by John Gibler
We made the list and started adding everything up and there were like fifty-seven compañeros missing, or more, sixty-four I think were the ones missing at that point. Time went by as we tried to see who was really missing. We knew that some compañeros had received permission to go home and they were in their houses. There were some other compañeros who had stayed back at the school to finish up things they had to do, and they didn’t go with us to Iguala. That’s when the number went down to fifty-seven compañeros.
We stayed there at the courthouse pretty much all that day. Teachers and other people went to support us; they took us food and we ate there. We were all afraid, we didn’t want to be there in Iguala. With all that had happened, we did not want to be there. We knew that even with all these police around, it was not safe at the courthouse; they can show up anywhere and strafe us with machine guns again.
So then the human rights people arrived and asked us if we could tell them what had happened. Four of us went into an office and started writing down everything that had happened, each of us on our own. We were there working on that when they came looking for me and another compa. They had to go inspect the different locations where everything had happened and they wanted a compañero who had been near the overpass where the other students were attacked, and another compañero who had been near the mini Aurrera where pretty much the worst attack happened, the machine-gun attack against the compañeros. They wanted us to go with them.
I asked a paisa from the committee if I could go.
“Yes, you can,” he said, “you all can go in just a moment; eat something and then you can go.”
We went with another paisa from the committee. We went to the curving ramp that leads down to the highway that goes under the overpass, but the bus wasn’t there anymore. Someone had taken it. The only thing we found was a bunch of broken glass. And in the distance it looked like the grass was all smashed flat and there were a bunch of cut tree branches. One of the human rights guys asked:
“Why did they cut these branches? Did they torture guys with these? Did they beat them with these as clubs, or what happened?”
The lowest branches were all cut and all the sticks were lying around.
PVC, 19, FRESHMAN. We went to the state courthouse there in Iguala to give our testimonies. We got there; they told us to all go in and give our testimonies. Then some people from Iguala went to support us, they took us food. More compañeros kept coming, and kept coming. They were among the ones who had been all dispersed throughout the city hiding; the state police were going around picking them up. And we asked about the compañeros that had been taken away in the police trucks, if they were really under arrest, or at some police station. And they told us no, that the compañeros were not under arrest and that they seemed to be disappeared. They said the police trucks that took them had never arrived at the police station to make a formal arrest. We tried to call them on their cell phones . . . but no, no one answered, all the calls went straight to voice mail, straight to voice mail, or the phones were turned off. A little later the secretary started moving around, doing what he had to do, investigating what had happened with the students who had been arrested and the ones we hadn’t heard anything from.
That’s how we spent the hours. The compañeros out there had been disappeared, and we wanted to get out of that place, because it was truly horrifying what we had lived through there.
CHAPARRO, 20, FRESHMAN. We got the news sometime around noon. They told us that they had just found a compañero, and he had been tortured. They beat him, took out his eyes, and cut off his face and ears. That is when the terror hit us. No one knew what to do. Around then we also realized that some parents were starting to arrive asking where their sons were. It was simply too sad to tell them that we didn’t know where they were, or that they had been killed. We couldn’t do it; we didn’t know how, more than anything, how to tell them. What we would say was: “Forgive us, ma’am, but we don’t know your son,” or “I don’t know him.”
The truth was that we did know him, but we didn’t want to tell his parents that he couldn’t be found. It’s unsettling, it is so sad to tell them that their sons are nowhere to be found, and their sons are our compañeros. One woman, who is from my hometown and a relative of mine, asked me about her son. The woman had just lost her husband. We really didn’t want to tell her that her son wasn’t there, that we didn’t know where he was. The woman, upon realizing that her son wasn’t there with us, went outside to be alone, not to be around the parents who were finding their sons. She stood apart from everyone else. She took out a lime and cut it. She is diabetic. She went to cut open a lime and drink its juice.
JOSÉ ARMANDO, 20, FRESHMAN. We got back to the college. A lot of parents were here at the school; everybody’s parents were already here waiting on the basketball court. Many of them found their sons, they found us. The parents of the disappeared wept that day when they saw that their sons hadn’t come back with us. They kept asking us questions.
“And my son? And my son?”
“We don’t know, tía, the police took them, but they weren’t at any jail or anything.”
That’s when the nighmare here began, the nightmare of the disappeared compañeros. But I’m going to tell you something: in spite of that we’re still here. A lot of compañeros grabbed their things and went back to their houses that very day.
“I’m leaving,” they said. “What can I do here? I survived one nightmare, why would I look for another one? No.”
They went back home and to this day haven’t returned. My parents also told me to go back home.
