I Couldn't Even Imagine That They Would Kill Us
Page 23
And yet, after the GIEI’s two reports, a number of things have been forcefully established about the federal government’s version of events. Chief among them: 1) neither the students nor anyone else was incinerated in the Cocula trash dump on September 26–27, 2014; and 2) the Mexican federal attorney general’s office, under the tenures of Jesús Murillo Karam and Arely Gómez and the guidance of Tomás Zerón, invented a fake crime scene, tortured the accused into signing and repeating false confessions related to that scene, hid the Estrella Roja bus and then lied about it, and planted evidence—including a bone fragment that was identified as belonging to the student Alexander Mora Venancio—at the banks of the knee-deep San Juan River.
Many unanswered questions remain, including: how did federal investigators, including Tomás Zerón, get their hands on what has been identified as a charred bone fragment from Alexander Mora Venancio’s body?
After the ceremony in Mexico City where the GIEI publicly presented its second report, the five experts went back to Ayotzinapa for their final meeting with the families.
“I mean, fuck. We had finished our term. The government threw us out. The families would still be there, on their own. And we didn’t tell them where their sons were,” Francisco Cox told me in Mexico City after the meeting. “And so I stood up, and I told them that if, I mean, it was. . . . We had given the best of ourselves, and truly our reports contain solid lines for further investigation; they’re well documented, and could be the guide that the families should use in moving forward. But I couldn’t deny that I felt . . . a pain that . . . for not being able to tell them . . . where their sons are. . . . And, um . . . That’s when everyone started crying.”
The term “cover-up” is too generous. To this day, the Mexican federal government continues to disappear the 43 students, among many thousands of other Mexicans and Central American migrants who have been forcibly disappeared, often by the very people authorized and paid to “serve and protect” them.
Forced disappearances have two stages. The material stage occurs when police, soldiers, or armed actors physically abduct someone, as the police did with the 43 students, and take them away to an undisclosed destination. The legal-administrative stage occurs when government officials create a false narrative, and then perpetrate new atrocities to support it. In the case of the attacks against the Azotzinapa students, officials tortured people to create false confessions, fabricated a false crime scene, destroyed essential forensic evidence, planted false evidence, and propagated false accounts by feeding disinformation to the press. During the legal-administrative stage of forced disappearance the perpetrators attempt to disappear the truth—any and all verifyable knowledge about the events—along with the bodies of those being disappeared. While the police use guns, patrol vehicles, roads, radios, mobile phones, and other tools to disappear people, the legal administrators of forced disappearance employ computers, the mass media, government office space, public funds, laboratories, maps, graphs, texts and all manner of legal documents to do the same. The government officials in suits who created reams of documents to sustain lies are just as responsible for the forced disappearances as the uniformed police who physically abducted the 43 students.
And that is not all. Those officials, including the lawyers, detectives, and politicians, have been torturing—literally, torturing—the families of the disappeared daily from September 27, 2014, to the present day. Every time these officials lie and go before the television cameras with their detailed descriptions of the students being thrown into a fire, their descriptions of the killers feeding the flames with gasoline and old tires, every time they tell that lie they force the mothers and fathers to imagine their children meeting such an end, when we—and they—know that said fire never burned. As Mario César González Contreras, father of César Manuel González Hernández, said at a press conference after the GIEI presented their first report on September 6, 2015: “From day one the trash dump has been torture for the families of the 43 disappeared students!”
María de Jesús Tlatempa Bello, mother of José Eduardo Bartolo Tlatempa, said that same day:
“Today it was shown that we were right and that we are the victims of our own government. Today it was proven that the government lies. And the first one to do so was Ángel Aguirre when he told us that our children were in the mass graves in Pueblo Viejo. Imagine what immense pain for a mother to be told such falsehood, such a vile lie! Today we know that he lied. And then the federal attorney general told us that our sons ended up in the trash dump, that those 43 young men had been incinerated. But we never believed him.”
And during that same press conference, Bernabé Abraján, father of Adán Abraján de la Cruz, said that he and other parents had gone to the Cocula trash dump two days after the government had first inspected the area. “And we realized that there was nothing there. We now know that the government has been lying to us,” he said. “We, the mothers and fathers of the 43 students from Ayotzinapa, we are all campesinos. And the truth is that this government wanted to step all over our dignity, and that of our sons. Since the day of the twenty-sixth, we have been struggling to find our children. This government thought that we would give up, because at the beginning it tried to buy us off. It offered us money. But we, as campesinos and the parents of our children, told the government that we wouldn’t sell our children. Our children are our children and they are not for sale. That’s why we are fighting to find the 43 students. And this government needs to realize that we will not give up. . . . We don’t know anything about legal matters. But we know what dignity is.”
10. I have explored this analysis in “Without Terror, There Is No Business,” NACLA Report on the Americas, Vol. 48, No. 2, Summer 2016, pp. 135–138, and “Las economías del terror,” in Jorge Regalado, ed., Pensamiento crítico, cosmovisiones, y epistemologías otras para enfrentar la guerra capitalista y construir autonomía, Gualalajara: Universidad de Guadalajara-CIESAS-Jorge Alsonso, 2017, pp. 125–157. My analysis has been greatly influenced by Achille Mbembe’s essay “Necropolitics” (2003, Public Culture 15 [1]: pp. 11–40).
11. It would later be revealed that spyware sold to the Mexican government was used around this time to hack the cellphones of and spy on members of the GIEI as well as lawyers from the Miguel Austín Pro Juárez Human Rights Center representing the parents of the disappeared, murdered, and wounded students. See Azam Ahmed, “Spyware Sold to the Mexican Government Targeted International Officials,” New York Times, July 10, 2017, p. A1.
