I Couldn't Even Imagine That They Would Kill Us

by John Gibler

  CHAPARRO, 20, FRESHMAN. We were in the first bus that left the station. The driver asked us to give him a minute to stop and wait for someone to bring him some documents. He called the person, but they didn’t show up to the place they said they would. He started the bus up again and asked that we give him another five minutes, that the person bringing him the documents was on their way. We were stopped there for maybe fifteen minutes. We were on our way out of town about to go under the overpass they call Santa María, though I’m not sure about that name. About then someone called the compa from the committee who was with us and told him that the municipal police had just killed one of our compañeros. The compa from the committee told the bus driver to turn around and go back quickly to where the attack was happening. The driver sped up, but when we were coming up to the overpass where we could veer off the highway and turn around we heard some compas say that some people were hijacking a bus. That seemed strange. Who was hijacking a bus? But then, coming a bit closer, we saw municipal and federal police trucks and cars. Both the feds and the local police were there. We didn’t know if the people in the bus were our compañeros or someone else. Then two federal police cars pulled up with the cops aiming their guns at us, like they always do, and telling us to drop our rocks. We told them to lower their guns and turn off the flashlights they were shining in our faces. And we started arguing, you know, shouting insults and things like that at the police.

  “Let us go, dickface!”

  “No, you fucking assholes, drop your rocks.”

  “No. Take your fucking bus.”

  And then we turned around and calmly started walking away, back toward the center of Iguala. We walked about a kilometer, and then ran.

  JUAN SALGADO, FRESHMAN. No authorities of any kind arrived to protect the crime scene. No state police arrived. No one whatsoever showed up to cordon off the area. We were the ones who, on our own initiative, were finding and marking the locations of the bullet shells. We put rocks around them, or a cup over them so that no one would move them, treating them like evidence. Some students started taking photos. Since we saw that no one was showing up, we said we’d have to cordon off and protect the area as best we can. After a bit, some reporters started to arrive. The compañeros from the school also arrived. Two Urvans from the school arrived. I don’t know exactly how many compañeros came, but some did show up.

  “What happened? How is everyone?”

  “We’re okay.”

  “And the others?”

  “They took some compañeros.”

  “How many did they take?”

  “Between fifteen and seventeen. They took them off in their police trucks.”

  “But you guys are okay?”

  “Yes, but two guys are wounded.”

  “And the others who are wounded?”

  “They took them to the hospital.”

  And, well, there we were answering a thousand questions, doing interviews. At that point a junior from the college gave us a cigarette and said: “Have a smoke to calm your nerves, because its obvious you guys are freaked out.” And so we sat down on the curb.

  GERMÁN, 19, FRESHMAN. We were there for a while. People started taking pictures. I think the press showed up, or something like that, I’m not sure. People were taking pictures of the bullet holes, the empty shells, and the blood from the compa who got hit. I was talking to my girlfriend on the phone. I was telling her that it was all over, it was calmer and that the police had left. That’s why I stepped away from the group where everyone had gathered. I told them that I was going to make a call. There were about five or six compas there with me. We were keeping watch over the avenue. I was talking with my girlfriend when I heard that someone was shooting at us again. I didn’t see them, because I was far from them, almost at the other edge of the road, far. I heard the shots. I didn’t turn around to look, but started running and running. I hung up on my girlfriend, because she could hear the shots too. There was a young woman among the people I was running with, a young woman who belonged to some kind of an organization there in Iguala. She knew the city and took us to a house. We hid there. My girlfriend called me but I didn’t answer. I sent her a message that I couldn’t talk because we were hiding in silence, trying not to make any noise.

  “I’m okay,” I wrote to her, “thank God. I’ll call you, don’t worry.”

  JORGE HERNÁNDEZ ESPINOSA, 20, FRESHMAN. We were standing on the street corner, near the buses. I was talking to a compañero, the one whose face they cut off, and he was telling me about everything that had happened, how they took our compañeros and everything. He was really freaked out, really nervous, scared, his voice would break as he spoke, like he was about to cry but, I don’t know, like he was really scared.

  “Nothing happened to you,” I said to him.

  “No. Luckily I was one of the people in the very back of the bus and just hid there when they started shooting at the bus.”

  He had hidden under the seats. So then, all of a sudden, this pickup drives by and takes our picture. Their camera flash went off. I asked Chilango:

  “What’s up with that guy?”

  But we didn’t pay it any further attention. We kept talking and a bit later I went over to the other side of the avenue and saw three men dressed in black, their faces covered, right when they began to shoot. I ran away, down the street, away from them. Chilango was running behind me.

  JUAN RAMÍREZ, 28, FRESHMAN. The police left. I was walking around with a cousin. The press arrived. The reporters started to take photos, take notes on how many bullet shells there were and stuff like that. After this some compañeros bought cigarettes. We all started smoking. I was talking with the guy from Mexico City. But, with what happened later, well, he too . . . no one imagined. . . . He was telling me that the next day he was going to go home because he didn’t want to risk his life. He was thinking about his family, his wife and daughter, and said that they were the most important things to him. All of a sudden I saw a black pickup truck. But I didn’t see the people in it well. They started shooting in the air. And then they started shooting at us, and I forgot about the compa from Mexico City. I ran as fast as I could.

