I Couldn't Even Imagine That They Would Kill Us

by John Gibler

  “Bro, they kidnapped me, pull together from our friends whatever they ask.” The kidnappers came on the line again:

  “Did you hear him? Now come pay! I’ll wait ten minutes!”

  “When we heard that voice,” Mario said, “no, our nerves, everyone, my mom, my sisters, everyone was crying. And the agents said: ‘No, you can’t go make the payment unless you are sure it is your brother.’ It sounded like him, but we were all so nervous. The agents were recording all the calls. They played that part of the call back and said: ‘Wait, wait, you have to be entirely sure that this is your brother. This is all business. Even if they get pissed, you have to wait for them to call again.’” The ten minutes passed. Another call came in.

  “You son of a bitch! I’m going to kill him right now! And then I’m going to go and shoot every fucking one of you! You fuckers!” Mario, pressured by the federal agents, asked again for the proof of life. “Do you think we’re playing?” the kidnappers asked and then hung up. The agents said:

  “This is a business, just wait. This is how it goes. We have a lot of experience with this.” Maybe they had experience, and “it was their job,” Mario told me, “but it was our brother.”

  A few minutes went by and the kidnappers called back. Again the insults and threats over the phone, the insistence from the federal agents on demanding proof of life, and Mario stuck in the middle, begging, pleading. Finally the kidnappers said they would hand the phone again to Tomás:

  “Bro, they kidnapped me, pull together from our friends whatever they ask.”

  “You heard,” they said, “be there in five minutes!”

  The agents again had recorded the call and again they played it back: the same words, the same length of time. The agents said that it wasn’t possible, it couldn’t be Tomás, those were the same exact words, it had to be a recording.

  “The time they gave us passed,” Mario told me. “They called back. We had the speakerphone on. The last words they said were that we would regret this for the rest of our lives, that we would never know what happened to my brother.”

  In Iguala alone, a city of less than 150,000 residents, federal authorities received more than 250 reports of forced disappearance in less than a year after the attacks against the students. A Mexican Justice Department official told me that the bodies found by volunteers all came from an area of only two acres. Volunteers had by February 2015, marked 30 other possible shallow and mass graves in an area spanning more than 20 acres, he said.

  I accompanied the Other Disappeared group on one of their Sunday expeditions. On a cloudless late February day in 2015, the temperature reached 39 degrees Celsius (102 degrees Fahrenheit). Some thirty volunteers spanned out across a steep, hillside cornfield. The stalks and husks of the last harvest lay sun-bleached and brittle on the ground. Federal police with assault rifles accompanied the group and stood guard around the perimeter of the field. Men and women ranging in age from their early twenties to their late seventies, dressed in long-sleeved shirts, hats, and bandannas covering their necks roamed in groups scanning the ground for hidden grave site characteristics. Mayra told me about her brother Tomás for the first time that day, and their decision to look for him in the hills and fields surrounding Iguala.

  “Do you really think that after seeing all this cruelty,” Mayra said, referring to the police attacks against the Ayotzinapa students and the 28 bodies pulled semi-charred from the hills on the edge of town “that my brother is still alive? The hope of finding him alive, once you’ve seen all these mass graves, that hope vanishes.”

  Mayra began to attend the very first marches and protests in Iguala after the attacks against the students. She made a banner asking if there would only be justice for mass disappearances. A few reporters approached her and she told them:

  “If you only knew, there are not only 43 people disappeared, there are so many mothers looking for their children.” Mayra was one of only a handful of people who went to the first meeting of families looking for their loved ones at the San Gerardo church in Iguala. By the time they held the second meeting in mid November, after the 28 bodies had been found, more than 100 people attended. They organized amongst themselves to start looking for more hidden mass graves in the hills.

  Mayra said that the families of the Other Disappeared do not seek justice. They do not want to find the people who did these things to their children, to their siblings. They know that most of those people still roam free, and many wear police or military uniforms. They just want to find the remains of their loved ones, she said. This distinguishes them from so many others who have organized to pressure the government to look for the disappeared. Their slogan is: “Child, until I bury you, I won’t stop looking.”

  Listening to the stories of the families looking for their loved ones in the hillsides near Iguala, I heard time and again testimonies describing how uniformed police officers participated in the disappearances. The police themselves controlled and administered kidnappings and sex trafficking in the region. One member of the Other Disappeared told me, “Abarca came in and put his police checkpoints around town, and a lot of people were disappeared as they tried to pass through those checkpoints.”

  In early October 2014, I spoke with an Iguala journalist who also survived the police attacks of September 26–27, 2014. He described the local police–organized crime structure that existed before the attacks this way: “The municipal police are the façade, but only a façade. They are not municipal police. They are narcos who use police uniforms, police weapons, and police vehicles. They call them los bélicos [the belligerents]. Los bélicos are police inside the municipal police who have a cartel. They are the ones who control the heavy stuff. The top guys. [. . .] There are about 300 bélicos, almost the entire police force. The cops who aren’t in the cartel are a minority.” He also told me: “The people who ordered and really carried out all that shit [on September 26–27, 2014] have not been arrested.”