“What would you both do,” I asked them, “if I were disappeared? Because I was there too and I could have been disappeared just like my compañeros. They could have taken me. What would you all do? Would you really want my compañeros, all of them, to just walk away like nothing happened, just like that?”
Because, you know, we all got along well. We were like brothers, sharing everything, working together, laughing together, and fucking around. Sure, sometimes we fought, but they are our brothers because that’s how we’re taught to share here. And so I’m going to stay in the struggle. I’m never going to forget my compañeros who fell that night, or those who are disappeared. You can’t say that they are dead; they are not dead, and they are going to live in our hearts forever. And if the government thought that it would be able to do away with this school just like that, if they thought that this would terrorize us even more and lead to the school being lost, well, they were very wrong. The government is making a big mistake.
COYUCO BARRIENTOS, 21, FRESHMAN. When we got to the school, I went to Dani’s room. His mom and dad were there. I couldn’t find the words to tell them the news. I didn’t want it to be me who would confirm what had happened to them. When his parents saw me . . . his mom burst into tears. The only thing I could do was to embrace her and ask for her forgiveness for not taking care of him like we would have wished. When things calmed down a bit, his dad asked me if I was going to continue or leave the school. I had been thinking since that night that no matter what happened, I was going to continue.
“Think about it hard,” he told me, “what is about to happen is not going to be easy.”
“Maybe I won’t stay here for myself,” I answered, “but I’m going to stay here for Dani. He didn’t deserve what they did to him. And also for my compañeros who are disappeared. We have to find them.”
EMILIANO NAVARRETE, FATHER OF JOSÉ ÁNGEL NAVARRETE GONZÁLEZ, 18, FRESHMAN. I was at home, resting. It was around ten-thirty at night. My wife would usually call our boy at night. In fact, he had gone to the house just the day before. I remember talking with him; I liked the changes I was seeing in him. Like any eighteen-year-old, sometimes he doesn’t want to help with tasks at home. It’s natural for an eighteen-year-old. Well, it seemed like he was trying to change some things in his life. He would come home from the college and start sweeping, or cleaning the furniture. That day I gave h
im a hug and I said:
“You know what, son? I’ll come looking for you no matter where you are, I’ll find you.” I never thought that it would be the next day. I never thought that something would happen, that they would be attacked in Iguala. Well, it was the day of twenty-sixth. As I said, my wife usually called him. I was in the living room watching TV. Then I heard our son Pepe tell my wife that the police were attacking them.
“Hand me the phone,” I said to my wife, “let me talk to him.” She passed me the phone and I said to Pepe, my son: “Pepe, what’s happening?” You could hear a bunch of screaming through the phone, a lot of boys shouting.
“Dad, the police here in Iguala are attacking us. They shot my friend in the head, he’s lying in the street and something smells really bad.”
“Son, try to hide, to escape.”
What the smell was, I don’t know what he was referring to. Maybe tear gas? Or maybe the bus tires had been blown out? I never imagined that the police were attacking them with guns! I thought the police were attacking them maybe with clubs or tear gas, that’s what I thought!
Then that was it. The call was cut off, and I didn’t hear anything else. But it didn’t even pop into my mind that they were being attacked with firearms. That night a car from the college came driving through the streets here, through Tixtla, announcing that there were problems at the school, that the boys had been attacked. But they didn’t say anything about guns. I thought that the police . . . just wanted to stop them from taking the buses that they were going to use for October second.
So the hours went by and we didn’t know what was happening. It wasn’t till the next day that a number of us parents decided to go to Iguala to find out what was happening. About five of us got togeher before dawn and left for Iguala. I got to Iguala and went to the courthouse thinking that my boy would be there. I got to the courthouse and saw a whole bunch of kids there. I think something like a hundred and fifteen students were in Iguala that night.
I still hadn’t realized that they had been attacked with firearms! So I started asking for my son. I saw that some of them were already giving testimony in some offices and others were outside. So, since they were freshmen, I guess they didn’t all know each other that well; they had just been there for two months. And since they get divided into sections, it isn’t so easy for them all to get to know each other so quickly. I asked a young man if he had seen my son and he asked me what my son’s name is.
“Well, his name José Ángel,” I said, “but we call him Pepe.” The boys there said no.
“But, go look inside,” they told me, “there are a bunch of boys inside.”
I walked all throughout the place. Then they told me that some of the boys had been arrested and taken to the city jail, a place they call Barandillas.
