I Couldn't Even Imagine That They Would Kill Us

by John Gibler

  Though it was neither an isolated event nor the largest killing or mass disappearance in recent years, something about the horror unleashed that night in Iguala removed the government’s mask of repose. The scale of the violence: that police killed six, wounded more than 40, and disappeared 43 people. The theatrical cruelty: that they cut off a student’s face. And then that those who suffered the attacks were mostly freshmen college students from one of the most combative colleges in the country. That the attackers were mostly uniformed police officers. That within days the mayor of Iguala, his wife, and the police chief—all suspects in the attacks—went into hiding. That when the state and federal governments finally started to search for the missing students they did so by looking in the ground. That the government so quickly then found mass graves, and that the remains found there were not those of the students. That the government treated the mothers and fathers searching for their sons with ineptitude and disregard.

  Something about the events in Iguala—the combination of horror, state culpability, and well-crafted official incompetence—struck at the very core of a people exhausted by violence and government depravity. Anger was everywhere palpable. Outcry rose from nearly every sector of society. Something appeared to break. Mexico, in early November 2014, was a nation in pain. And all of the protests gave voice to one resolute demand: Bring them back alive.

  By late September 2014, before the attacks, Mexico was supposed to be in the grip of its Moment. President Enrique Peña Nieto of the Institutional Revolutionary Party had overseen sweeping education and energy reforms and the arrest of Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, Mexico’s “most wanted” man (he would later escape, get arrested again, and then be extradited to the United States in January 2017). The gruesome images of murder that defined the administration of Felipe Calderón from the National Action Party (2006–2012) no longer dominated the daily newspapers. Time magazine put Peña Nieto on the cover of its February 2014 issue with the headline “Saving Mexico.” The mid-September news of an army massacre in Tlatlaya, State of Mexico, led to scandal and the quick arrest of at least a few of the implicated soldiers, something that never occurred on Calderón’s watch. From a distance, on the surface, it might have seemed that Mexico’s long nightmare of violence was waning.

  President Peña Nieto’s inauguration on December 1, 2012, marked the return of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) after 12 years of National Action Party (PAN) rule. The PRI had governed Mexico from 1929 to 2000 without interruption. Presidents held one six-year term and then stepped off stage. The incoming president turned a blind eye to the previous administration’s crimes and the outgoing president abandoned national political life. This system allowed Mexico’s elite to overcome murderous infighting while constructing a state apparatus capable of silencing all opposition through bribery, electoral sleight-of-hand, and bloody repression. The president stood atop a pyramidal power structure in which every lower level reproduced the pyramid. Governors, for example, bowed to the president nationally, but ruled as mini-presidents in their states.

  For decades the system withstood all challenges. In 1968, then-president Gustavo Díaz Ordaz used the army to repress the student movement, massacring hundreds during a protest in Tlatelolco Plaza in Mexico City on October 2. Thousands joined clandestine armed revolutionary movements following the massacre. The government sought to annihilate the guerrilla organizations using death squads, forced disappearances, and torture throughout the 1970s and 1980s. In 1988, opposition candidate Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas mounted a serious electoral challenge, and the PRI responded first with election fraud and later with a killing spree of members of the Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD) that Cárdenas and others created after the elections. The PRI government sent the army and then paramilitary death squads to repress the Zapatista insurgency that began on January 1, 1994.

  But the cumulative power of the challenges gained unprecedented momentum in the 1990s, and under such pressure the political pact dissolved. On March 23, 1994 one or maybe two gunmen shot the PRI’s then–presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio in the head, in public, on camera. By the end of the following administration (1994–2000) the PRI was thoroughly discredited and reviled. Vicente Fox of the conservative PAN won the election, breaking the PRI’s 71-year reign. Fox’s six-year term was marked by legislative stalemates, corruption scandals, and widespread protest. The 2006 elections became mired in allegations of fraud, and PAN candidate Felipe Calderón took office with the weakest mandate in Mexican history. He quickly militarized the country in a “war on drug traffickers.” During his term more than 120,000 people were murdered and at least another 23,000 were reported “disappeared.” Massacres and mutilated bodies displayed on roadsides became quotidian headlines. Federal and state prosecutors investigated a mere 2 to 5 percent of the murders. In 2008, Jorge Juárez Loera, the military commander in charge of Operation Chihuahua, told reporters: “Instead of saying another dead person, you should say one less criminal.” Within a year, the main city under his command, Ciudad Juárez, would become the murder capital of the world.

