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Hi Revealer,
In 2014, students from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College in Mexico were riding in a caravan of buses when police pulled them over and started shooting. When they were finished, six people were dead and 43 others – all young men – were taken and never seen again.
The case shook Mexico.
The government promised to investigate the crime and deliver justice, but from the beginning families of the missing young men suspected it was instead hiding the truth. The students became symbols of the country’s unchecked human rights abuses. In recent decades, tens of thousands of people have gone missing in Mexico, and almost no one has been held accountable.
Years after the attack, the investigation had stalled and the Ayotzinapa case remained an open wound for the people of Mexico. Reveal’s Anayansi Diaz-Cortes and Kate Doyle from the National Security Archive knew it was a case they had to examine, and that’s how Reveal’s After Ayotzinapa three-part podcast series was born. Anayansi and Kate spent two years connecting the dots in a reporting quest to try and answer their central question: Why did the police attack the Ayotzinapa students?
They reconstructed the night of the attack through never-before-broadcast voices of people who survived it. They gained access to the international experts who had been kicked out of Mexico for investigating the crime and the government cover-up. They cultivated a source who told them the story from the inside, and who eventually became the special prosecutor in a new investigation into the students’ disappearance. And most importantly, they connected with families of the students to understand what their fight for justice against some of the most powerful people in the country has looked like.
The series first aired in January. Since then, Kate and Anayansi stayed on the case, releasing an additional episode this fall that gave listeners updates about arrests and indictments of high-profile members of the military, and even the country’s former attorney general. The series even made it onto the best podcasts of 2022 lists for the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times’ Latinx Files newsletter.
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