I Couldn't Even Imagine That They Would Kill Us
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The GIEI released its first report in September 2015. The report confirmed not only the participation of state and federal police in the attacks, but also that of municipal police from the neighboring municipalities of Cocula and Huitzuco. It also included testimony of a military intelligence agent (a document that the independent investigators found amongst the 85 volumes and more than 80,000 pages of the federal government’s case file at that moment) who was present at one of the scenes where police attacked and disappeared the 43 students, observing and reporting in real time to his superiors. The GIEI report also documented both the torture of almost everyone arrested by federal authorities in the case and the particular institutional mechanisms for sanctioning that torture.
Among the other key findings, the GIEI discovered official video camera evidence of one of the scenes of attack where police disappeared some 15 to 20 students in front of the state courthouse on the highway leading out of town. That video, however, was—supposedly—retrieved and then destroyed because a state judge said she didn’t see anything of value in the video. For this judge, a video of police attacking unarmed students who were all disappeared was nothing of value. Or, what really happened to that video? Was it destroyed, or hidden? Either way, how could that happen? Or, more to the point, what does the government’s self-proclaimed destruction of evidence documenting police attacking and disappearing college students reveal to us about the nature and function of that government?
The GIEI also emphasized that the students had been attacked aboard five buses, and that the fifth bus, the Estrella Roja bus, was itself also disappeared. When the experts asked the government to see that bus, the government officials showed them a different bus and lied repeatedly. The experts proved that the Estrella Roja bus the students rode that night and the bus provided by the government were different, using video images from the bus station’s security cameras (which federal detectives had not even bothered to look at).
Upon realizing that the “fifth bus” was missing and that the government had tried to lie and manipulate its way around providing that bus, the experts asked some more questions: Could there have been something on that particular bus so valuable that it provoked the attacks? Could there have been, for example, a major heroin shipment hidden in secret compartments on the bus? Is that why the government can’t show anyone the real bus? Guerrero state is one of the largest heroin-producing regions in the world. Iguala is a known trafficking hub for heroin bound for the United States. Could the Ayotzinapa students have unwittingly grabbed a bus loaded with heroin bound for, say, Chicago? Could that have provoked the heroin shippers to order the recovery of the bus and the murders and disappearances of the students? If so, what does that say about the relationship between police—not one or two “corrupt” cops, but all on-duty municipal, state, and federal police officers in Iguala, acting together under the watchful eye of military intelligence agents only two miles down the road from a major army base—and the transnational heroin trade?
Rather than address such questions, the media focused on the GIEI’s thorough debunking of the federal attorney general’s claim that three confessed “drug gang” members murdered and incinerated the 43 students at an open-air trash dump in Cocula between 3:00 a.m. and 5:00 p.m. on September 27, 2014. The GIEI concluded, based on an indepth forensic fire analysis, that no such fire occurred, and, moreover, that such a fire would have incinerated not only the 43 students, but all of the surrounding vegetation in the dump, likely causing a forest fire as well as killing any human who approached the flames to feed them more wood and tires, as the supposed killers claimed (under torture) they did.
The GIEI’s findings unleashed a kind of media war of fire experts. Several newspaper columnists began a slander campaign against the GIEI, claiming that they were only in Mexico for the money, and that two members had connections to armed guerrilla groups in Guatemala and Colombia. The GIEI later released satellite images of the trash dump from September 26 and 27, 2014. The images are clear: it was raining, there was no raging cremation pyre used to reduce 43 human bodies to ash. In November 2014 and again in June 2015, I spoke with two Cocula municipal trash workers. They both said that they dumped the trash in Cocula on September 27, 2014, around 1:00 p.m. The ground was still wet from the rain, they told me, and there was no one there. There was no fire. In early 2016, the Argentine forensic anthropologists would confirm all these findings in their own independent report based on more than a year’s inch-by-inch analysis of the Cocula trash dump: there was no major fire incinerating even one person, much less 43 people, there on the night of September 26–27, 2014, or any other day between then and the end of October when the analysts began their work.
After the publication of the GIEI’s first report, the federal government, which had already extended the group’s mandate by another six months, grew cold toward the five experts. Soon thereafter more and more slanderous reports began to appear in the government-friendly press attacking the experts, claiming that they were sympathetic with “subversive” groups and were “anti-military.” From the very beginning of its investigation, the GIEI formally requested to interview the soldiers of the 27th Batallion present in Iguala on September 26–27, 2014. The government flatly refused to let the GIEI experts carry out those interviews. National Defense Secretary Salvador Cienfuegos told a Televisa reporter on October 6, 2015, “I cannot allow the soldiers to be treated like criminals” and implied that the members of the GIEI “want to interrogate the soldiers so as to later make it seem like they were involved” in the attacks.