  Throughout the PRI’s reign, Guerrero always ranked among the states most active in opposition movements and government repression. In the late 1960s and early ’70s, Lucio Cabañas and Genaro Vázquez—both Ayotzinapa graduates—took arms in Guerrero following police repression of their social movements. The Mexican army killed and disappeared hundreds of people in an attempt to annihilate guerrilla movements in that era. In the late 1980s and early ’90s, hundreds of grassroots PRD activists were killed in Guerrero. In the 1990s, state police massacred 17 campesinos and wounded 21 during a roadside ambush in Aguas Blancas. Then-governor Ruben Figueroa resigned amidst scandal after unedited police video footage of the massacre was leaked to the press.

  Ángel Aguirre Rivero of the PRI stepped in as Governor Figueroa’s replacement. While Aguirre was in office, the army massacred 11 people suspected of belonging to a guerrilla movement while they slept in a schoolhouse in the small indigenous community of El Charco. Aguirre, now with the PRD, won state elections in 2011 and took office again in April of that year. On December 12, 2011, Ayotzinapa students blocked the Mexico City–Acapulco federal highway in Chilpancingo to pressure Aguirre to increase the school’s admissions quota and the daily food budget. Within minutes, plainclothes state police opened fire on the protest and killed two students: Jorge Alexis Herrera Pino and Gabriel Echeverría de Jesús. No one has been punished for the killings.

  Every year 140 students come to the all-male the Raúl Isidro Burgos Rural Teachers College in Ayotzinapa from some of the most economically battered places in the hemisphere. They live on campus but pay no tuition or board. (While Ayotzinapa is an all-male college, other rural teachers colleges are all female, and others are coed.) The state government provides a meal budget that amounts to $3.70 per student per day (increased after the police killings in 2011), and hence a diet that seldom strays from eggs, rice, and beans. The first-year dorm rooms are windowless concrete boxes with no furniture, where students sleep as many as eight to a room, laying out cardboard and blankets for bedding. Some fasten empty plastic milk crates to the walls to use as dressers.

  Though the buildings are in need of repair or reconstruction (a 2012 National Human Rights Commission report stated that many of the dwellings “violated the students’ human rights” and “were not fit for habitation”), the most visually striking things at Ayotzinapa are the murals and stencil art. Buildings feature portraits of revolutionaries such as Lucio Cabañas and Genaro Vázquez, Subcomandante Marcos, and Che Guevara, and murals depicting mass mobilizations, indigenous resistance, and the 2011 police murder of Jorge Alexis Herrera and Gabriel Echeverría. The school grounds, which include fields of corn, beans, a few vegetables, and flowers are well kept without employees paid to do so. The students do all the farming, cleaning, tending, fixing, and painting, and a large part of the cooking. And like college students across the world, they are ab
sorbed in the purpose and routines of their particular lives. Class time and homework make up the least of it. I rarely heard a student speak about their classes. (Students said that the state government intentionally hires teachers opposed to their social organizing.) Instead, the subjects of enthusiasm are most often student-organizing activities; sports, music, and dance clubs; classroom observations conducted in rural schools throughout the state; and just the place itself, Ayotzinapa. These are youth whom the political system tells they have no place. They are the ones apparently destined to enter the lowest ranks of the drug-warring armies or scramble across the Arizona desert and pick bell peppers in California or wash dishes in Chicago. Ayotzinapa offers them a different route, a profession: to become rural elementary school teachers. Ayotzinapa says to them, “You belong here.”