12. Carlos Beristain. 2017. El tiempo de Ayotzinapa, Madrid: Akal. pp. 68–69, 82–83, 97–98, 105–106, 129–130, 137–139.
Names of the Murdered, Coma Victim, and Disappeared in Iguala, Guerrero, on September 26–27, 2014
Killed in Iguala
1.Julio César Mondragón Fontes, 22, Ayotzinapa student
2.Daniel Solís Gallardo, 18, Ayotzinapa student
3.Julio César Ramírez Nava, 23, Ayotzinapa student
4.David Josué García Evangelista, 15, soccer player
5.Víctor Manuel Lugo Ortiz, 50, soccer team bus driver
6.Blanca Montiel Sánchez, 40, taxi passenger on the highway
In a coma with a shot to the head
Aldo Gutiérrez Solano, 19, Ayotzinapa student
Ayotzinapa students forcibly disappeared
1.Abel García Hernández, 19
2.Abelardo Vázquez Penitén, 19
3.Adán Abraján de la Cruz, 20
4.Alexander Mora Venancio, 19
5.Antonio Santana Maestro, 19
6.Benjamín Ascencio Bautista, 19
7.Bernardo Flores Alcaraz, 21
8.Carlos Iván Ramírez Villarreal, 20
9.Carlos Lorenzo Hernández Muñoz, 19
10.César Manuel González Hernández, 19
11.Christian Alfonso Rodríguez Telumbre, 21
12.Christian Tomás Colón Garnica, 18
13.Cutberto Ortiz Ramos, 22
14.Doriam González Pa
rral, 19
15.Emiliano Alen Gaspar de la Cruz, 23
16.Everardo Rodríguez Bello, 21
17.Felipe Arnulfo Rosas, 20
18.Giovanni Galindes Guerrero, 20
19.Israel Caballero Sánchez, 19
20.Israel Jacinto Lugardo, 19
21.Jesús Jovany Rodríguez Tlatempa, 21
22.JonásTrujillo González, 20
23.Jorge Álvarez Nava, 19
24.Jorge Aníbal Cruz Mendoza, 19
25.Jorge Antonio Tizapa Legideño, 20
26.Jorge Luis González Parral, 21
27.José Ángel Campos Cantor, 33
28.José Ángel Navarrete González, 18
29.José Eduardo Bartolo Tlatempa, 17
30.José Luis Luna Torres, 20
31.Jhosivani Guerrero de la Cruz, 20
32.Julio César López Patolzin, 25
33.Leonel Castro Abarca, 18
34.Luis Ángel Abarca Carrillo, 20
35.Luis Ángel Francisco Arzola, 20
36.Magdaleno Rubén Lauro Villegas, 19
37.Marcial Pablo Baranda, 20
38.Marco Antonio Gómez Molina, 20
39.Martín Getsemany Sánchez García, 20
40.Mauricio Ortega Valerio, 18
41.Miguel Ángel Hernández Martínez, 27
42.Miguel Ángel Mendoza Zacarías, 23
43.Saúl Bruno García, 20
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks with all my heart to everyone who spoke with me and shared their stories for this book and to all the families and the Ayotzinapa students who have continued their tireless search and struggle for the disappeared, the fallen, the wounded, the truth, and justice; and to all those in solidarity who helped me during the months of reporting in Guerrero: Kau Sirenio, Marcela Turati, Sergio Ocampo, Lenin Ocampo, Ulises Domínguez, Vania Pigeonutt, Margena de la O, Jesús Guerrero, María Benítez, Daniela Rea, Norma González, Edith Victorino, Naira, Füsun, Almazán, Diego, Sandra, Meño y Nayeli, Ray y Yuri, Adriana, Alba, A., Andrés y Sara, Enrique, Andalucía, Francesca, Eileen, Elia y Luz, Diana y Matt, Sánchez, Valencia y Tania, Paco y Jovi, Nel, Lolita, Emiliano, Río Doce, Ana Paula, M., C., Raúl, Thalía, Témoris, Valin, David Espino, Alejandro Guerrero, Natividad Ambrocio, Muki, Maya Telumbre, Pablo Rojas, Patricia Salinas, Daniel Alarcón, Ted Lewis, Kit Rachlis, Douglas McGray, California Sunday Magazine, Suzanne Gollin, Valentina López DeCea, Edith López Ovalle, Fernanda Gómez, Paula Mónaco y todas las compañeras y los compañeros de H.I.J.O.S. México, and Greg, Elaine, Bob, Stacey, Chris, Linda, Elizabeth, and everyone at City Lights Books.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
JOHN GIBLER lives and writes in Mexico. He is the author of Mexico Unconquered: Chronicles of Power and Revolt, To Die in Mexico: Dispatches From Inside the Drug War, 20 poemas para ser leídos en una balacera, and Tzompaxtle: La fuga de un guerrillero, forthcoming in English as Torn from the World: A Guerrilla’s Escape from a Secret Prison in Mexico.
ARIEL DORFMAN is a Chilean-American author whose plays (among them, Death and the Maiden), have been performed in more than 100 countries and whose numerous books (novels, stories, poems, essays) have been translated into more than 60 languages. Accompanied by his wife, Angélica, Ariel divides his time between Chile and the United States, where he is professor emeritus of literature at Duke University. He is a regular contributor to the most important newspapers worldwide. His latest novel is Darwin’s Ghosts.
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