by John Gibler
JORGE, 20, FRESHMAN. After a while we heard them screaming. There was a little shop there and I saw a cop when he was throwing a compañero to the ground and then beating him and others once they were on the ground. And when the police took them, they made them keep their hands behind their heads. The police put them all in the squad trucks. I peeked through a window and could see where the police were putting several compañeros in the trucks and then took them away. I looked through the window quickly, because we could also see that in front of us two police kept aiming at us from behind a light post. That’s why we only looked quickly through the windows, because we thought that if we didn’t move away from the windows quickly then those two police would shoot us.
COYUCO BARRIENTOS, 21, FRESHMAN. We were all bunched together toward the back of the first bus, by the bathroom. Where I was taking cover, the window was broken, all cracked, with just one hole. I wanted to peek out through there to see if we could get out yet. But there were two police still aiming at us from behind, near the third bus. I could see that the police had some compañeros lying facedown on the ground. They had arrested them. And they were taking them inside some building. And they were still aiming at us, and shooting. The compañeros who were stuck between the two buses would shout out to the police that we were students, that we were unarmed, and that we didn’t even have any more rocks: “We’re unarmed!” But instead of talking or negotiating with us, they just kept shooting. Whenever the compañeros tried to videorecord the police, the cops would shine a flashlight at the compañeros’ cell phones to make it impossible to see the cops’ faces, to keep from being filmed.
IVÁN CISNEROS, 19, SOPHOMORE. We saw it when the police forced the students off the third bus and made them lie facedown on the ground with their hands like this, behind their heads. A bunch of them weren’t wearing their T-shirts and the police made them lie down like that on the ground. And there we were watching, feeling powerless, angry. We couldn’t do anything. We thought it was strange when they started putting the compañeros into the backs of the police squad trucks: they started to pick up all the spent bullet casings and clean the blood off the ground. Then a cop came up and said to us:
“Okay, leave now, get in your bus and leave.” The driver got in the Costa Line that was in front and started the motor. We told him no, leave the bus where it is, don’t move it. We were afraid that if he moved it the police would come for us. We screamed:
“No!” A compañero ran into the bus and grabbed the keys away from the driver. And so we stayed there a bit longer.
URIEL ALONSO SOLÍS, 19, SOPHOMORE. A bit later three big police trucks arrived. They were also municipal police, but the color of their squad trucks was different. It was a bright marine blue. A normal Iguala police truck is a Ranger with a double cabin. And the ones that arrived later were the really big Ram trucks. But they were municipal police. And they got out of their trucks dressed all in black, with gloves and ski masks and the municipal police shields. One of them got out and said:
“Let’s negotiate.” We told him to take off his ski mask if he wanted to talk with us. So he took it off and walked closer. He had short, frizzy hair, ragged eyelashes, and a mustache. He was tall with slightly dark skin. He told us to turn ourselves in.
“Alright guys,” he said, “let’s make a deal. You all are going to turn yourselves in. We’re going to take the buses. We’re going to pick up the bullet shells, and we’ll act like nothing happened here.” But no, that couldn’t be. They had already shot a compañero. And they had arrested the other compas.
“No,” we told him, “our compañeros are on their way. We’re staying here.”
“If you don’t leave,” he said, “you’ll regret having come to Iguala for the rest of your lives. If you don’t leave, we’ll be coming back for you later.” And then he left. He signaled for the rest of the police to leave. That was when the police started to get back in their trucks. They got the truck that was all smashed and shot up and took it too. They took everything, even the cars back behind the buses where they had arrested the compañeros.
We saw how they forced the compañeros from the third bus into their trucks and took them. They all left. When I first saw what was going on back there, I saw the compañeros all lying facedown on the ground. And the bus driver was there. It was hard, because whenever we tried to peek around the edge of the bus the police would shoot at us. So we would take shelter back behind the bus and couldn’t see much. But we could see how the police had all the compañeros facedown on the ground. We thought that we’d all be arrested. That’s what I was telling the freshmen, not to get bummed out, that the compas would be arrested and probably released the following day.
