Rebuild Ayotzinapa: where were the 43 disappeared students?

In Mexico, the calendar marks again the date of shame and horror.

September 26 marks the eighth anniversary of one of the country's modern tragedies, the

, the brutal attack against a group of student teachers, apprentice teachers from a rural school, sons of peasants, who encountered evil once any autumn night: drug traffickers and the corrupt state.

They did it in a town, Iguala, which was then an important logistics center for heroin trafficking in the region.

Three students were shot to death during the attack, as were three other passers-by, a bus driver, a soccer player and a taxi passenger.

43 students disappeared, all in their twenties.

Only small portions of bones have been found from three of them.

Over the years, the authorities have proposed different reasons why the attack happened, which keeps some 70 people in jail, but which came to have almost 150 prisoners.

The current government, headed by Andrés Manuel López Obrador, has presented a new report that demolishes what is known as the "historical truth", which was prepared by the authorities under the mandate of Enrique Peña Nieto (2012-2018).

In this chronicle, EL PAÍS reconstructs the endless chronology of an attack that changed the reality of Mexico, based on the various existing reports, sources of the investigation, both from the Prosecutor's Office and the presidential commission investigating the case, and experts who participate in the investigations.

Regarding the reasons, the authorities first said that the students went to Iguala to boycott a local political act, then they leaked that some of the boys had links with a criminal group opposed to the one that ruled in Iguala.

The most accepted hypothesis today is that they unknowingly threatened part of the commercial logistics of the network of local criminals: the buses.

Iguala criminals used buses to send heroin to the northern United States.

The normalistas went to the municipality to take vehicles to attend, days later, the commemorative marches of the Tlatelolco massacre in Mexico City, the state repression of students in October 1968.

The drug trafficking bureaucracy, the buses, the routes, point to the core of

.

The onslaught of police officers from up to four municipalities against the students, the articulation of the agents with the criminal group in the region, Guerreros Unidos, and the strange participation of the Federal Police and the Army, today accused of having an important role in the attack , make up one of the layers of opprobrium.

The other indicates the false closure of the investigation, an operation orchestrated by the Prosecutor's Office of the Government of Enrique Peña Nieto (2012-2018), whose head, Jesús Murillo, has been in prison since August, accused of torture, forced disappearance and obstruction of justice. .

For the current Government, the resolution of

has been a priority.

The first leftist government in the country's history sees the attack on students as a state crime, an example of the classism of previous regimes, a nemesis of dissident movements.

López Obrador's first decision upon taking office, in December 2018, was precisely to create the commission.

Although the families of the 43 have sometimes criticized the lack of progress, or the ways of the commission, the situation has improved.

The last two years of his mandate are key to the resolution of the case.

September 26, 2014: the attack

A contingent of normalistas, as aspiring teachers are known in Mexico, left the Ayotzinapa school after 5:00 p.m. on that September 26.

They had a simple assignment, usual for the students: they had to hijack buses so that they and their classmates from the rest of the normal schools in the country could travel to Mexico City, days later, to commemorate the massacre on October 2.

They chose Iguala for a strategic issue.

They could go to other places, Chilpancingo, without going any further, the capital, which is a few kilometers from the school, but previous failures had made them think that it was better to go to a place where the police were not so vigilant.

The students traveled from school in two buses that they had already hijacked from before.

They reached the entrance to Iguala and parted ways.

Some stayed at a toll booth and others went to the municipal terminal.

After a brawl with some drivers and workers, those who were in the booth also went to the terminal.

After a while, they all left there, with the original buses, plus three others that they hijacked.

The idea was to get out of the terminal before the police arrived.

There were a total of five vehicles.

Three headed north and two headed south.

The first passed through the zócalo, where the mayor, José Luis Abarca, and his wife, were celebrating a political act.

From there to the north of the Periférico, an avenue that surrounds the city, municipal police officers from Iguala chased the three buses.

At the intersection with Periferico, some vans crossed them.

The policemen started shooting.

A student, Aldo Gutiérrez, was wounded by a shot to the head that left him in a coma.

He has not woken up.

Many others were injured.

The policemen took all the boys from the last bus of the convoy.

They were around 20.

The two vehicles that headed south did so with some distance between them.

The first managed to reach the Iguala exit, in front of the Palace of Justice.

There, municipal police officers stopped the vehicle, broke the windows and fired tear gas to force the students to leave.

They took everyone, a group of 12 to 15. The second stayed a few meters behind.

The Federal Police arrested him and forced the boys to leave.

They fled through neighborhoods on the outskirts of Iguala.

In the first scenario, the students left there regrouped.

They asked for help from colleagues from the Normal School and other teachers from Iguala.

They prepared a press conference.

They surrounded the casings with stones so that the Prosecutor's Office would take note.

But at the stroke of midnight, with half a dozen journalists present, an armed group attacked the crowd.

Two students died there and many others were injured.

The body of a third normalista appeared the next day on a road near there, with a disfigured face.

