I Couldn't Even Imagine That They Would Kill Us

by John Gibler

  “We’re soccer players!” The gunmen wanted to board the bus, but they couldn’t open the door. They said:

  “You fuckers are dead!”

  One of the physical trainers, Jorge León Sáenz, screamed that we were a soccer team, pleaded with them to stop shooting, that there were minors, children on the bus. To which they responded that they didn’t give a fuck, and that we were as good as dead. They shot us again, thinking, obviously, that we were Ayotzinapa students. When they realized that we weren’t the people they were looking for, they said:

  “Now we’ve fucked up.” Literally, those exact words, they said: “Commander, we fucked up, they’re soccer players.” Then they went back to their cars. We heard more shots, because they attacked a car that was behind us and another person died.

  We realized that one boy was severely wounded. The doctor went to look at him when, after five or six minutes, he stopped breathing and ceased to exist. There were three of us adults taking care of the wounded. After we had done some first aid, a federal police patrol car arrived. That was about forty minutes after the attack. But the police didn’t want to help us. One of the feds took out his cell phone and asked:

  “How many dead, how many wounded?”

  “We want you to help us, not interview us!”

  “Just wait a bit, an ambulance is on the way.”

  “Let us use your patrol car; we must get the wounded to a hospital.”

  We were going to start putting the wounded in his patrol car.

  “I dare you to put him in my car. I dare you,” the cop said.

  “Can’t you see us?! They attacked us! What we want is help.”

  And still the cops said they went to help us. . . .

  CLEMENTE AGUIRRE, 38, PHYSICAL TRAINER FOR THE AVISPONES. We knew that something was happening in the center of Iguala. We were trying to decide whether or not to get dinner in Iguala or Chilpancingo. The boys wanted to celebrate. They wanted to get tacos.

  “Let’s eat here,” they said.

  “No, let’s head back to Chilpancingo. We can get dinner there,” we said. Once we were on the highway we were all really caught up in the movie Now You See Me. Everything was really shocking, really fast. At first the shots sounded like they were part of the movie, or like firecrackers. The bus kept moving. The first thing I thought was that they were going to come for us. And I managed to say out loud:

  “Kids, keep quiet, don’t make a sound.” But they started groaning with pain. And indeed, the gunmen came up to the bus and told us to open up and get off the bus. Another compañero started to say:

  “Easy, brother, we’re a soccer team.”

  “Get out of the bus, bitches!”

  “Take it easy, brother. We’re a soccer team!”

  “You’re not getting off then? Get the fuck off!”

  So they tried to open the door, but it was jammed; it wouldn’t open. So they shot at the door. We didn’t move. We stayed down on the floor. We just waited. It was impossible to know if they would get on the bus or not. I thought: “If they get on the bus, we’re done.” But as far as us getting off: no way. I wasn’t going to move an inch. They screamed:

  “Now you all are fucked!” They shot at us again. It wasn’t much, a little, I don’t know, maybe ten seconds. They stopped shooting and they left. But we stayed still, nobody moved. After a bit we started to lift ourselves up and climb out through the busted windows on both sides of the bus. When we started to get off the bus, some of the boys took off running, about fifteen of them, pretty much all the boys. They were hiding in the cornfields for a long time, until the ambulances started arriving. We started getting the wounded people off the bus. I pulled out my phone and immediately called for an ambulance. But that ambulance never arrived. I was thinking the attackers might return. And with that thought, I wanted someone to send the police, ambulances, something. No cars passed by on the road for almost half an hour, but even then, none wanted to stop. We screamed out to them:

  “Help!” But they just went slow enough to get a good look and then floored it. We were all covered in blood. The most seriously wounded ones were the bus driver, Coach Pedro, and Miguel. The rest, from all the adrenaline, didn’t even feel their wounds, like Facundo with all the shrapnel in his chest.