  “The famous bélicos. They were police with official squad cars and everything, but they operated at night wearing face masks,” Marina Hernández de la Garza, then an Iguala city councilwoman with the PRI, told me in Iguala in early October 2014. “If there were 400 police on the force, 300 of them were in the mafia. The cops that had the old banged-up trucks, those were the chumps. And the ones with the new, top-notch trucks, those were the mafia. When they came to deliver the new police trucks here, we said: look, those are the ones who will soon be robbing us.” Hernández de la Garza said that the bélicos “would pick people up off the streets and give them an hour to turn over 10,000 pesos, or else. . . .”

  In Mexico, police and military at every level have fully merged with forces of organized crime. It is no longer accurate to speak about corruption—if it ever was. Individuals who work inside and out of police and military forces carry out a wide range of violent acts inside a single network that combines both repressive and mercantile functions. The attacks on the streets of Iguala on September 26 and 27 exposed the evolving practices of the larger drug war machine, combining multiple forms of violence—murder, torture, mutilation, and forced disappearance—as acts of state terror and acts of business.

  The U.S.-designed and -imposed drug war has enabled the growth and expansion of illegal markets in all areas of Mexican society, areas of state jurisdiction, and especially, areas of life and death. Terror has become a central feature not only of repression, but also of this market expansion. Gloria Arenas, a former guerrilla fighter and ex–political prisoner, told me in January 2015, while reflecting on the police–organized crime control of territory in her home state of Veracruz: “Es que ya sin terror no hay negocio” or, literally: “There is no business anymore without terror.” Thus forced disappearance—a practice of state terror cultivated over decades to repress both armed insurgencies and unarmed social movements—has been taken up by the entrepreneurs of kidnapping and extortion.

  Iguala is only one example of the terror zones created by the dr
ug war in Mexico where families are condemned to live in fear and grief, scouring dry hillsides to look for the remains of their loved ones, people taken as commodities in the drug war’s death markets and disappeared. The experiences of the Other Disappeared further reveal the daily, normalized realms of terror that existed before the violence unleashed against the students of Ayotzinapa.

  Fear, terror, and horror are essential elements of both the illicit drug markets and the death markets that have expanded along with the constant fueling of the drug war itself. Just as illegality is part of the commodity form of substances like cocaine, heroin and marijuana, terror and horror have become parts of the commodity forms of mercantile killing: the reconfigured kidnapping, extortion, forced labor, human smuggling and human trafficking industries in Mexico.10

  On December 7, 2014, the DNA lab at the University of Innsbruck, Austria, notified the Mexican government that it had identified one of the bone fragments as belonging to Alexander Mora Venancio, a 19-year-old Ayotzinapa student who was disappeared in Iguala. The government said that this identification amounted to “scientific proof” that the students had been burned in the Cocula trash dump. The Argentine Team of Forensic Anthropologists (EAAF)—one of the world’s leading forensic anthropology organizations specializing in forced disappearances—had been representing the families alongside the federal investigators from the beginning of the Cocula trash dump investigation. The EAAF put out a communiqué on December 7 that stated: “At the moment there is not enough scientific certainty or physical evidence to claim that the remains recovered at the San Juan River by authorities . . . correspond to those removed from the Cocula trash dump in the manner indicated by the accused.” The Argentine forensic anthropologists repeatedly emphasized that they were not present when the remains were supposedly pulled from the river, and that they had requested multiple times but never seen the official chain of custody documents corresponding to the discovery, removal, and initial treatment of those remains.

  On January 26, 2015, the families and students held their monthly march in Mexico City. Once in the Zócalo, Carmen Cruz, mother of Jorge Aníbal Cruz Mendoza, said to the thousands of people gathered there:

  “Good evening four months into this nightmare that we are living. These have been four months of pain, four months of suffering. We have wept, but not because our sons are dead. We have wept because we miss them. And I want to tell you that we have no doubt that government people have our sons. Because uniformed officials were the ones who took them, people following orders from a high command. Enrique Peña Nieto needs to stop playing the fool: even if he doesn’t have them, he knows where they are. Give them back to us now. Every day we are thinking about where our sons could be. And once again we take to the streets to protest, demanding answers about where they are. With all of your support we will succeed. And I want to tell my son wherever he may be, don’t think that I’m not looking for you. I am looking for you and I will find you.”

  Hilda Hernández Rivera, mother of César Manuel González Hernández said:

  “The government has deceived us with so many lies. Unfortunately, we have come here to learn about all their bullshit. Forgive me if I speak with bad words. It makes me furious the kind of government we have, and that they try to deceive us, thinking we are stupid. We know what they are trying to do. And we will not permit it. My son is such a kind, kind person and I know that he knows his father and I are looking for him. And we will not stop looking. Yes, there are times when I cry, because it hurts, because he is my son. But it also makes me so angry, and that is what leads me to speak out now. I have not spoken out before. I have kept quiet, because I don’t know what to say sometimes, but now I will say: we are not going to stand back with our arms crossed for our children. They have to reappear, because as a compañero just said, it was the police that took them, federal police and the army also participated. And there is nothing else to do but look for them. There is no one else, no drug traffickers or anything like that. Because here the drug traffickers are the government.”