  Ayotzinapa is a Náhuatl word meaning a place of turtles, and there is something about luxury passenger buses that resembles turtles. One of the most common “activities,” as the students call their organizing actions, is—for lack of a better word—commandeering buses. For Ayotzinapa students, their travels to observe teachers in rural areas are an essential—indeed, state-mandated—part of the curriculum. The college however, in early September 2014, had only two buses, two vans, a pickup truck, and no budget to rent or acquire new vehicles. The students, for many years, had found a way to secure transportation themselves: boarding a stopped bus—often achieved by first setting up a highway blockade—and informing its driver and passengers that the bus would be used for the educational purposes of the Ayotzinapa Teachers College.

  In the immediate aftermath of the attacks in Iguala, government officials decried the students’ tactics as wanton thievery. Both the police and the companies had tolerated the practice, if begrudgingly, for years. Moreover, the students are not thieves: they return the buses unharmed, and they “reach an agreement with the drivers.” Such an agreement—for the bus drivers never abandon the vehicles, sometimes camping out at the college, with meals provided, for weeks or even months—involves compensation. The students pay the drivers after the “hijacking” (a term even the students sometimes use to describe their actions), hence the drivers “agree” to go along with it. I spoke to bus drivers who loathe the practice, others who feel indifferent to it—it’s just another day of work—and others who enjoy it, saying that it gives them more time off, which they often use to visit family in nearby towns, asking the students to cover for them if the company calls.

  The students, when they block highways, typically do so at tollbooths, or just before them. When they are able to take over a tollbooth, then the drivers coming through, relieved of their toll duties, might be inclined to “donate” that money to the students. Often, however, the students will block the road just before the tollbooth, asking for donations independently of the tolls. None of these tactics are unique to Ayotzinapa students, but by 2014 they had become fully integrated into the basic functioning of the school.

  The government’s accusations against the students do not stop, though, at calling them bus thieves. For years, government officials have accused Ayotzinapa of being a kind of nursery for armed movements. In May 2013, Televisa reporter Adela Micha interviewed Governor Ángel Aguirre on her program. She asked him how it was possible that the Ayotzinapa students had made a “habitual” practice of “stealing” buses. Aguirre responded that Ayotzinapa, “has become a kind of bunker. Neither the federal nor the state governments can access the school. It is a place that has been used by some groups to indoctrinate these youths and cultivate social resentment amongst them.” Micha then asked him: “Who is indoctrinating them?” Aguirre responded: “A few insomniac guerrillas.”

  “Governor Aguirre said that the students had taken control of the school and that no one could get in: it was a way of saying that the school was lawless, a no-man’s-land. But the truth is that the governor himself visited the school in 2011. He was in the dining hall when he made a public commitment to provide the support that the students asked for,” said Kau Sirenio in early October 2014. Sirenio, a friend I have known for several years, is an indigenous Ñuu Savi journalist from the Costa Chica region of Guerrero. He writes for the Chilpancingo-based weekly Trinchera, hosts a bilingual weekly radio program in Spanish and Tu’un Savi, and has covered Ayotzinapa since 2004. “That day in 2011,” Sirenio told me, “the students tried to get Aguirre to sign an agreement, but he said that he would do so two weeks later, at the governor’s office. Two weeks later he postponed the meeting. He then kept putting off the meeting. In November, the students started going to the local radio stations to demand that the governor sign the commitment. Then came December. The students couldn’t wait any longer because they were trying to negotiate the school’s budget for 2012. They wanted to increase the incoming class from 140 to 160 students. They also wanted to increase the daily food budget from 20 pesos to 60 pesos per student per day. [In 2011 the peso was worth about 0.07 dollars.] But Aguirre didn’t sign the commitment, and so the students blocked the federal highway on December 12. That is when the police killed Jorge Alexis Herrera Pino and Gabriel Echeverría de Jesús. And still, after the repression that day, the state government unleashed a kind of dirty war smear campaign against Ayotzinapa, saying that they had no reason to block the highway. In January 2012, the government organized a march to support the governor and demand the closing of Ayotzinapa. That is when they really began demonizing the students. What happened in Iguala was the fruit of that hate campaign of 2012 and the impunity in the case of the two murdered students in 2011. Because they showed in 2011 that in Guerrero the murderers of students are not punished.”