  PEDRO CRUZ MENDOZA, IGUALA-BASED TEACHER, MEMBER OF THE STATE COORDINATION OF EDUCATION WORKERS OF GUERRERO (CETEG). I was in a meeting with other members of the CETEG. Around ten at night I got a message from a compañera. I called her and said:

  “What’s up?”

  “Listen,” she said, “they’ve just attacked the boys from Ayotzinapa. They killed someone! Get the others and come over here.” And, well, since it is kind of common for the government to hurt the compañeros from Ayotzi, we immediately went over there. About twenty of us from the CETEG arrived little by little to help the students from Ayotzinapa. With a compañera we walked around taking pictures and trying to investigate what had happened. We spoke with a young man who told us he had been wounded: a bullet grazed him. We were trying to reconstruct the facts. The bus drivers were very shaken. A woman with a store nearby came out and offered the drivers some tequila, for their nerves.

  “How much do we owe you for the bottle?”

  “Keep the bottle, it’s for you all; you seem really terrified,” she said.

  The drivers each took a shot of tequila. We called some other compañeros and they said that they had called the state detectives and that no one was there, absolutely no one. When we arrived we didn’t see the young man who had been shot in the head, but we did see a pool of blood and a T-shirt. A student there told us that the young man without a shirt on had put his shirt under the wounded guy’s head to keep him from drowning in his own blood. And that was all they could do to help him, put a shirt under his head. Inside the buses we found a bunch of spent bullet casings on the floor and blood all over the seats. And since no detectives had arrived the students surrounded the casings with rocks to mark them.

  “Be careful,” they said, “there are some rocks over there, they’re marking the bullet shells
, please don’t step on them or kick them.”

  Honestly, we were there for about an hour and a half, two hours trying to help the compañeros and waiting for the authorities. We arrived at around ten or ten-fifteen, sometime around then. And yeah, we were easily there for two hours and not a single authority showed up, eh? I asked the compañeros if they had called the press. They told me they had. But the reporters also took a while to arrive. They must have showed up around eleven or twelve that night.

  Some of the reporters know me and came up to me. I was standing with my compañeros from the CETEG talking about what had happened. We were asking ourselves why those fiends had done this to the students. Just then a reporter approached me.

  “Prof Pedro, can you give us any information?”

  “No, I can’t, the students have their political structure and specific people assigned to do that. They’re over there, they’re going to give a press conference.”

  A group of students and teachers from the CETEG were forming a circle near the corner with the Periférico. That’s where we were when we heard. . . . I remember that I heard three shots—bam-bam-bam!—in rapid succession, like from a semi-automatic. And then came the machine-gun bursts. It was a complete strafing. We lost track of some of our compañeras standing by our side at that moment. Who knows which way they ran?

  ANDRÉS HERNÁNDEZ, 21, FRESHMAN. So what I did was run and run. Since I know my way around Iguala, I shouted to my compañeros to follow me. But they were so terrified they split up and ran in all different directions. Before I knew it I was running by myself. I ran and ran—what was it?—about four or five blocks away from the shooters. I saw a taxi and signaled it to stop. I don’t know if the taxi driver had realized what was happening, but he stopped and I got in without a dime in my pocket. I didn’t have anything. I was wearing huaraches.6 I asked him to take me to my aunt’s house. She lives near the bus station for the Estrella Blanca line. The driver was very kind and took me. When we arrived he didn’t charge me anything.

  I was knocking on my aunt’s door for half an hour. They were all asleep. I knocked and knocked; they woke up and let me in. I went inside and sat down. I still couldn’t believe what I had just lived through. They spoke to me, but I don’t know, I couldn’t answer them. I was still in shock.

  JORGE, 20, FRESHMAN. While we were just sitting there, suddenly we saw what looked like flames coming from the street. But they were gunshots. They were shooting at us again. There was a young woman with us where we were sitting. She couldn’t run well, so we helped carry her. We went running down some street. I don’t know what its name is. But in every street corner the compañeros started dispersing. We weren’t all running together. Some went a different way, but we kept going with the young woman. About two blocks farther down the street she directed us to a door and knocked. I don’t know how she knew the woman at that house, but the woman let us in. She hid us there. She took us all into a room to hide. There were about fifteen of us.

  URIEL ALONSO SOLÍS, 19, SOPHOMORE. Sometime around one in the morning on the twenty-seventh, a convoy of unmarked cars arrived: a red truck and some white cars. Men dressed in black, wearing face masks, with bulletproof vests, but without any government insignias on their clothes, got out of the vehicles. They were dressed in all black. By how they fired their weapons, we thought they were soldiers or paramilitaries. We saw some throw themselves down on the ground, others knelt down, and others stayed standing and they all started firing rifles. So we all ran. I got a look at about three of them. They were tall. They weren’t wearing helmets, just vests, gloves, and face masks. They all had short hair like soldiers. And they were tall.

  In that moment we all ran. Run or die. We all ran. The shots lasted a long time. They kept shooting for maybe five or ten minutes. I hid about three blocks from there in a field with three other compañeros. We stayed there. When we had just gotten to the field we heard something like if they had grabbed a compañero. Like a person being beaten, he screamed:

  “Let me go!”

  We said to each other that they must have grabbed a compañero. We saw police trucks drive by. It was a full-on hunt for students that night. Then it started raining. It rained and rained. We were hiding in the brush, in the dark. I called a couple of compañeros to ask how they were.

  “We’re up on a roof,” one told me.

  “We’re in the hillside,” others said.

  “We’re about three blocks away hiding in a woman’s house,” others answered.

  They’d been lucky, the ones hiding in a house. We were really cold, and more than anything, afraid. We thought that if they found us there, they wouldn’t just arrest us; we thought they would kill us. That’s why we were so terrified, so scared.

  RODRIGO MONTES, 32, JOURNALIST FROM IGUALA. I got there at around eleven-thirty. The buses had bullet holes everywhere. You could see that the police had shot at them from all angles. There were bullet holes in the windshields, the windows, the tires, the sides, I mean, everywhere. The third bus, the last one in line, that was where a lot of students had been riding; the others told us that they had felt safer there. And that was where the police had forced them off the bus. There were several pools of blood on that bus. That’s where the police grabbed the majority of the students. They spoke of between twenty-five and thirty students taken from that bus. There were AR-15 and nine-millimeter bullet shells inside the bus.

  There was a period of hours during which nothing happened. No authorities arrived at any point. Nobody. When I got there, around eleven-thirty, no authorities were present. The area hadn’t been cordoned off. There were no soldiers, no detectives, no police, nobody. Absolutely nobody from the government, not a soul. But more students from the college had arrived. There were about fifty people there between students, teachers from the CETEG, and journalists. There were six of us reporters there during the press conference. Precisely when they were finishing the press conference, as the students who had spoken were telling us their names, we heard the gunfire. They were machine-gun bursts: an infinity of gunshots.

  At first we thought they were shooting in the air. But when we starting hearing the projectiles—you can hear it when the bullets pass by you, this whizzing sound—and the car windows shattering, then we all began running toward the buses, down Álvarez street. A compañero and I took cover in the Aurrera parking lot.

  The gunmen were shooting to kill. Imagine the terror and confusion that caused: the screaming, the cries of pain from those who had been wounded. It was chaos. It was really very terrifying. It seemed to go on for fifteen minutes, but no, actually, the shooting lasted three minutes tops. But you feel that time like an eternity. The machine-gun bursts sounded like they came from high-caliber weapons. I left at around one or one-fifteen and no authorities had yet arrived. The gunmen had all the time in the world to do whatever they wanted. No authorities ever showed up.

  GABRIELA NAVALES, 28, JOURNALIST FROM IGUALA. Around eleven-thirty that night I got a call from a teacher named Erika. She said:

  “Hello, this is Erika from the CETEG and I’d like you to attend a press conference at the corner of Álvarez and Periférico about the attack on the Ayotzinapa students.” I told her I’d go. I called another reporter and asked him to check whether it was true or not that there had been a shooting with several people wounded and killed. He looked into it and then told me that yes, it was true, and there was going to be a press conference in a few minutes. I went with my husband and my boss from the newspaper. We arrived and saw an Urvan and a number of cars blocking the road, and then there were the buses. There were three buses in the middle of the street. The buses all had flat tires and bullet holes all over them. The students told us to go on the buses to take photographs to prove what they had suffered at the hands of the municipal police. We went to take the photos. There was blood on the bus, and a student’s ID card. We found rocks of all different sizes. We got off the bus and the students asked us to wait for a few minutes, for mo
re reporters to arrive before beginning the press conference. We waited. There were students standing on both sides of the corner of Álvarez and Periférico keeping watch. They said that more students had arrived from the school to help them.

  We were waiting there for a while. At a few minutes after midnight we saw that the press conference was about to begin. We formed a kind of “U” around the students to be interviewed. One of the students started talking about the attack, saying that it was the municipal police. He started narrating the events. We had been listening for about two minutes when we heard the first shots. People began screaming:

  “Take cover! Get down! They’re shooting!” A number of students on my right side threw themselves to the ground. Others fell. Everyone ran toward the center of town. I stayed standing there, in shock. One of my sandals broke and I stayed right there while everyone ran.

  One of the students screamed to me: “Take cover! Get down!” I didn’t respond. Then one of the students pushed me and threw me to the ground. Everyone was screaming.

  “On the ground! On the ground! Don’t lift your head! On the ground!” I was listening to the screams, the gunshots, and the bursts of machine-gun fire. We all looked at each other down on the ground, confused, not knowing what to do or how to act. We didn’t know who was attacking us nor from which direction the shots were coming.