  The police and the ambulances took about an hour and a half to arrive. But first, actually, a car did stop, a car with some people from Mexico City, chilangos, who wanted to help. I was with the bus driver. The car stopped and two young women came up, held the driver’s head in their hands so that he wouldn’t choke on his blood. They tried to take care of him. The police arrived and I thought: “Okay, now it’ll be okay.” We said:

  “Let’s get the wounded in the squad cars.” So me and some others, including one of the chilangos, went to take Coach Pedro, who had multiple gunshot wounds, to the police car. We lifted him, carried him, and sat him in a police car.

  “Sit him there in the meantime,” the police officer gave us permission. And then we went for Miguel, we lifted him, and when we were going to put him in the other police car, the cop said:

  “Don’t even think about putting him in my car.” One of the guys helping said:

  “But he’s seriously wounded, we can’t just leave him like this. We have to get him to a hospital.” The cop said:

  “Nope, you’re not putting him in my car. The ambulance is on the way.” I was holding Miguel by the butt and legs; the other guy was holding him by the arms. We had to set him down on the ground, next to the squad car.

  ALEX ROJAS, FRESHMAN. What I’m going to tell you is rarely mentioned in the news. In the news you only heard about the shootings by the mini Aurrera, off of Periférico Norte, but we had a different problem. There were fourteen of us who took the Periférico Sur route out of the bus station. And yes, when we were stopped we went back about three blocks and then ran, because we know that the police can be jerks sometimes, that’s how they are, assholes. We ran and then hid in the woods. For about two hours we were wandering around in the woods, but we couldn’t find any paths. Before that, when we were still on the Estrella Roja bus, we had heard that our compañeros were being shot at near the mini Aurrera. Someone there had called the paisa on the committee who was with us and told him they were under attack and a compañero had already been killed, but they hadn’t identified him yet. We were worried about what was going on there and decided to go back to the mini Aurrera to help them. We ran a good way, but Iguala is big. We decided to wait for the two Urvans that were coming from the school to help. They were bringing sophomores, juniors, and the committee secretary general. They told us they’d look for us by the last overpass before leaving Iguala, the very overpass where the police had stopped the Estrella de Oro bus. They said they’d pick us up there. We went back and crossed over the bridge in groups of four because there were so many police right beneath us. We crossed over and the police didn’t see us. We hid in a patch of woods on the other side of the overpass and waited there.

  After hiding there a long time, we came down the curving ramp that goes down from the overpass to the Periférico. We went down and saw that all the police had left and the Estrella de Oro bus was abandoned there alone. For a second we thought about going over to see what was going on, or what had happened, but then we decided against it, thinking that there could be feds on board the bus, they might have set a trap for us, or something. Instead we decided to walk along the Periférico back toward the center of Iguala. We went walking all along the Periférico, thinking to offer help to our compañeros. And we went walking along the Periférico because the Urvans would have to pass by at some point.

  We crossed over to the other side, facing oncoming traffic on the way out of town toward Chilpancingo, and we saw one of the Urvans driving on the other side, toward Iguala, but they didn’t see us. So the Urvans had already passed on their way to help out where the shootings had occurred.

  We kept walking, and walking, and then ran because two municipal p
olice squad trucks had seen us. We had heard that the police had killed one of our compañeros, and yeah, we screamed at the police to go away. But the two police trucks kept following behind us. No one got out of the trucks. They just stayed back there, following us a good way. Then two more police trucks came and right then, two state government civil protection trucks went by and then turned around to come back and face us. The two civil protection trucks came right up to us and then put their trucks in reverse. And behind us there were four municipal police trucks. We were walking in the middle. And then three more police trucks pulled up behind the civil protection trucks and stopped, forcing those two trucks to stop as well. And we were stuck between all those police, in the middle of the street.