  The plan for September 26, 2014, never involved going to Iguala. The students had no idea that the mayor and his wife would be hosting an event that evening in the town’s central plaza. Most of them did not know who the mayor of Iguala was. The plan, rather, was to try and grab some buses in Chilpancingo and, if that didn’t work, to take two buses of first-year students out to Huitzuco—some 20 miles from Iguala—slow down cars on the highway, collect donations, and hope a bus would appear in the traffic.

  In mid-September, representatives of the Federation of Socialist Campesino Students of Mexico (FECSM) from rural teachers colleges across the country gathered for an annual assembly in Amilcingo, State of Mexico. The assemblies are usually held in June, but had been postponed until September that year. Among other affairs, the student representatives voted on which college would host delegations from the other colleges prior to traveling to Mexico City to participate in the annual October 2 march commemorating the 1968 student massacre in the capital’s Tlatelolco plaza. That day, September 16, 2014, the FECSM representatives from across Mexico chose Ayotzinapa, even though it wasn’t supposed to be their turn that year. Another school said they couldn’t host, Ayotzinapa volunteered, and the assembly approved. Hundreds of students from the 15 other rural teachers colleges across the country would thus all gather at Ayotzinapa and from there travel as a caravan to Mexico City to take to the streets 46 years after the Mexican army gunned students down in those very same streets in the lead-up to the 1968 Olympics. As host, then, Ayotzinapa would have to provide food and transportation for the caravan. That meant getting buses. A lot of buses.

  This is worth keeping in mind: the rural college students, most of them freshmen, who went out to commandeer buses on the evening of September 26, 2014, most of them doing so for the first time, were trying to commandeer those buses to attend the annual protest of one of the worst student massacres in history.

  Over the course of that Saturday, September 27, 2014, state forces arrested 22 Iguala police officers. The surviving students identified those police officers, which means they were only the ones that they could see shooting at them from the front and the sides of the buses, and not the ones wearing face masks who disappeared their classmates from the third bus on Álvarez Street, nor the police who attacked the fourth bus in front of the state courthouse, nor the state or
federal police who also participated in the coordinated attacks.

  Families of Ayotzinapa students arrived at the school that Saturday from all over hoping to find their sons. On Monday, September 29, Mayor José Luis Abarca gave an interview to Chilpancingo-based journalist Sergio Ocampo. Ocampo asked him for “his version” of what happened. Ocampo shared his recording of the interview with me. Abarca said that he had been working up a sweat dancing after the DIF event and then went with his wife and daughters to a restaurant. While dining, he said that he got a call from Felipe Flores Velázquez, the Iguala police chief, telling him that “the Ayotzinapa students were involved in some disturbances, that they had taken some buses from the station. So, I indicated that he should let them be . . . that I don’t want any . . . assault, um, eh, problem with them. Because we know in advance that they enjoy, um, well, riling people. So I gave instructions for the forces to keep their distance, that I didn’t want any problems.”

  The following day, Mayor Abarca and his wife, María de los Ángeles Pineda Villa, went into hiding. President Peña Nieto canceled a previously scheduled trip to Guerrero, citing unfavorable weather conditions. (He did not, however, cancel his early November trip to China and Australia. To this day he has not set foot in Ayotzinapa or the scenes of the multiple attacks in Iguala. He has, however, urged people to “get over” the killings and disappearances.)

  The initial search efforts that week involved state police driving groups of parents around Iguala, occasionally stopping to suggest that they, the parents, knock on a given door and ask if their children were hiding there. Nardo Flores Vázquez, father of Bernardo Flores Alcaráz, told me in March 2015 that he had traveled to Iguala the day after the attacks with two other parents from his hometown in the Costa Grande region of Guerrero. They went to the city jail, to the morgue, and to the army base without luck, before heading to Ayotzinapa and joining the other families there.