We stayed put. The cops left. And then cars started to circulate again. Before that no cars passed by at all. The streets were desolate. People started to come up and ask us what had happened and we told them. We started putting a bunch of rocks around the bullet shells so we could take photos of them and register the evidence. The seats on the third bus were covered in blood. The compa Bernardo’s ID was covered in blood. The bus’s tires were blown out and the windshield was covered in blood. We didn’t know what the police had done to them. Our compañeros from the school arrived as well as some local Iguala teachers to offer help. We called the press. We thought that if the press arrived we’d feel safer.
CARLOS MARTÍNEZ, 21, SOPHOMORE. A police officer came up to talk to us. He started telling us to turn ourselves in, to throw out our weapons, and who knows what else, that we were screwed. He wanted someone to come out and tell him what had gone down, what happened. Well, we said:
“Fuck that. If you take one of us, you’ll have to take us all. So if you really want us, come get us.” But no, they didn’t.
ERNESTO GUERRERO, 23, FRESHMAN. They started telling us: “Ok, assholes, you’re all going to leave. Get on your bus and leave, otherwise you’ll hear from us.” But how were we supposed to leave if the bus was all shot up? We decided to stay because people from various organizations, from the CETEG teachers union, from here at the college, were on their way. And just to give you an idea, about an hour and a half after the police started shooting at us, our compañeros from the school arrived.
In that same hour and a half, did the army arrive, even though their base is located just meters away from where we were attacked? Not a single soldier came: nor the state police, nor state detectives, nor the army, nor the federal police, nor the marines. How we would have liked to see all those uniforms that are always in the streets intimidating people! But no, not even with a military base just meters away from where the police attacked us and shot at us.
We were there for about an hour or so when our compañeros from here at Ayotzinapa arrived in Iguala. Reporters from Morelos state showed up, but not a single detective honored us with an appearance, nor did anyone from the army. Someone told me that there was a detective on the way. And I went about looking for bullet shells. The municipal police picked up their bullet shells after firing, but even so they left several of them, including an unfired bullet. I told the reporters to take photographs of the evidence, and they did. I put marks around the shells so that when the detectives arrived, supposedly, they could find the shells easily. We students tried to cordon off the area and protect it as best we could. We put rocks and sticks around the bullet shells and other evidence so that no one would pick them up or step on them, so when the detectives arrived. . . . But they never came. An hour and a half went by, if not more, and they never showed up.
COYUCO BARRIENTOS, 21, FRESHMAN. When I didn’t see any more movement outside I went up toward the front of the bus. From there I couldn’t see anything either. Then some police passed by in front of the bus and I threw myself back down between the seats. They had seen us. They walked up to the door, but didn’t get on the bus. We were all just waiting for the moment when it would be our turn to get the shit kicked out of us. But the police stayed over on the street corner. They weren’t shoot
ing anymore. When they started leaving, I think that was when they also drove off with the compañeros from the third bus. Those of us inside the first bus were still just waiting for it to be our turn. But then the police all started leaving. Then we didn’t hear anything. Everything went quiet. The street was calm, in silence. And we saw that some guys were passing by on motorcycles. They seemed to be just passing by, looking around to see what had happened. We asked them if there were still police around. They said no. We asked them if they could check in front of the bus, and they did, they did us that favor and said that there was no one there.
That was when we started to get off the bus. We all met up between the two buses. We got together and checked to see who was injured, who was okay, who was missing. We talked about what had happened and where the others could be. We went to look through the other buses. Some students stayed back to keep watch at the street corners. We saw all the bullet shells on the ground. And the police had picked up a lot of the shells trying to cover up what they had done. We agreed not to move a single shell. That instead of moving them we would put some kind of marker around them like a rock so we could protect the evidence.