Investigators believe that in addition to the students that the Iguala police took from the two buses, they and their criminal associates nabbed another dozen boys at that scene, after the second attack, and in the outlying neighborhoods of Iguala, near the Palace of Justice.

Mr Garcia

The construction of “historical truth”

In October 2014, Tomás Zerón was the star of the investigators.

The director of the Criminal Investigation Agency of the Federal Prosecutor's Office had assumed the investigations at the beginning of the month and since then he commanded and directed.

The first results were not long in coming.

On November 7, his boss, prosecutor Murillo Karam, appeared before the media to present an account of the events, according to which police from Iguala and the neighboring town of Cocula, associated with Guerreros Unidos, had attacked the students.

The police had taken them off the buses and handed them over to the criminals.

They had killed them, burned their bodies in a garbage dump, and thrown the remains into the nearby San Juan River.

Murillo, with Zerón present, supported his narrative in the statements of members of Guerreros Unidos detained in previous weeks.

In addition, he explained, Navy divers had found plastic bags with human bone remains in the river.

The explanation of the divers closed the story of the assassins.

magazine

months ago, could continue to shine.

In the weeks and months that followed, the discussion focused on the bonfire, if that dump had been able to house a fire of the characteristics necessary to burn 43 people.

The families were hesitant.

The Argentine forensic team, which had arrived in Mexico to analyze possible scenarios and remains, doubted, as did the group of experts that the IACHR had commissioned to investigate the case.

In January 2015, Murillo and Zerón appeared before the press again to give details that, in their opinion, supported the garbage dump theory.

Murillo ended his intervention by saying: "This is the historical truth of the facts."

But the historical truth soon showed its cracks.

Successive reports from the Argentine team and the IACHR defended that there was no way that the dump could have housed a bonfire to burn 43 people.

The IACHR team also noted that the boys had moved in five buses.

Until then, mid-2015, the existence of the fifth vehicle was unknown, one of the two that left the terminal from the south, the one that the Federal Police had evicted next to the Palace of Justice.

Current investigations indicate that it is likely that this bus had a drug shipment hidden.

More reports from international organizations widened the fissures.

In 2016, a second document prepared by the IACHR group denounced that Zerón had illegally transferred a detainee to the San Juan River in the first weeks of the investigation, at the end of October 2014. Over time and the change of guard at the Prosecutor's Office, investigators discovered that Zerón had orchestrated the placement of the remains of at least one of the students in the river.

The scenario of the garbage dump and the San Juan River, investigators now say, was a setup, a false story to close the case and stop the social outcry that invaded Mexico in the weeks after the disappearance of the 43.

Criticized by the families, politically untenable, Zerón resigned in September 2016. Murillo had resigned much earlier, in February 2015. In 2018, the United Nations Human Rights office in Mexico published a new report denouncing the torture of dozens of arrested in the case.

Before and after resigning, Zerón always defended his work.

For this, he used to summon reporters to his office.

On one occasion, the official took out a huge file cabinet containing, among other things, photos of bonfires in Nazi concentration camps.

It was, in his view, proof that the dumpster pyre had been real.

The current administration of the Prosecutor's Office accuses him, among other crimes, of torture and forced disappearance.

Murillo in prison

From mid-2016 to the change of government in December 2018, the

remained in limbo.

Nothing moved.

All 43 were still missing.

The discovery of bones of one, under Zerón's guard, was compromised by mounting suspicions.

But the appearance of a special commission for the case, already with López Obrador in the Government, and the creation of a special unit in the Prosecutor's Office, gave life to the investigations.

In June 2020, the researchers found a piece of bone from one of the 43 in the La Carnicería ravine, a place almost a kilometer from the dump.

The following year they found a piece of bone belonging to another student right there.

Thus the historical truth was buried.

The problem, however, persisted.

If they hadn't been burned in the dump, what happened to them?

Were they alive, even some of them?

Furthermore, why had they attacked them so viciously?

Why disappear them if, after all, they had already recovered the bus with the drugs?

Although the degree of certainty is not absolute, they are questions for which there are beginning to be answers.

The presidential commission assumes that the boys are dead and that the attack took place, beyond drugs, because the Iguala criminals thought that an opposing group was attacking them, in retaliation for a confrontation weeks before in a mining town in the region.

The commission says there is no evidence that the students were part of any criminal group.

He also points out that the police handed over the boys to the crime, that they separated them into groups, killed most of them and scattered their remains in different places.

In recent weeks, the case seemed like a roller coaster.

The arrest of the old prosecutor, Jesús Murillo, and the presentation of the commission's report have shaken the understanding of the case.

The commission has accused an Army general of ordering the death of six of the 43, who would have been kept alive for several days after the attack.

The general has been in prison since this Wednesday.

The active participation of the military in the attack changes the logic that had been handled, a problem of corrupt police and cruel criminals.

If the military were involved in the hunt, at what level of the Administration did the tentacles of crime reach?

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