After Ayotzinapa: The Cover-Up
The second chapter of our three-part investigation into the abduction of 43 Mexican college students, which launches today, digs into the government cover-up of the crime. Weeks after the disappearance, the Mexican government released its official story: Corrupt police had taken the students and handed them to members of a local gang, who killed them. But parents of the students had their doubts. As this latest show reveals, human rights lawyer Omar Gómez Trejo and a group of international experts begin to dismantle the government’s explanation of what happened to the young men.
The show is co-reported by Reveal’s Anayansi Diaz-Cortes and National Security Archive senior analyst Kate Doyle, who has spent the last 30 years investigating human rights violations in Latin America. Since 1992, Doyle has worked with Latin American human rights groups, truth commissions, prosecutors and judges to obtain government files from secret archives that shed light on state violence. I talked with Doyle about what drew her to the Ayotzinapa case—and what she learned from digging into the story.
How did you initially get involved in investigating what happened to the Ayotzinapa 43?
 What initially pulled me into the Ayotzinapa case was that the lawyers who represent the families of the disappeared boys asked if I would assist them and support their investigation. This was in 2017. At that point, the investigation in Mexico had stalled out. The reason why they wanted to pull in the National Security Archive is that they knew there was this U.S. element in the case. The drug trafficking gang in Iguala that participated in kidnapping and taking the boys away was a gang that actually trafficked massive amounts of heroin and cocaine in the American Midwest, through distribution points in Chicago.
How do you feel like working on this show changed your understanding of Mexico and the United States?
I feel that the case exposes the ways in which this shared drug war that Mexico and the United States have both pursued for many, many years seems to promote violence rather than slow it. The drug war seems to exacerbate crime rather than make either country safer. You know, we always look at Mexico and talk about how there are so many deaths in Mexico. It’s true, there have been hundreds of thousands of deaths from the drug war, of people complicit in trafficking and ordinary people who die as “collateral damage.” But hundreds of thousands of people in the United States have also died—from overdoses of opioids. So something about this idea of the drug war is not working.
When you talk about this case with family and friends, what feels like the most important piece of the story to you?
There are two elements of the show that I hope shine through. One is I hope people feel compassion for what's happening in Mexico and for the families themselves. The mothers in the show stand in for so many hundreds of thousands of people in Mexico who are missing people and who are desperate to figure out what happened to their loved ones. The other thing is that despite this terrifying crime, despite the fact that the previous government—under President Peña Nieto—failed to solve this case and, in fact, participated in a cover up of what really happened, despite all that, challenging that level of impunity and injustice is not impossible. You don't need a superman. Omar Gómez Trejo is just a guy. He's a human rights lawyer. He cares deeply about the families, he cares about this case, and he really cares about solving it. He always said to us that the only solution to cracking this wall of impunity and injustice is to use the law. You use the law. When you arrest people, you talk to them and you offer them incentives, and maybe they'll talk to you. If they don't talk to you, well, then you give them a trial, and they go to jail, but you don't torture them. If you find out that there are perpetrators, who were part of the military or the federal police, you arrest them, you don't cover that up, you don't hide that. I hope that we can come away from this knowing that justice isn't some kind of nebulous idea, but it's actually made up of actions and laws.
Listen to the series: After Ayotzinapa
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