  There were three police trucks and two civil protection trucks in front of us and another four police trucks behind us. You know, that’s a lot of police. There were fourteen of us students, with nothing. We had just been walking. And then the police all got out of their trucks. I thought . . . it passed through my mind that we were fucked. “They’re going to arrest us,” I thought. And since some older schoolmates had told us about getting arrested and how the cops overpower them and beat the crap out of them, I thought: “Okay, well, tough luck, this is as far as we can get.” I thought they would arrest us and take us to jail after beating the shit out of us. I thought: “Well, too bad, when they start beating us, we’ll have to see what we can do.” The police began approaching us, cocking and aiming their guns at us. I had a rock, and a couple of other compañeros did too. The police began shouting at us.

  “Okay, listen here you motherfuckers! Drop your rocks now or you’re all dead! You’re all fucked, you stupid kids, you’re fucked, you can’t escape!”

  “Okay then, do it, if you’re gonna shoot, do it, you already hit one of us, you already killed one of our compañeros, you want another one, fucking do it!”

  And they were aiming at us and coming closer. Luckily, behind us there was a little stream that had footbridges over it every ten meters or so. And just about three steps away, right behind us, there was a thin little wooden footbridge, about a meter wide. We crossed over that bridge without thinking. No one said a word. We just crossed the bridge and went over to the other side. We stayed there. Then the police started crossing the bridges and coming after us. Three more plainclothes police came after us. They picked up rocks and threw rocks at us. We threw the rocks we had back at them. There was a neighborhood behind us. We didn’t even look. We ran up that way because the police were throwing rocks at us. We also fought back with our rocks. But then with only pavement all around, we didn’t have any more rocks. So we ran.

  There was a narrow street right behind us and we all ran down that street until we came to a path that went up a hill, the neighborhood was on a really steep hill. And there were steps, a shit ton of steps, going straight up. And we saw those steps, luckily we found them, and we all ran. And the police ran behind us. When we started running up the steps—they were really steep, almost like a staircase—some of the guys were almost running on all fours. We were racing with fear, you know. All those police trucks with their sirens. . . . And then when the police started running up the steps we heard gunshots. They started firing their weapons, and that made us all the more terrified. We kept going: running, running, running. We started screaming to each other.

  “Faster! Hurry! Let’s go! Don’t fall behind!”

  We were shouting and a woman up above, in a house, was screaming too.

  “Leave them alone,” she was saying. “Those boys aren’t doing anything to you. They aren’t doing anything! Leave them alone, they aren’t doing anything, don’t kill them!”

  We ran up to the top where the woman’s house was and we knocked on her door. We could still see the siren lights and everything down below. The police didn’t run up into the neighborhood, they just shot at us. They only fired about five shots at us at that moment. And we asked the tía to let us hide there.

  “Tía, open up, please let us come in.” And she did. We went inside. She closed her doors and turned off her lights. But four of our compañeros—we were fourteen in total—had kept running, terrified, I guess. They kept running farther up the hill and went straight into the woods up there. They went in the woods and we couldn’t see them. We began shouting out to them.

  “Paisa, come back!” “Chiquilín, Tiny, come back!” We shouted out to them like that but they didn’t care. They were really scared and kept running. We lost contact with them. We went inside the house. I told the paisa from the committee:

  “If you want, I don’t mind, I’ll go look for them, I’ll take the risk.”

  “No, no, no. Stay here. We can’t risk you too.”

  “I don’t mind. I’ll go real quick.”

  “No, just stay here. We’ll go look for them after sunrise. They’ll be okay, they’ll know how to hide too.”

  We stayed there. The tía asked us what we had been doing. We told her. Then she said: “Well, the police are always like that here, always patrolling, supposedly protecting.” We stayed there. We wrote text messages with the compañeros in other parts of the city, the ones we had phone numbers for. We were all scared. It was about eleven or eleven-thirty, I think, when I sent a message to a paisa on the committee:

  “Paisa, where are you? What’s happening where you are?”

