by John Gibler
If they hadn’t shot me I would also be disappeared. The bullet saved me. Everyone who was riding in the bus where I was is now disappeared. I was the only one who was saved. All the blood that was in the bus. . . . In fact, I have some photos here. This is the photo of my arm where they shot me. All that blood is mine.
JORGE HERNÁNDEZ ESPINOSA, 20, FRESHMAN. I had gone with a compañero to play a volleyball game in Tixtla. We went to play at six in the afternoon, when they had all gone to Iguala. We played the game and went back to the school around ten o’clock. On our way to dinner we saw people running in all directions, even the seniors. We didn’t pay any attention to them. Then a paisa from the committee told us:
“Everyone to the parking lot.”
It was around ten-thirty when we went to the parking lot, and that was when we found out. But they only told us:
“There are problems in Iguala.” And we thought that it was the same as always: “So, they’re not letting our compañeros leave.” Then they called us to go to the outdoor basketball court [which has a corrugated tin roof, but no walls]. We went there and it was there that they told us that a freshman had been shot in the head. They didn’t know if he was dead or alive. An ambulance had taken him off, and that was all that they told us. Then they started to look for buses, but couldn’t find the drivers, or the buses didn’t have any gas. They said: “Some of you freshmen get in the Urvan.”5 Several juniors and seniors as well as some freshmen got in, including me. I was in the first Urvan that got to Iguala.
OMAR GARCÍA, 24, SOPHOMORE. They called the school and we learned what was going on. We called the media, the radio stations, the teachers union, and the people who support us. We were in a state of absolute alarm, trying to figure out what we could do. It all happened very fast. We organized about thirty people and—well, we took off. When we got there, there were federal police in the streets, in the area near the army base. We came into town right around there. There were federal police patrolling, and the state police were posted at the entrance to the city. There was a state police roadblock on the way into town. But they didn’t stop us.
EDGAR ANDRÉS VARGAS, 20, JUNIOR. Since I was already in my third year, I didn’t really follow the activities that the freshmen and the committee organized. But that day I was washing clothes outside and the guy they call Cochiloco, who is disappeared, was there with another kid and they were shouting out to a guy whose room was right by there. They were shouting for him to join them on an action, that they were going to hijack some buses for the march. He didn’t say where. The kid who was in his room on the second floor, who was also in the Struggle Committee, was saying he wouldn’t go because it was Cochiloco’s turn. And that was how I heard about the action. But you know, it was just another action. I kept washing, hung my clothes out to dry, and that was that. I went back to my room. I remember that I called my parents because we had our classroom observations coming up, and I called my parents to ask them for some money. They said yes and asked me to wait a few days and then they’d send it. I lay down on my bed, took out a folder I needed for some homework, but didn’t have the photocopies I needed, so I left it for the following day. And so I lay down, turned on the computer and logged in to Facebook. Just then a friend called me. As we were talking, a kid came in screaming for everyone to get ready because there were problems, the freshmen were under attack.
We all ran outside immediately. I told my friend that I’d call her back. She asked me what was going on and I told her nothing, and then just hung up. I put on my pants, my tennis shoes. I wasn’t wearing a T-shirt, but grabbed my red Ayotzi jacket and put that on without a shirt underneath. We went to the basketball court and they were saying that the freshmen were trapped and we needed to go help them. Several of my friends were there and they were going, so I went as well. I ran back to my room for a T-shirt, the first one I saw, and then ran back with the white T-shirt in my hand. I think the committee secretaries were in Chilpo and we didn’t have any more buses, or there were buses, but the drivers weren’t there. So we got an Urvan, we all got in, a bunch of us from my study group. Everything happened so fast. We took off for Iguala. One compa had told me not to go, because I had mentioned to him earlier that my girlfriend would be coming to visit me. I think she was going to arrive around dawn. I didn’t think anything so serious was happening, since there’ve always been problems, and when I go they’ve never been so serious, so I got on the Urvan and left. There were some freshmen and sophomores with us. The Urvan was so full that it couldn’t go very fast even though the driver was flooring it.