The army’s role in the attacks presents a striking enigma. With a large military base (which was involved in the forced disappearances and counterinsurgency campaigns of the 1960s and 1970s) located one mile away from the scene, why didn’t soldiers intervene on behalf of the students who were under attack for hours? As confirmed in the GIEI reports, the army—formally tasked with combating organized crime across the country—had been monitoring the movements of the students using highway surveillance equipment since 6:00 p.m. on September 26.
A military intelligence agent also reported to his superiors from one of the main scenes of the mass forced disappearances in real time. Army officers knew exactly what was happening. When soldiers finally were deployed sometime around 1:00 a.m., they proceeded to lecture the students hiding in a private clinic about the value of making good grades while Edgar Vargas nearly bled to death from a bullet wound to the face. How to explain the army’s apparent refusal to respond to or investigate the disappearances, the shootings, and the murders that continued to take place throughout the night? Was the army’s non-response to the police attacks that night a decision rather than a failure? If so, who made that decision, who gave the orders that night, and why? Did the federal government refuse to let the GIEI speak with soldiers because they have something to hide? If so, what are they hiding?
The students of Ayotzinapa, who were so demonized by government officials and the commercial press, were among the very few people who acted as if there existed something called “the rule of law” that night. After the police attacked the students on Juan N. Álvarez Street, after they abducted and drove off with some 20 students there, a commanding officer threatened the remaining students if they didn’t leave the city, saying: We’ll come back for you. The students, however, defied the threat and remained in the area to support the students whom they thought had been arrested. They planned to protest the following day to demand that the arrested be released. As one student, Carlos Martínez, said, they couldn’t even imagine that the police would kill them, much less that the police would disappear 43 of their compañeros. They assumed that the police would act according to the law, even though they had already violated the law during the attacks.
The students viewed the space around them as a “crime scene” and sought to protect the integrity of “evidence” such as spent bullet casings, bullet holes in the buses, and pools of blood on the street and in the third
bus. The students phoned the press; they also called their schoolmates in Ayotzinapa. Between around 10:30 p.m. and midnight, the students waited for the “authorities” to arrive. During that time, several groups of people arrived at the scene, including two vans full of students from the school, teachers from the CETEG, and six Iguala reporters. No government officials arrived. No one from the army base located one mile away arrived. No one from the state or federal police investigative units arrived. Local police maintained wide checkpoints at all the roads leading in and out of town, but none came to Juan N. Álvarez or the state courthouse to investigate what had happened there. Not a single government official arrived to carry out their supposed legal duties. It was the students of Ayotzinapa who behaved—to their mortal danger—as if a “rule of law” existed, by safeguarding “evidence” and waiting for the proper “authorities” to arrive. Three men in face masks armed with assault rifles did show up and open fire on the students giving a press conference. Those men killed two students—Julio César Ramírez Nava and Daniel Solís—and shot Edgar Vargas in the mouth. Julio César Mondragón Fontes was last seen alive running from those masked attackers.
The GIEI published its second and final report in April 2016. The families of the disappeared students clamored for its investigation to continue. The Mexican federal government, however, refused to sign another six-month extension of the agreement, effectively kicking the five experts out of the country.11 The experts knew this as they prepared their second and final report. The report further detailed a series of government actions in the investigation that appeared to hover in a difficult-to-discern area between extreme ineptitude and sinister malfeasance. But the bombshell, so to speak, was a series of photographs and video images showing the supposed lead federal investigator Tomás Zerón de Lucio at the San Juan River, near the Cocula trash dump, on October 28, 2014. I say “supposed” because one federal attorney told me that Zerón’s job itself was illegal, that he did not even have a permit to carry a handgun, and he did not have the legal authority to conduct crime scene investigations, much less with one of the accused at an investigation site without his attorney.
In the photographs and video we see Zerón, armed, pointing and leading a number of detectives while another armed man in a suit leads the accused around the river. At one moment we see a black trash bag by the river. Zerón indicates that the other officers should check it out, see if it has human remains in it. A man is then seen sticking his hand into the bag and pulling out clumps of some substance (human ash?) and sifting that substance in the river. So much for proper handling of evidence.
One thing that was so striking about the images, however, was the date: October 28, 2014. This was important because the federal government said that agents found the bag of ash on October 29, 2014. Simple confusion? Probably not, since the search that was conducted on October 29, 2014, was rigorously documented and entered into the case file. There was absolutely nothing, however, in the case file from the activities carried out on October 28, 2014. It would seem then, that two freelance reporters, Daniel Villa and José Manuel Jiménez—who chose to follow the police to the trash dump that day and photograph and film from a distance using telephoto lenses, and who couldn’t even get their work from that day published—filmed the supposed lead federal detective carrying out a dress rehearsal for the following day’s “discovery.” That is, the federal government planting evidence and rehearsing testimonies.