  The following day, January 27, 2015, the Mexican federal attorney general, Jesús Murillo Karam, announced what he labeled “the historical truth” of the events in Iguala, which he had previously sketched in his November press conference, based on three testimonies (of men who would later denounce having been tortured into signing their confessions) claiming that the Iguala police, acting alone, had “turned the 43 students over” to gang members who took them out to an isolated trash dump near Cocula, murdered them and proceeded to incinerate their bodies from the predawn hours until 5:00 p.m. that Saturday afternoon with a fire built in the open air of wood and old tires.

  The families were outraged. They held a press conference that same day. Cristina Bautista Salvador, mother of Benjamín Ascencio Bautista, said:

  “We will not accept that our sons have already been killed. Just like they took them alive, we want them back alive. That is what we demand, and we will continue our struggle and our protests until they give us back our sons. Because out of a hundred people, 95 percent support us. And the 5 percent that is against us, that says we’re just pestering, I assure them that if it were one of their children or grandchildren they would be here with us. And they would also be crying, like us. We are not crying because we feel like our sons are already dead, but because we miss them. We miss their voices, the way a son hugs, that’s what’s happening. We are in despair, that’s why we cry. So we are not going to accept the government’s refusal to return our sons. Officials have said that our sons are dead, but there is no proof.”

  Epifanio Álvarez Carvajal, father of Jorge Álvarez Nava, said:

  “We would like to say, as parents, that the government has stepped all over our dignity. They have destroyed us. We do not accept what they are doing. First they told us that our sons were in the mass graves. And then, after that, they said in Cocula, in the trash dump. And now we can’t be certain of anything. We can’t accept anything they say, because there is not enough evidence to support it. So we as parents will keep struggling to find our sons, however we may find them, but we will fight to the end. This must be cleared up. That is why we as parents will not stop fighting. We can’t go back to our homes with this pain.”

  The federal government’s description of the coordinated attacks that night makes no mention of either state or federal police participating in the violence. The government’s unproven claim that the police “turned the students over” to “narcos” is integral to the deliberate fabrication that the police and the narcos are distinct entities. To this day, the government’s investigation fails to account for, or even address, state and federal police complicity in the atrocity, much less the role of the army.

  In February 2015, the families of the disappeared students, the Mexican government, and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights signed an agreement to establish an independent group of experts to conduct a parallel, though entirely independent, investigation. The group of five experts known in Mexico as the GIEI (Grupo Interdisciplinario de Expertos Independientes) was granted unprecedented access to the Mexican federal government’s investigation. The experts nominated and accepted by all parties were Francisco Cox from Chile, Ángela Buitrago and Alejandro Valencia from Colombia, Claudia Paz y Paz Bailey from Guatemala, and Carlos Beristain from Spain. They arrived in Mexico for their initial six-month period in March 2015.

  After a round of formal meetings with various Mexican federal agencies, the five experts went to meet with the families and the students in Ayotzinapa. When I had the opportunity to ask Cox and Beristain, at the end of their time in Mexico, which moments had most impacted them, they both, separately, referred to this first meeting.

  “Something that hit us hard, really hard,” Francisco Cox told me, “was when the families told us, ‘You are our last hope, you have our trust.’ But then what hit us, so intensely, was when they said, ‘Por favor, no se vendan’ [please, don’t sell out]. At first, I though
t it was kind of offensive for someone to tell you ‘don’t sell out,’ because that implies that you could sell out. But of course, it just reflected their reality, that they’ve seen people sell out or abandon them.”

  Carlos Beristain described the meeting that about 60 relatives of the disappeared students attended. They received the experts with a live band and freshly made flower wreaths: a traditional Guerrero welcoming of honor. Beristain said that one by one the different family members took the microphone and addressed the five experts.

  “They all said three things,” Beristain told me: “Always tell us the truth, you have our trust, and—and this really hit me—please, don’t sell out.”

  I spoke with Isabel Alcaraz Alcaraz, mother of Bernardo Flores Alcaraz, a few days after that meeting and asked her for her initial impressions of the expert group.

  “I think it went well,” she said of the meeting. “They explained to us how they planned to work and I personally, as well as what I’ve heard the others saying, thought that, okay, we have another hope because we saw how they explained to us their way of working, their plans, and we all thought that it would lead to good results. They told us they were completely independent and that they would be working collectively, independently of the government.”

  By July 2015, when I first began to assemble the oral history that would become this book, it was still more common to encounter confusion, rumors, speculation, and disinformation about the attacks in the media than direct descriptions of the events from those who had lived through them. The government, much of the media, and even many activists in solidarity with the students still spoke of the students having been riding on four buses, though they were aboard five buses when attacked. They also spoke of only one scene of attack from which police disappeared students, but this was done during simultaneous attacks, from two distinct locations: the corner of Juan N. Álvarez and Periférico Norte and in front of the Guerrero state courthouse, called the Palacio de Justicia. People still spoke of the students having been attacked for having protested the DIF event in Iguala, even though it had been long since proven that no such protest took place.