Since Iguala is a bit far—I don’t know exactly, but maybe two hours—while we were on the road all the kids were calling their compañeros in Iguala. A number of them didn’t answer, their phones rang but no one picked up. A bunch of the kids on the Urvan were making calls and no one answered. Later, when we were coming into Iguala, at the entrance to town, beneath a bridge, I think, we saw an Estrella de Oro bus. We thought that it was the students, at that moment we thought it was their bus.
All the bus’s windows were busted, and the bus was all shot up. But that bus was on the other side of the highway, and when we came into Iguala there were a lot of police trucks patrolling. We passed that bus and then one of the guys in the Urvan shouted for us to stop because he had seen some students. I don’t know if they were there, actually, I didn’t see them out there on the highway. But this other guy had seen five or six. But the Urvan couldn’t turn around there, we had to go up to a place where we could turn around and come back. But we went back and didn’t see anyone. We went back two times and didn’t see them. Then we pulled into an OXXO convenience store and someone called, I don’t know who, to let them know where we were. The guy who was driving is in my class and he wasn’t familiar with Iguala. He got out and asked a taxi driver:
“How do I get to such-and-such place?”
The taxi driver told him more or less how to get there and we drove off. I think we got to the center of Iguala. There was a little park, I don’t know what it was, a small plaza. We stopped again. There were police trucks everywhere. When we saw a police truck approaching we all ducked down so they wouldn’t see us. We were scared they’d arrest us too. They were municipal police. There was one small police car, but I couldn’t see what it was. The majority were municipal police, and one state police truck. I saw a state police truck when we were in the park. It passed right by us in the street. I don’t know how the other Urvan got there, but I heard that they were in Chilpancingo and went from there to Iguala. There in the center some people told us how to get to the place where the students were. And then we got there.
SERGIO OCAMPO, 58, JOURNALIST WITH THE AUTONOMOUS UNIVERSITY OF GUERRERO RADIO STATION AND CHILPANCINGO-BASED STAFF WRITER FOR LA JORNADA. I was about to have dinner when someone close to the mayor called me and said that there were shootings in Iguala.
“Hey, they are shooting at the students,” some journalist friends then told me. I didn’t believe it, really. At that time it was about fifteen minutes to eleven. I started to investigate.
“Yes,” said someone close to the mayor, “there was a shooting. If you want, I can give you the mayor’s number.”
“Sure, great, give me the mayor’s number.” So then I called the mayor and he told me:
“No, nothing is happening. Anyway, those ayotzinapos only come to make trouble. I was at my wife’s annual report, she’s the president of the DIF,” and later we’d learn that she was about to launch her mayoral campaign. Then the mayor said that there were about seven thousand people at the event at one point. But that, due to the students’ supposed shenanigans, only about a hundred stayed behind. He said he had stayed there to dance. So I then repeated my question, but he said:
“No, man, nothing is going on. Everything is fine. No one is injured; no one has been killed. Peace reigns here in Iguala.”
ALEX ROJAS, FRESHMAN. We came from Periférico Sur. The bus driver told us: “Sure, kids,
I know that you all do this every year and it’s no big deal. Let’s go. I’ve got family in Tixtla, but I work here. I want to go for a visit, too. Let’s go, we’ll head over there right now.” The driver seemed eager to take us. We were all talking. We called back to the school to let them know we were on our way back. There were fourteen of us students on that bus, thirteen freshmen and one guy from the committee. So we called and said that we were on our way on an Estrella Roja bus, that we’d be there soon, and that the other buses were behind us somewhere, they had gotten held up a bit. We were driving along Periférico Sur, coming up to the last overpass before heading out of town toward Chilpancingo, when we saw that right beneath the overpass there was an Estrella de Oro bus. There were a bunch of police trucks both in front of the bus and behind it, you could see their siren lights in the distance. We could tell that the bus was an Estrella de Oro because we came within a hundred or a hundred and fifty meters to it at most, before stopping. The bus driver was trying to turn around when, just like that, a police car pulled up. The police made the driver get off the bus and detained him. We also got off the bus.
The police started arguing with us using obscene words.
“What the fuck are you all doing here? Get the fuck out of here or you’ll all be dead.”
“What of it? We can be here, we’re not doing anything wrong.”
And they started getting into it when the compa from the committee said:
“Come on, let’s go, let’s go!” Because there were so many police trucks surrounding the Estrella de Oro, they had it surrounded under the overpass, and so we walked about three blocks in the opposite direction.
ÓSCAR LÓPEZ HERNÁNDEZ, 18, FRESHMAN. Along Periférico Sur, I think. That’s the route we took. And right at the overpass there was an Estrella de Oro and some state police—no, no, they weren’t state police. I don’t know. Maybe they were municipal police. I don’t know what they were. Men with guns. They were already in the bus. The bus was completely surrounded. The police—there were about five police trucks—were all around the bus aiming their guns at it. It was dark. You could only see the siren lights and the police with their flashlights. But we couldn’t see more because right then the police pulled up to where we were and aimed their guns at us. They told us to all get off the bus. We didn’t see anything else that was happening with the Estrella de Oro bus because the police also stopped us at gunpoint there near the overpass. The guy from the committee shouted to us to grab some rocks. We grabbed some rocks and started arguing with the police so they would let us go.
The cops ordered us to drop the stones. They started bullying us, insulting us, and then fired a shot in the air. When they fired the shot, we took off running.
SANTIAGO FLORES, 24, FRESHMAN. So we all squeezed together in the space between the two buses. My lung had collapsed before. I had that medical history. And since we were all bunched together, there was a moment when we all fell down. I didn’t feel anything when I fell, and couple of others fell on top of me, on my back. I remember that the compa Chilango, the Mexico City kid whose face they cut off, was with me. He was next to me and both of us were trying to take cover. Each time the others would push us a little, we’d get closer to the edge, closer to the edge. At one point we were stuck right at the very edge of the bus and if they’d pushed us just a bit we would have been exposed. So Chilango would push back to give us some room, but then they’d push against him again, and there we were. And then I started to. . . . I don’t know what it was, the fear, all the pushing, or just all of it, but I started having trouble breathing. I couldn’t breathe. I remember that I said to my compas that I couldn’t breathe. I told Chupa, Drinker, the guy they call Chupa who was one of my roommates, I told him I couldn’t breathe.
“Hold on, hold on,” he said, “okay, now, sit down, sit down.”
Everyone bunched together without sticking out from behind the buses, and they told me to sit down. There were about fifteen of us, more or less, maybe eighteen of us there. I sat down. I started to feel pain, here in my back, it started to go numb there. I couldn’t get the air in and out of my lungs, like I wasn’t breathing. I tried to breathe through my mouth and the compas told me to hold on. They took off the T-shirt I had wrapped over my face and several compas started fanning me, giving me air. Some of the compas were saying to call an ambulance and shouted out to the cops to call another ambulance because another student was down.
And, you know, during all this, the shootings kept on happening. I was sitting there leaning against the bus and thinking, well, it’s one or the other, either they shoot me or I’m going to collapse here, one of the two. From where I was sitting I could see the police officer aiming at me from behind a light post. It seemed like they were pointing at you and they fired at you but then the bullet went some other way. I remember that I was ducked down and looking out at two cops, and I could see that they were aiming at me but I don’t know if when they fired they pointed off in another direction. At one point I couldn’t breathe well and the compas laid me down. They put some T-shirts here like a pillow and they said to the cops not to be assholes, to call another ambulance, and that they had already killed one of us, why do they want to kill another?
“We don’t have any guns,” I heard them shouting, “we just have rocks, we can only defend ourselves with rocks.” But they stuck out their hands to show that they didn’t even have any rocks and they said, “We’re unarmed.” The ambulance took a long time to arrive. One compa that was with me, they call him Dedos, Fingers, was trying to keep my spirits up, telling me to hold on. I remember that I squeezed his hand and said that we’d both stay strong.
“We’ll get out of this,” he told me, “don’t give up, we’ll make it.” I squeezed his hand and said:
“But I can’t really breathe, I don’t know if I’ll make it, I don’t know.”
A number of the compas that were there with us, we were crying, because, facing it, we knew what was going to happen. I told them that I wasn’t going to make it and they told me no, I needed to hold on, that it wasn’t over yet. I remember them carrying me. They told the cops:
“If you won’t bring your truck, we’ll carry him out and you all take him.” But right when they were going to, when they were going to carry me over to the police, the cops started shooting at us. The police wouldn’t let them carry me out. They started shooting at us, and the compas screamed out to them not to be such assholes.
“Don’t be shits, another student is sick, we just want you all to take him to a hospital, that’s it, if not, he’s going to die here.” Then I heard the police shout that they’d only take one student. So they carried me out just a bit and left me there. A cop grabbed me and dragged me, he grabbed me by the hair and dragged me. He took me around the corner and threw me down. I fell face up. I couldn’t breathe. The cop asked me what was wrong and said stuff like:
“See what happens? You knew what would happen.”
“No, I didn’t know.” How the hell would one know this would happen?
When I was lying on the ground there I could see the police with their guns, the same police that had been aiming at me, they were screaming to the compas that they were fucked, that why had they come?
“Shoot ’em! Shoot ’em! Don’t stop shooting at them! Why do they come here? So that we can teach them not to be such fucking idiots.”
The police grabbed me by the feet and hands and threw me in the bed of the squad pickup. I thought: “Where are they taking me? The hospital?” And then they took off, flooring it, like there was no one in the back, as if I wasn’t there. They took off like that, flooring it. And when they went over speed bumps, or braked, it was the same, and I was smashing around with a bunch of tubes they had in the bed of the truck. They went about two blocks. Since I didn’t see any ambulance or anything, the street was abandoned, I thought: “I guess this is it, because I don’t see any ambulance.”
When I had been back there on the ground I had heard someo
ne say, “The ambulance is here,” but they didn’t put me in an ambulance; they put me in their truck. And after about two blocks I thought to myself: “These cops aren’t taking me to a hospital, not like they’re driving, surely they’re taking me somewhere else, who knows?”
It had been about three blocks when they slammed on the brakes. They braked and I went smashing around amid the tubes again and I thought: “Okay, now what?” And then there were some. . . . I don’t know, paramedics, I don’t know. They had a stretcher. The cops didn’t say anything. And the others they just took me out of the truck and moved away. The cops didn’t ask them anything, where they were taking me, nothing.
I didn’t think that they would disappear me, because none of us thought about that. “They’re arresting me,” I thought to myself, “but they’re not taking me to the hospital, because the way they dragged me along, the way they drove, that’s not the way. . . . I mean, I’m kind of like dying, that’s not the way to treat me, flying around in the bed of a pickup truck with a bunch of tubes.”
The cops didn’t even get out of their truck. The ones who came for me were the nurses, the paramedics. They then lifted my shirt up and immediately asked me what was wrong. They realized that I couldn’t respond and then put an oxygen mask on me and put me in the ambulance.
“Breathe normally,” they said, “otherwise you’re just going to make it worse.”
“But I can’t, I can’t.” That was the only thing I could manage to say. And perhaps they couldn’t understand me since I couldn’t breathe. I spoke but it was like the words, like I couldn’t pronounce them well. I don’t know if they understood me.
JOSÉ ARMANDO, 20, FRESHMAN. We could see how they pulled the compañeros off the third bus. They kicked them and beat them as they stepped off the bus. The compañero who got shot in the hand was on that bus. They beat him as well. And we could see how the police took them to the squad trucks. The municipal police drove off with them.