The two GIEI reports, together totaling 1,030 pages, make up perhaps the single most rigorously documented description of how impunity itself is carefully elaborated by the Mexican federal government. Impunity is not the result of “corruption” or “incompetence” or a “lack of resources.” Impunity is an exquisitely crafted function of the judicial system; it is in fact the defining feature of the judicial system. Or, as I once heard writer Francisco Goldman say at a journalism conference in Guadalajara: “Impunity is the freedom of expression of the killers.”
In addition to the two GIEI reports, one of the five experts, Carlos Beristain, published a book in 2017 called El tiempo de Ayotzinapa, or Ayotzinapa Time, about his experiences investigating the attacks against the students. In the book Beristain tells from personal experience the tales of impunity documented in the two GIEI reports. Among many other details, he writes about the testimony of one of the bus drivers describing the participation of Guerrero state and Huitzuco municipal police in the attacks; the destruction of the courthouse video that recorded one of the two scenes of mass forced disappearance at the hands of the police; the immediately apparent contradictions in the government’s trash dump hypothesis; the absurdity of the government’s claim to have found 41 bullet casings piled up on top of a rock in the trash dump after detectives, independent forensic experts, and journalists had spent a week combing the dump for evidence; how Jorge Aníbal Cruz Mendoza sent his mother a text message at 1:16 a.m. on September 27 asking her to add credit to his phone, when, according to the federal government, all the students had been murdered by that time; how, nine months after the attacks, one of the experts, Claudia Paz y Paz, found a note in the case file describing the clothing of the students disappeared from the bus in front of the courthouse and how detectives had thrown all the clothing clumped together in plastic bags without conducting any forensic analyses and without even telling the families or their lawyers that they had found such clothing; how Ángela Buitrago working in the predawn hours found a handwritten signed testimony of the driver of the Estrella Roja “fifth bus” stating—as the students had—that the bus was stopped by federal police, that police ordered the students off the bus, that the police escorted the bus to the outskirts of Iguala and told the driver to call his boss and then go to Jojutla and then Cuautla, in Morelos state, where the driver arrived at 5:00 a.m., wrote his testimony by hand, and signed it, which contradicts the federal government’s multiple and mutually contradictory statements about that bus and what happened to it; and how then–federal attorney general Arely Gómez lied to the world when she falsely claimed in a press conference that the remains of a second student, Jhosivani de la Cruz, had been positively identified at the lab in Austria: no such identification had been made.12
The GIEI’s revelations led to a short-lived scandal concerning the actions of Tomás Zerón de Lucio on October 28, 2014. Two weeks before the second anniversary of the attacks against the students, President Enrique Peña Nieto left no doubt as to the role of the highest levels of the federal government in the forced disappearances of the 43 students. On September 14, 2016, Tomás Zerón resigned from the agency inside the federal attorney general’s office in charge of the Ayotzinapa investigation. And then, hours later, the president promoted him: on September 14, 2016, Peña Nieto appointed Zerón to be the Technical Secretary of the National Security Council, a job that answers directly to the president. The man who had been overseeing the torture of detainees, the fabrication of evidence, and a myriad of lies and deceptions would now be in charge of the President’s National Security Council. The message was quite clear.
The government’s false narrative attempts to depoliticize the attacks by denying the violence directly perpetrated by the Mexican army, federal police, and state police. Instead, the government narrative attempts to localize the atrocities, focusing exclusively on the Iguala and Cocula police, alleged “cartel members,” and former Iguala mayor José Luis Abarca and his wife, María de los Ángeles Pineda. This narrative serves to perpetuate the essential drug war myth that a genuine separation exists between so-called drug cartels and the government. The neatly packaged government story describing how “corrupt” local police working for a narco power couple grabbed the students and “turned them over” to bad-guy narcos makes it seem—contrary to all available evidence—that the “narcos” are to blame, and a stronger federal police and military presence is needed to protect people from them. An overwhelming amount of evidence describes a very different reality: on September 26–27, 2014, scores
of Iguala, Cocula, and Huitzuco police collaborated with Guerrero state police and federal police to carry out hours of horrific violence against unarmed college students while the Mexican army watched from the shadows.
For, even though the government arrested more than 120 Iguala and Cocula police officers, local officials, Abarca and Pineda, as well as supposed “gang” members, all of those arrests support its official version of both the attacks and the fate of the students. Santiago Aguirre, the Miguel Agustín Pro Juárez human rights attorney representing the families, told me that all of the people arrested have been charged with bogus crimes. More than half have been charged with generic crimes unrelated to the attacks against the students, like “organized crime” or “drug trafficking.”Those arrested in direct connection to the attacks have been charged not with murder and forced disappearance, but with “kidnapping.” Moreover, all of the government’s charges relate to the attacks on Juan N. Álvarez street. The government has not charged a single person in connection to the mass forced disappearance of students in front of the state courthouse: the location from which the government video footage was destroyed (or hidden) and at which the military intelligence agent was present.