So I left. I went into Iguala, toward the center of Iguala, near the bus station. I went walking through the streets thinking that they could be around there lost, or hiding inside a house. That’s more or less what I imagined. I didn’t know, I still didn’t understand the reality of what had happened. I looked for him all day. I looked together with another compañero. We looked all through the center of Iguala, but we didn’t find anyone, nothing. We went back to the courthouse where all the boys were. There were some people telling the secretary if they wanted to go back to the college, the ones who were safe. They said they would get some buses and a police convoy to guard them back to Ayotzinapa. I didn’t want to return to the school until they brought our sons back to us. But the secretary of the students here said that he was going. And so we all came back.
My thought was to stay there until they gave us our sons, and then we could all come back. The right thing to do, I think, was stay there. We should have stayed there until they brought us our sons. The government would have looked for them that very afternoon. For me, that was something I never liked, I’ll tell you, that we came back to the school then.
The following day was a Sunday. Two or three other parents and I starting going out looking in the hillsides and along the highways. We drove all around in a small pickup looking for our sons. We had heard that some of the students had run into the hillsides—at that point we had realized that they had been attacked with guns! We knew that the government had straight up shot at them with machine guns, maybe they meant to wipe them out with all those bullets.
We didn’t understand why they had done it. Today we still have many questions, so many questions. We have looked for our sons. The first two weeks we looked for them on our own. We were just parents looking without any results, alone, looking along the highways, in the wilderness. Sometimes we went out to where there are caves or abandoned mines and things like that. After about two weeks the federal police came and started looking with us. Well, first we met with the federal government in Chilpancingo. That’s where we held the meetings. There we told them that, as parents, we wanted to participate in the searches and to be able to use the information that we had to guide the searches with the federal police accompanying us. Besides the marches, I’ve preferred to look for information. I feel much better going out to look for my boy, for all the boys, wherever they may be. That has kept me a bit stronger.
We have gone so many places, often with the federal police. When we would get information we would go out with them. We would go out to the places we’d heard they might be, but sadly without positive results. A lot of people take advantage of us, take advantage of our pain, giving us false information, like those people who read tarot cards. One of them told me once. . . . I didn’t know anything about those kinds of people, but I realized what was going on when he asked me for money to give me information. And believe me, in such desperation I fell for it. He told me that our boys were in Iguala, near the hill known as La Parota. I remember going out there with the help of the federal government. I went out there to a house where our boys supposedly could be found. The tarot card guy said he’d send me a text message when I got near there to give me a more precise location. None of it was true. I never received a text message from that person. The only thing I know is that he took advantage of our situation to take from us the little bit of money that we don’t even have.
I’ve gone on so many search expeditions and marches. I’ve gone to other states to inform people about what’s happening so that they can keep supporting us in our demand for our sons. Because here we know that the government knows perfectly well where they are, because it was the government that took them. They have offered I think a million pesos for information. And how is it that no one knows anything? I can tell you that no one knows because the government has known from the beginning. The government knows where the government took them: that’s why there is no information! If it had been, as they say here, the bad guys who took them, trust me, we’d know by now. Someone would have claimed that money the government is offering, or would have demanded a ransom. The government puts up a large amount of money asking for information because it knows that no one is going to claim that money because the government already knows everything. They know where the boys are. That night that they did everything: it was completely planned and coordinated. The municipal police coordinated with federal police and soldiers to cordon off the city and not let anyone escape.
They were the ones in control that night, no one else. So I always come to the conclusion that the government knows where they are. And what pisses me off, believe me, is that we don’t even know why they’re keeping them. The government says that supposedly they were confused for a criminal group called Los Rojos, The Reds. Listen: if a crimminal group had really been on board those buses they would not have been unarmed. Please! Those people are always armed, they would have killed some police officers! It is completely false to try and link our sons to those types of people. This government has not taken us seriously. From the beginning they have not investigated anyone. They’ve only released the testimony of that thug Cepillo who says they went to burn the students in Cocula.
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nbsp; I didn’t hear his testimony. I was not in the room listening to his testimony. Not one of our lawyers was in the room listening when they made that person testify. Only those who were there know what happened.
How can we believe them? How are we going to trust them when it is the very same government that is doing this very horrible damage to us?
We absolutely do not believe what the government says. They want to wash their own hands of all this using other people, using people who are outlaws.
We want truly serious results. We know that our sons are alive. There was no huge fire like that person says. Some of the boys say they were still being chased at three in the morning. They were just trying to get back together with their compañeros.
So when did they supposedly start this big fire? That night it rained.
Where did they get enough wood at that hour of night? The residents of Cocula say there is no wood to be found around that area. How was it possible? It’s not credible. The residents say plainly that there was no huge fire! They had burned people in previous years, but not that night. The government is lying: it is that simple.