by John Gibler
“I’m going to pray for you right now,” my dad said—no, wait, he didn’t say that. He said: “Your mom is going to pray for you,” or something like that, I can’t remember. When I heard my mom’s voice I felt really bad. I felt sad, in all honesty. I wrote a message in my phone. I told my dad to pray for me, to not leave me alone, to take care of my mom, and to tell her that I was going to be okay. I sent that message.
We realized that the ambulance wasn’t coming. The teacher was trying to find a way to get me to the hospital. He had called a number of taxis, but no one was available to pick me up. There we were just waiting. I don’t know what time it was. They said that I was there for about two hours bleeding out. I didn’t notice the time, but I do remember that I left a lot of blood there. I was sitting down and started feeling my body weaken. I got so tired. I wanted badly to go to sleep. I really couldn’t take the tiredness. I started to close my eyes for little bits. Omar would wake me up:
“Hold on, hold on.” He said that the taxi was on its way. I lifted my head and everything seemed blurry and I got really hot. I wanted to take off my jacket, but when I took it off—I did take it off—but when I took it off I started getting cold and I put it back on again and then I felt hot. I felt like I was choking, like I couldn’t get enough air. Then I started to feel really bad and my face started to hurt. It hadn’t hurt me earlier, it just felt hot. After the soldiers had arrived it started hurting and I felt my head like it was heavy. It started hurting and then the pain was getting more and more intense. I don’t know what time it was. Then a taxi arrived. The teacher and Omar got in. I think the taxi driver asked: “What happened to him?” or something like that. The teacher said that we had been in a cantina drinking and someone had hit me in the face with a bottle. I grabbed a towel that was there in the taxi and put it under my mouth to try and not stain the car. I felt like my body was shutting down. I felt tired, really sleepy. I could feel my body trembling.
By the time we arrived at the hospital my vision was all blurry. It was already drizzling. When it started raining I felt cold, really cold. I got to the emergency room. I remember that there were a lot of people there in the emergency room but when a nurse saw me she instantly called a doctor. They sat me on a stretcher. It all happened really fast. They were stitching up my hand—it was cut open—while they started taking off my clothes, all of my clothes. They asked me what had happened. I didn’t answer. In fact, when they were stitching up my hand I already had my eyes closed and I couldn’t hear them very well. Everything sounded distorted, all the voices. They told me to lie down. In the instant that I lay down I went to sleep. From that moment on I lost consciousness, I slept.
My mom says I woke up four days later.
NOTES FROM MY NOTEBOOK OF AN INTERVIEW, CONDUCTED TOGETHER WITH MARCELA TURATI, WITH DOCTOR RICARDO HERRERA, SURGEON AND DIRECTOR OF THE CRISTINA PRIVATE HOSPITAL, IGUALA, GUERRERO, 10 OCTOBER 2014.
Herrera: They took the place over by force. It was all covered in blood. I called the police, but the army came. I didn’t call the army. And when I asked the soldier why the police didn’t come, he told me that the police had orders not to leave their stations.
Turati: Did you attend to the wounded?
Herrera: No.
Turati: Why not?
Herrera: It wasn’t my obligation. If someone arrives nicely, then I attend to him or her. But if people come all aggressive, hitting the place. . . . I called the police, but the army came. The soldiers called an ambulance. But they took the wounded guy off in a taxi. He did not have any gunshot wounds. A bullet grazed his lips. He was walking around and talking like normal.
Turati: He almost died.
Herrera: Of fright, I guess. But he was mixed up in adult things. And that’s what’s going to happen to all those ayotzinapos.
Turati: I hope not.
Herrera: I hope so. Because that school is worthless. They invade property. That is a crime. They leave everything dirty, ugly, and the government has to pay for it, and that bothers me because it drains the government. They are criminals.
Gibler: That is a crime? That seems wrong to you? So, cutting off their faces, taking out their eyes, cutting off their limbs, and incinerating their bodies: that seems right to you?
Herrera: Yes. Truthfully: yes.
SERGIO OCAMPO, 58, JOURNALIST WITH THE AUTONOMOUS UNIVERSITY OF GUERRERO RADIO STATION AND CHILPANCINGO-BASED STAFF WRITER FOR LA JORNADA. The guys from FUNE, the United Front of Teachers College Alumni, called a press conference at eleven-thirty. We arrived where they had set up a protest camp and they told us that one of the students had been killed. The events had just taken place, and the first person killed that they spoke of was the student who is now in a coma. He didn’t die. With a number of colleagues we decided to go to Iguala. We were going to go on our own. When the teachers heard we were going they said:
“Hey, let’s go.”
We decided together with the teachers and the students there, and the other reporters, to all go to Iguala in a caravan. We felt a bit braver since we would be about thirty people. We left in two cars and one bus. I was driving one of the cars. On the road a reporter from another newspaper told me:
“Hey, my editor tells me it’s not safe to go to Iguala.”
“Well,” I said, “precisely because it is not safe to go to Iguala, we need to go and find out what’s happening!” And then we came to Santa Teresa and saw the soccer team’s bus, the Chilpancingo Avispones. The bus was completely destroyed. I saw a referee whom I know.
