THE WEEKLY REVEAL

Hello! In this issue:

• Seeking accountability and justice in Mexico’s Ayotzinapa kidnapping case

• Who’s getting rich from student debt? 

• A new rule takes aim at ghost guns

BIG NEWS

The Ayotzinapa Mass Disappearance Was ‘Crime of the State’ Involving Every Layer of Government

In 2014, students from a rural college in Mexico came under attack by police. Six people were killed and 43 young men disappeared without a trace. Families suspected the government was hiding the truth. Reveal’s series After Ayotzinapa exposed corruption at the highest levels. Now, some of those government officials are being charged with crimes.  

Mexico’s former Attorney General Jesus Murillo Karam was arrested last week and is heading to trial for his alleged role in the disappearance of the students. A Mexican court issued 83 warrants for people involved in the disappearances, including dozens of members of the military and police. 

For years, lawyers, human rights experts and the families of the disappeared students all suspected that the Mexican government was involved in kidnapping the 43 students. Officials denied these claims. Year after year, the families of the victims rejected the government’s fake findings and demanded the truth of what happened. An official inquiry released last week validates the families’ anger, finding that the case is a “crime of the state” involving every layer of government: “At all times the federal, state and municipal authorities had knowledge of the students’ movement. … Their actions, omissions and participation allowed for the disappearance and execution of the students, as well as the murder of six other people.” 

As reporting from Reveal senior reporter and producer Anayansi Diaz-Cortes and National Security Archive analyst Kate Doyle showed, government officials went so far as to plant fake evidence and coerce witnesses to create a false narrative of the crime. After Mexico’s special prosecutor saw Reveal’s reporting on the connection between the students’ disappearance and a heroin trafficking operation in the suburbs of Chicago, it has become a major line of inquiry in the criminal investigation.

THIS WEEK'S PODCAST

American Rehab: Venomous Snake

We’re rebroadcasting the first three episodes of our award-winning series American Rehab, which investigates how treatment for drug addiction has turned tens of thousands of people into an unpaid shadow workforce.  

This week, in the second episode, we go back in time to the 1960s, when the group Synanon was a widely respected drug rehab that had intake centers and commune-style rehabs all over the country. It turned members into unpaid workers who hustled donations and ran Synanon businesses. As the money poured in, Synanon’s founder, Charles Dederich, transitioned the group from a rehab into an “experimental society.”  

Dederich instituted a series of increasingly authoritarian rules on members: He banned sugar, dissolved marriages, separated children from their parents and forced vasectomies. Synanon ultimately became a religion, with Dederich as its violent and vengeful leader.

FEATURED STORY

Who Got Rich Off the Student Debt Crisis?

The more than 45 million Americans with student loan debt got good news this week, as President Joe Biden announced the government would forgive $10,000 in federal student debt – and up to $20,000 for low-income students who received Pell Grants. In 2016, Reveal reported on how both Wall Street and the government profit off student debt. James B. Steele and Lance Williams wrote:  

Decades ago, the federal government relinquished direct control of the student loan program, opening its bank to corporations concerned with profits, not diplomas. Private equity companies and Wall Street banks seized on the flow of federal loan dollars by peddling loans that students sometimes could not afford and then collecting fees from the government to hound those students when they defaulted.

Once in place, the privatized student loan industry has succeeded largely in preserving its status in Washington. Student loans are virtually the only consumer debt that cannot be discharged in bankruptcy except in the rarest of cases – one of the industry’s greatest lobbying triumphs.

At the same time, societal changes conspired to drive up the basic need for these loans: Middle-class incomes stagnated, college costs soared and states retreated from their historical investment in public universities.

If states had continued to support public higher education at the rate they had in 1980, they would have invested at least an additional $500 billion in their university systems.

🎧 Listen to the episode: Who’s Getting Rich Off Your Student Debt?

In the News

🔷 A new rule cracks down on ghost guns. Gun dealers have been selling kits with all the parts needed to build your own gun – a dangerous DIY approach that made the guns untraceable. A new Biden administration rule went into effect this week that categorizes the kits used to build these so-called ghost guns under the same legal standing as traditional firearms. That means companies that sell firearm kits must add serial numbers to their parts, keep records of their sales and run background checks on prospective buyers. A recent Reveal episode, Shooting in the Dark: Why Gun Reform Keeps Failing, exposed how ghost guns and new technologies are making guns more lethal.  

🔷  The nation’s first-ever fee on a greenhouse gas could target methane. One part of the suite of environmental policies passed in the Inflation Reduction Act is a fee on methane emissions that’s slated to start in 2024. In a 2021 Reveal episode, Emission Control, reporter Elizabeth Shogren explored how reducing methane emissions is key to slowing climate change. Methane traps 90 times more heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide, meaning it plays a huge role in the warming of the planet. The new policy imposes a $900 fee per metric ton of methane starting in 2024. The fee will affect only larger oil and gas facilities.

A Number to Remember

That’s the number of people who have left Ukraine since Russia invaded the country six months ago. This week, Ukrainians celebrated their Independence Day trepedatiously, fearing Russian airstrikes targeting civilians. Our episode in March, “To Shoot and Fight for My Home,” spotlighted everyday life for journalists and other civilians in Ukraine.