  “Hide, don’t separate,” he responded, “they just came to shoot us again, hide, we’ll regroup after sunrise.” That was all he told me. Some of the students back at the school called me and sent me messages like this:

  “Paisa, what’s happening? Compa, how is everyone? How are you? What’s going on? Do you have any info?” I answered some like this:

  “I think they killed more compañeros, I don’t know how many are dead, we’re all spread out across different parts of Iguala, we’re all hiding, we ran wherever we could.” I wrote to one compañero:

  “Honestly, I’m scared, truly, I don’t know what is going to happen because the police are looking for us, they’re patrolling around looking for us, we’ll see what happens if they find us here.” Some of the compas wrote back to me saying:

  “Don’t give up, they won’t find you, hide, be careful, everything will be okay, in the morning it will be different, we’re going to wait, we’re going to go help you all, but we can’t go right now.”

  They said they couldn’t go then because apparently there were police roadblocks set up where the police wouldn’t let any Ayotzinapa students through, they had orders to stop and arrest any kid from Ayotzi trying to go help in Iguala. A number of us were writing texts like that. The tía was also getting worried.

  “I really don’t want any trouble here,” she said.

  “Tía, we’ll go by dawn, don’t worry, nothing is going to happen here,”

  We were lucky: We had a roof over our heads. Other compañeros were out in the woods. And it rained that night, a light rain, but rain nonetheless. And those out in the woods, in the brush, got all wet taking cover there.

  JOSÉ, 18, FRESHMAN. Up ahead we could see municipal police trucks blocking the road. We got off the bus and started to grab rocks and the police officers started insulting us.

  “You’re all gonna die, you fucking animals.”

  One of them pointed his flashlight in our faces and then drew his pistol and pointed it at us. He was about six meters away and aiming straight at our chests.

  “Why are you pointing your gun at us? Why are you aiming at us?”

  Then we backed up. We saw that there were more police coming and took off running toward a hill. We ran off to the left, up a hill, and hid there for about two hours in an abandoned house. After that we went back down to the highway. We walked along the edge of the road and then we noticed that there were a number of police trucks nearby, and we ran back up the hill and then walked along a dirt road. We went over several hills and then went back down to the highway. There was a bridge there and we saw that there were still a
number of police trucks beneath it, about ten or thirteen police trucks. They saw us and started to come after us, so we hid in some brush.

  It started raining. We hid there for quite a while, about an hour. When the police left we decided to follow the highway. One of our compañeros called a member of the committee and asked where they were. So we started heading to a Bodega Aurrera, but we never got there. We were walking straight down the road when we saw two police trucks coming toward us. We were walking on the left side of the road and saw the two trucks coming at us. They were moving fast and the municipal police tried to hit us with their trucks. We were able to recognize one of the police officers then, a woman who is now under arrest. They did that twice. First they tried to run us over with one of the squad trucks, then a bit farther down the road they circled back and tried a second time. Both times we jumped up onto the sidewalk. It was a miracle they didn’t kill us right there because they were really close when the driver jerked the wheel, and by pure reflex were jumped up on the sidewalk.

  We kept walking and then we realized that there were about eight police trucks coming toward us. We ran about five hundred meters when the police and a truck from the public prosecutor’s office all boxed us in. Seeing that we were trapped, we ran to the left, toward some houses, and started to defend ourselves against those eight truckloads of police and some state police too. They started throwing rocks at us, and we threw rocks back at them. And that’s when the cops started shooting at us. We ran toward some alleys and then up some steps. We ran up like two hundred steps and when there were no more steps we kept running up a hillside. The police kept after us, shooting at us. We knew they were shooting to kill, because when they fired a few of us heard the bullets whizzing by, the screeching of the bullets cutting the air. We could hear that whistle of the bullets passing right by us. We kept running up the hill, and the police stopped following us but we kept running. We didn’t stop for anything. Sometime around midnight, we were exhausted and stopped for a while. A woman let us stay on the patio outside of her house. We spent the night there.