The compañeros were taking photos and filming. Some people started to arrive, including some parents, but they started to walk all over the evidence. So we made a human chain to protect the area. More people started to come. Someone called the local media in Iguala, but some of the journalists said they didn’t have permission to report on the story. So reporters from Chilpancingo started to arrive. And a few local reporters managed to show up. A bit later the compañeros from Ayotzinapa who had come to help us arrived. They came in an Urvan. And some others came. At that moment we didn’t know anything about what had happened to the students in the other two buses. We all started to talk. What’s going on here? Are you okay? Is anyone else wounded? We started to talk about everything that had just happened and about the compañeros that the police had arrested. There was a lot of blood in the third bus. That bus was all torn up, all destroyed. We didn’t know where the drivers had gone. We started to look for information about the compañeros the police had taken, about the different police squad trucks that were there during the attacks.
The press arrived and started gathering information. Some compañeros went looking for all the cell phone videos to gather them together. Everyone was still scared. No one had expected this. Sure, we all talked about how at the moment of truth we’d all fight back, but fight back with fists. No one had imagined that something like that could happen, and least of all from the municipal police. Something that I thought was really strange was that, when the police were still there, a squad truck arrived that looked just like a federal police truck in every way. But it had the “M” from “municipal” on the door. I couldn’t see the tailgate. But it said POLICE and had the national symbol and the “M” from “municipal.” But it was identical to a federal police truck. The police that came in that truck all wore masks like the feds. When that truck arrived all the other police had like a meeting, and then left. That seemed strange to me. I didn’t understand that. In my opinion, it would seem that those were the sicarios, the hit men.
Since we were all gathered together, we started to check in with everyone there in order to try and lift our spirits. I was with my cousin, Daniel Solís. Well, he’s not really my actual cousin, but a friend. I’m a friend of the family. I’d met him years before, before coming here to the college. And then here at the school our friendship, our brotherhood, got much stronger. We were always together. We did everything together. Before we came here his family had asked me to take care of him, since I’m a bit older.
PEDRO RENTERÍA LUJANO, 60, FOUNDER AND TECHNICAL DIRECTOR OF THE THIRD DIVISION SOCCER TEAM THE AVISPONES (HORNETS) OF CHILPANCINGO, GUERRERO. It was precisely that day, September 26, that we began the 2014–2015 third division soccer season. At eight-thirty that night we played against Iguala. The game ended. We won 3-1. After the game, a former player I had coached came up to say hello, and at that very moment got a call: he shouldn’t go back to his neighborhood because there were gunshots. When he told me that, I said:
“You know what? We’d better get going. It’s better we leave, because I’ve got all these kids, a lot of kids with me, and we don’t want them to get hurt.”
We left Iguala, or rather, we tried to leave but couldn’t get on the fast lane precisely because they were attacking young people there. It took us about ten minutes to get on the highway. Then, after we got in the fast lane to get on the highway toward Chilpancingo, we were stopped for about ten minutes. On the outskirts of Iguala there was a police roadblock. They pulled the car ahead of us aside and let us through. We kept going. There was some roadwork about five kilometers outside of Iguala; traffic was reduced to one lane and we were stuck there for another while. There the bus driver asked the driver of another bus what was going on. That other driver said:
“Nothing, everything’s okay,” and so we kept going.
About ten kilometers on the way from Iguala toward Chilpancingo, at about ten minutes before the stroke of midnight would end the twenty-sixth, we started hearing bursts of machine-gun bullets striking the bus. Hearing the shots, the bullets, I shouted to the boys:
“Gunshots! Get down on the floor!” And that is what all of us, without exception, did. But in the gunfire we received from both the right and left sides of the bus, a shot hit the driver: a bullet hit him behind the ear and lodged in his brain. He lost control of the bus. He let go of the steering wheel and the bus went about thirty meters from where they shot us and came to a rest about ten meters off the road, tilting into a ditch.