“I came to look for my son,” he told me. “They called me saying they had all been shot.”
“And you came alone?”
“Yes, I’m here alone.”
“That’s brave. We came in a caravan.”
There was one federal police car there, but otherwise they were completely alone.
We got to Iguala around one-thirty in the morning. As soon as we got near the city, the narco lookouts, the halcones, started following us. The municipal police were out as well. We got stopped at a municipal police checkpoint. A police officer asked me:
“Where are you going?”
“Officer, we heard that something was happening in Iguala.”
“No, nothing’s happening here.”
“Really? Come on, where’s the trouble?”
“Take the boulevard. And who are they?”
“Students.”
We were there at the checkpoint for about twenty minutes, a while. The energy was tense there. Knowing how they operate in total impunity, surely those dudes were there. They covered all the tasks: they were police, they were traffic cops, they were hit men. Or, they are. When we got to the corner of Álvarez and Periférico an army captain began questioning us.
“What are you all doing here?”
“We are reporters.”
“And them?”
“They’re teachers and students. They came to look for their friends.”
When we got there the two boys were lying in the street. No one had even covered them. Right there, well, the boys who came with us starting crying.
LENIN OCAMPO, 33, STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER WITH EL SUR IN CHILPANCINGO. I host a radio program every Friday. It starts at ten at night and goes until one in the morning. On Friday the twenty-sixth, people started posting on social media that there had been a confrontation with the boys from Ayotzi. And a number of guys who graduated from Ayotzi and listen to my radio program started calling me, saying: “Hey, they killed two students,” or, “They killed a student.”
Around eleven that night a guy who was there where it was all happening called me. So the student, on the air, started asking for help, saying that they were alone and they had been attacked. That’s what he said. He said one person was dead and they had taken a number of compañeros and that they were afraid and asking for security from the state government. About twenty minutes after he called in to the radio, they were strafed with machine-gun fire. That was when they killed two
students. And there was a group of reporters there, too. They were in a press conference when an armed group shot at them all. The Iguala-based reporters also got shot at. My editors at the newspaper called me and said:
“What’s the chance that you all could go?”
“I don’t know,” I said, “who is going?”
But we put together a caravan of reporters, eight of us in two trucks. We made plans to meet up at a location on the outskirts of Chilpancingo and head out at around half past midnight. In that lapse of time we also waited for a bus from the school to go in caravan with them as well.
As we were arriving in Zumpango, which is about ten minutes from Chilpancingo, we got a text message from a compañera who was at the press conference telling us that they had just been shot at. After that text we didn’t hear anything more. When we were a bit beyond Zumpango we got another text from the crime beat reporters in Iguala telling us that the Avispones had been attacked. The Avispones are a soccer team from Chilpancingo. The reporters told us that three people had been killed in that attack. We were driving on the highway; there was no police presence. We came to Santa Teresa, the place where the Avispones bus was stopped. The bus had been traveling from Iguala to Chilpancingo and was left half turned over in a ditch. It had a ton of bullet holes all over it; I’d guess about three hundred. There were still some of the soccer players’ parents there, including a referee who was all worried because they couldn’t find some of the players. Right there they also attacked a taxi and killed a woman.
So when we got to Iguala, there was a police checkpoint. It looked like they were waiting for battle. The municipal police were all spread out across the highway. Like they were in battle position. We pulled up and the compañero who was driving rolled down the window. The police officer said:
“Get out.”
“No. We’re not getting out. We’re reporters.”
“No? We don’t give a fuck what you are, get out.”
“We’re not getting out.”
We didn’t get out of the truck, but when the police saw the bus pull up behind us it was like they said, ah, forget about it.
“Are they all with you?”
“Yes. They’re coming with us.”
“What are they?”
“Teachers and students.”
“Those fuckers we are going to make get out.”
So I said to the compañero: “Let’s get out with our cameras.” And so we got out of the truck with our cameras.
“No,” the police all shouted. “No pictures!”
So in the end, they didn’t make everyone on the bus get out. We all went through the checkpoint and drove to the place where the two students had been killed. When we got there the soldiers were there; there were two army trucks there. It was about one-thirty in the morning. One young guy was lying dead there in the road and the other one was back a bit near a workshop. One of the vans that the students had brought was all blown to pieces. There were another three trucks all shot up. And no one was there from the state detectives, the morgue, the police, nothing. When we got there, the first thing the teachers asked the soldiers . . . because a student who I think had been there during the attack came up and said that they didn’t know where some of the compañeros were, that the police had taken them off in their patrol trucks. Thrown in the beds of the trucks. So the teachers started asking the soldiers to start looking for the missing students. Mainly in the place called Barandillas, the city jail, where they take drunks and that kind of thing. Supposedly about forty of the students were there. But the authorities didn’t look for them at the jail until the next day, around ten in the morning I think. We were there for a while and then went to the state courthouse. Students started arriving in about six trucks of the state investigative police; they had a whole bunch of students, the ones they were able to pick up in the streets. Up until six in the morning, when we left, I think a truck was still coming with students. But they never went to look in Barandillas. We were going to go back to Chilpancingo, but the federal police told us that we shouldn’t go because some sicarios had blocked the road near Mezcala with cars and buses.
If you go right now to Zumpango you’ll see the municipal police have set up checkpoints in the entrance and exits to town. Iguala was like that, or worse. Iguala has three access routes: toward Teloloapan, Taxco, and Chilpancingo. And on the old highway, every day, twenty-four hours a day, the police were always there.
SANTIAGO FLORES, 24, FRESHMAN. We got to the hospital and they put me on a stretcher in the operating room. When they laid me down I asked them where my compañero who had been shot in the head was. They said:
“We can’t tell you.” They were rushing around. I asked them multiple times where the guy who had been shot in the head was and they told me they didn’t know. They injected me with something and I slept for a while. When I woke up there was a man, a bit heavyset, and a woman, a teacher. They said the man was a driver, but I don’t know what kind of driver, or where he was from. They said that they were a driver and a teacher. They had shot the teacher in the back, I think. But when I saw her, she looked normal, like she was okay. She was talking normally. The man, he was in worse shape. Then they came up and closed the curtain so I couldn’t see and they started operating on the man. When I asked the nurse again where he was, she said:
“Who? Your compañero with the buzz haircut, the little buzz-cut guy, the one who came just like you did?”
“Yes. Where is he?”
“Problem is, there are a number of you guys, quite a few, but there is one with a gunshot in the head.”
“The one with the gunshot in the head. Where is he?”
“You’d better worry about yourself. The way you’re going, with your lung problem, you could make it worse. You’d better worry about yourself. Your compañero is in critical condition. They are operating on him now. They are just now operating on him. He’s in bad shape, between life and death. You’d better worry about yourself.”
That was when I began to cry. I asked the nurse why they did this to us.The nurse left without answering me.
It was almost five in the morning. A child arrived, a boy. I knew he was a kid because I was listening, but I didn’t open my eyes. I didn’t want to see who it was. A woman was crying, she was wailing. She was asking why him. She was saying:
“My dear boy, why you?” She was saying: “My little boy, why God, why did you tear him away from here, away from me here?” She was speaking to the boy, asking him to open his little eyes, but he didn’t open them. The boy had already died. I was just listening.
The woman was crying, wailing, for maybe fifteen or twenty minutes, talking to her son, saying goodbye to him. She was saying:
“My dear boy, I’ll let you go in peace. I ask you one thing, close your little mouth. Close your little mouth.” Because he died and his mouth was open. His mom was saying:
“I ask you to close your little mouth.”
I feel like she was closing his mouth but then it would open again. The woman was weeping, me too, we were both sobbing, and she was saying:
“My little boy, just close your little mouth.” That was the only thing she asked of him and, well, he couldn’t close his mouth and it stayed open. I overheard the doctors saying:
“There aren’t enough of us; there are some sixteen people with gunshot wounds; there are about sixteen of them and we can’t handle them all.” They said that the teacher and the driver both died.
ERICK SANTIAGO LÓPEZ, 22, SOPHOMORE. When I arrived, the hospital director asked me my name. I told him my name. Then he asked me where I was coming from. I told him that I am from the Ayotzinapa college.
“They should have killed you,” he snarled, “fucking ayotzinapo.” He didn’t give me any medical attention. A military nurse attended to me. A military nurse told the doctors:
“I’ll take care of the boy.” Then they took off my clothes, leaving me just in my boxers, and took me to the operating area. Soon aft
er, my compa Aldo arrived, and another freshman who got shot in the hand, and the guy who got shot in the mouth. There I was.
About two hours had gone by when the police came looking for me. Maybe they had been given the order to kill me because they showed up really aggressive, looking for me. I really am grateful to the nurse because she told them that I wasn’t there anymore, that my compañeros had taken me out of the hospital, had taken me somewhere else. The police left.
MIGUEL ALCOCER, 20, FRESHMAN. No one talks about the other Estrella de Oro bus. We never heard anything about it again. When we were driving down that straight street in an Estrella de Oro bus, they say that the students on the other Estrella de Oro bus had gone a different route. And on that other route I heard that they had been speaking on the phone with our compañeros saying that they were on their way out of town, and they were asking where we were. A number of my compañeros had said that they were okay, on their way out of town. We never knew what happened to that bus. The compañeros on the Estrella Roja bus said they saw those compañeros in that other bus beneath an overpass and there were a bunch of police there. But no one talks about that bus. They say that it was all shot up, beneath the overpass, and there were a lot of police there. I think they also took students from that bus, I think that they are disappeared too.
JORGE, 20, FRESHMAN. Around five in the morning someone knocked on the door. We thought that they’d found us. Then the woman from the house called to us saying that it was a compañero. And, in fact, we recognized his voice. He said that the danger had passed and that the state police were going to take us. We all went outside and went with the state police. They took us walking back to where the buses were because, they said, they had left their patrol trucks there. We went walking toward the buses when we saw the two bodies of our compañeros, the compañeros that they had killed there.
