations with his
perceived adversaries grow more fraught. Recently,
the _Times_ reported on a now closed investigation into the drug
trade’s possible dealings with close associates of the President,
and he lashed out at the paper’s Mexico City bureau chief, reading
her name and phone number out loud during his morning press conference
two weeks ago. This may be illegal, but “I would do it again,” he
said the next day: the President’s “moral authority is above the
law.” In an exceedingly rare interview—two hours with a Russian
journalist from a minor Spanish cable channel—he recognized that
Ayotzinapa remains a pending assignment. “There is still time,” he
affirmed. “The most important thing is to find them.”

Six years after the massacre, Clemente Rodríguez and his wife, Luz
María Telumbre, received a visit at their home in Tixtla from Gómez
Trejo, Encinas, and two members of Centro Prodh. The group was there
to tell them about a two-inch fragment of bone that Gómez Trejo’s
team had found in a dry gully. The Argentine team had certified that
the DNA recovered from the fragment belonged to Christian Rodríguez
Telumbre, one of only three positive identifications that have been
made in all this time. “We tried to bring some dignity and a sense
of ceremony to the event,” Gómez Trejo told me, of the visit. But
it was hopeless trying to replace a twenty-year-old who skipped gaily
around his parents’ house, practicing steps from the folklore dances
he was crazy about, with a broken bit of bone. When I met Doña Luz
María in Mexico City last spring, at the start of one of the
parents’ marches, I asked her about this moment. She is a beautiful
woman with an easy, affectionate manner, but there was no hiding the
paper-slicing edge in her voice when she answered. “I said thank
you,” she told me, “and I asked what part of the body
this _huesito_”—little bone—“was from.” She was informed
that it was part of Christian’s right foot. “But I’ve seen
people who lost a foot and are still alive,” she said, not raising
her voice. “I am not satisfied. I want my son.”

It was Day of the Dead in Mexico City when I ran into Don Clemente,
later that year. I asked if he was going to place a picture of his son
on the family altar in Tixtla that night. There was a long silence
before he finally said, “I can’t.” He was in town to give a talk
at a local school, and as usual he had brought some of his friends’
and family’s handicrafts to put out for sale. He used to sell
five-gallon jugs of drinking water for a living, but the constant
travelling to agitate for his son’s return has ruined the
family’s livelihood, and they now made money weaving straw, or
embroidering textiles, and selling these crafts during events and
marches. Don Clemente has a sidelong sense of humor, but I watched
his face crumple as he tried to find words to explain his son’s
absence on the altar. “I don’t have a body to mourn,” he said.
“I don’t know the place where he is. I have nothing to hold that
is him.” The hope that their children would be returned to them
alive was at the center of the parents’ movement. It was the
motivation that kept them going through years of doubt, and fear, and
struggle, away from their families and their fields. _Alive they were
taken away. We want them returned alive_. What parent wants to kill
his own child in his heart? Don Tanis gently corrected me when I
referred to his son in the past tense.

Recently, I drove back to Guerrero along the same long highway that
had taken me to Don Tanis’s home, but this time I stopped in Tixtla,
to talk to Rafael López Catarino, or Don Rafa, whose son, Julio
César López Patolzin, was the Army informant who was disappeared
along with the other students. Unavoidably, his father became
something of a pariah among the other families once his son’s role
in the school was made public, and it seemed to me an unusually cruel
fate to lose a son and be unable to seek the comfort that the other
parents obviously find in one another’s company.

Don Rafa, curmudgeonly and limping, took me around the land his son
can no longer help him farm. He showed me a picture of Julio César at
his high-school graduation, a boy stiffly uncomfortable in his formal
shirt and vest, holding a diploma. He handed me a sheet of paper with
the heading “Life Project” at the top of a list his son had
written, in careful block letters in bright-blue ink. “I would like
to travel around the country learning different things and meeting new
people,” it began. Farther down, he wrote that he would like to
study at Ayotzinapa so that he could become a physical-education
teacher. He also wanted to join the military, and to study to become
an Army doctor. And he wanted to earn money, “so that I can help my
parents the way they have helped me.” In the end, Julio César did
join the Army. He spent some of his time patrolling the mountainous
region of Guerrero. Eventually, his father said, Julio César was
injured and could no longer go out on patrol. He told his father that
he wanted to leave the Army and study, but it must have been hard to
give up the salary of a foot soldier. One can imagine his commander
zeroing in at that point to offer him a deal: _Go to Ayotzinapa if
you want, and keep your salary. But help us._ He must have protested
at the unfairness of his fate before he was taken away.

Don Rafa is a gruff man, but he insisted on riding back on the road to
Chilpancingo with me so that I wouldn’t get lost. There was a new
crop of Ayotzis at the toll booth, exacting fares for “the
revolution.” The G.U. was diminished, as were the Rojos, and rival
groups had eclipsed them. In Chilpancingo, a new mayor had been filmed
having breakfast at a restaurant with a drug boss. (The mayor did not
respond to a request for comment. She has denied that any deal was
made at the meeting.) Don Rafa generally struck me as a harsh realist,
but he told me that Julio César’s godmother, recently deceased, had
come to his daughter in a dream. “She had looked for Julio César
everywhere on the other side,” Don Rafa told me, “and found no
sign of him. She said we should keep looking for him in this world.”
Still, he seemed to be in deep mourning. “I used to tuck him in at
night when he was a baby and watch him sleep,” he said. “What a
thing, huh?” he added, as he got out of the car. “We care for and
nurture our children so that the government can rip them away from
us.”  

_[ALMA GUILLERMOPRIETO, who first contributed to the magazine in 1989,
has written about Latin America for more than forty years. She has
published four books.]_

_Published in the print edition of the March 11, 2024
[[link removed]], issue, with the
headline “The Forty-three.”_

* Mexico
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* Mexican students
[[link removed]]
* 43 Mexican students murdered
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* Ayotzinapa
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* Andrés Manuel López Obrador
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* AMLO
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* Enrique Peña Nieto
[[link removed]]
* Mexico'sDrug Cartel
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* Mexican army
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* Mexican police
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