When the bus came to a stop we were in front of the men who had been shooting at us from the right side; they began shooting at us from straight on. That’s where they hit me twice: one bullet went into my abdomen, and the other into my liver. And they hit our physical trainer: one bullet grazed his eye and pierced his nasal septum, and the other bullet broke his left arm. One of the gunmen had his face covered, but the other one didn’t. They were not wearing police uniforms. I only saw two of them, but there were definitely more than ten of them, easy. Taking into account the machine-gun bursts they fired at us, let’s say there were eight on one side and eight on the other side, something like that. They shouted at us to open the door. The only one of us who got up was the physical trainer. He screamed out to them:
“We’re a soccer team!”
They responded: “Open the door you son of a bitch!”
“I can’t, I can’t! You left me blind,” the trainer said, “I’ve got a gunshot in my eye! I can’t see!”
But even so, he did try to open the door, but it was stuck. So the gunmen started to strike the windshield and the door windows with their rifle butts to try to get inside. Luckily . . . I don’t know what happened, if it was God’s protection, if it was because we were all quiet, speechless, and they thought they’d killed us all, or if it was because the trainer had told them we were a soccer team, I don’t know what it was that made them stop shooting at us, made them decide not to come on board and massacre us. They went off running straight into the darkness. All I could see, just barely, was the reflections from the lights on one of their trucks that they had left with the motor running and the lights on. They went running, shooting at the cars on the highway. Those poor people screamed as the bullets hit their cars. The killers left.
After that we all tried to get off the bus. We started climbing out through the broken windows, because that was the only way out. Some tried to ask for help on the highway, for someone to take the wounded to the hospital in Iguala: fifteen of us had been shot, out of the twenty-two aboard the bus. The amount of damage we took from the shooting, in my opinion, was minimal, because when they shot at us through the windshield that’s when they hit everyone and that’s when they killed one of the players, David Josué García Evangelista. He was in the aisle and raised his head; the bullet went through his neck. The team’s d
octor helped us take care of the wounded boys. We got out of the bus, but the federal police and the ambulances took a long time to give us help. They got to us around ten minutes before two in the morning, and we were only a ten-minute drive from Iguala. They didn’t want to help us. I called the president of the team we played against in Iguala, Humberto Chong Soto.
“They shot us,” I said, “there are a bunch of wounded people, probably a few people killed, please send me ambulances.”
“I’ll send them right away,” he said.
But later I was able to speak with him and he told me that the ambulances didn’t want to go, they were afraid to go out there to where we’d been shot. So, that led to us spending so much time out there wounded and bleeding. The ambulances took me and several of the boys to the hospital at around two in the morning. We arrived at the Iguala General Hospital and that was where they operated on us. They started operating on me at around three in the morning. The operation lasted until six in the morning, and I was in intensive care for twelve days. After they discharged me from the hospital, I came back home to Chilpancingo to continue treatment and rehabilitation. Now, on doctor’s orders, I can walk and jog.
FACUNDO SERRANO URIOSTEGUI, 41, CHILPANCINGO MUNICIPAL SPORTS DIRECTOR. We left at a quarter to eleven. The game went from eight to ten. We played both halves. The final score was 3-1 in favor of the Avispones. The players then went to the locker rooms to change and we were waiting for the referees to finish the game certificate and give it to us. That took about half an hour or forty minutes. By the time the boys had changed and the referees gave us the certificate, it was about ten-forty.
We got on the bus. Since we had traveled to Iguala earlier that day and we hadn’t had any rest, we were all a bit tired. As soon as we got on the road, the driver put on a movie. We were all seated, watching the TV, with the curtains all drawn. We were watching the movie. We were tired; some people were sleeping. All of a sudden we felt the glass and heard shots. Some people were hit immediately. The bus went off the road and came to a stop, leaning to the right. All the bullet shells were out on the highway. They had been waiting for us. We screamed: