I Couldn't Even Imagine That They Would Kill Us

by John Gibler

  “The government didn’t give us any information,” he said, “only that the boys were disappeared and that the government would look for them. We went with the government to look for them in Iguala and on the outskirts of town. And then the following week we went searching for them with the Marines through the hillsides, but I didn’t trust in the government’s search efforts from the beginning. I could tell they were just going through the motions, making a pantomime of looking for the students.”

  Then, on Saturday, October 4, the Guerrero state prosecutor announced the discovery of four mass graves in the hills outside of Iguala. An initial excavation revealed an unknown number of charred human remains. The architects of this killing had placed logs under the people before dousing them in diesel fuel and setting them on fire in the ditches. According to an officer I questioned there that afternoon, information from a person being tortured led them to the site. “They squeezed one of those guys and he sang,” the police said.

  Governor Aguirre, amidst calls for his resignation, gave a press conference that evening committing himself and his government to searching for the students, and then invited the families to speak with him privately. Plainclothes police ushered the mothers and fathers, aunts and uncles, brothers and sisters through metal detectors before leading them into the room with Aguirre. Mario Contreras, a short, wiry 49-year-old tinsmith, stood before the governor without extending his hand.

  “Good evening,” Aguirre said, smiling. His greeting met silence.

  “Yes?” the governor added, “Tell me.”

  “What do you want me to tell you? Good evening? For you. For us with our guts tied in knots, with our guts a fucking wreck. . . . Our only fucking crime is being too poor to send our kids to a private school. Lucky it’s not your son. They’d find your son in less than half an hour, you asshole, and without a fucking scratch.”

  Contreras and Aguirre faced each other there across a fissure, which their brief conversation became a doomed attempt to bridge. The rupture between them, signaling class tensions and power disparities, also revealed a pain differential: Aguirre, the governor, was seeking to save his political career, and Contreras, the tinsmith, his son.

  “You do not know the pain we feel,” Contreras told him. The fissure would expand in the coming days and weeks, with growing calls for the students to be found alive and their attackers brought to justice on one side, and speculation about temperatures at which bones disintegrate in a diesel-fed fire during a rainstorm on the other.

  Contreras had last spoken to his son César on the telephone around 3:00 p.m. on Friday, September 26, 2014. Contreras was then recovering from typhoid fever, and his son had called to check up on him. Upon hearing his father’s voice, César said that he wanted to ask for permission to take leave for the weekend and make the 10-hour trip back to his hometown in the state of Tlaxcala to help take care of his father. But the school year had just begun and Contreras didn’t want his son to be distracted. He told him to stay put.

  “That was the worst mistake of my life, a mistake I cannot forgive myself for,” Contreras told me. “But I told him: ‘You know what, I sent you off to study.’”

  The next morning Contreras saw the headlines: six people killed and, at that time, 57 students disappeared. He and his wife, Hilda Hernández, got a ride from a friend, driving the 10 hours to Ayotzinapa and arriving around 1:30 a.m. that Sunday to find their son’s name and image amongst the 43 thumb-size black-and-white photographs making up the revised list of the disappeared. From that moment on, Mario Contreras and Hilda Hernández—like the men and women of the 42 other families—slept on the bare floors of classrooms, ate what students and neighbors handed them, changed into donated clothing, and spent countless hours between protests and meetings gathered around the shaded edges of the Ayotzinapa basketball court.

  The Mexican federal government soon took over the investigation but continued to look for, and find, mass graves and incinerated human remains. The parents of the 43 disappeared students wanted their children, not bones and ash. They called on the government to reorient its search and began a series of fierce protests demanding that the government return their sons and classmates alive.

  “They are leading us in circles,” Contreras told me in early October, during a large march in Chilpancingo that shut down the federal highway connecting Mexico City and Acapulco for hours. “They’re telling us there are ten dead bodies in Taxco, there are twelve dead bodies over there. Now they’ve found mass graves. So now they’re going to give us those bodies, all charred and foul? I say, no sir. You all took them alive and you have to bring them back alive. It wasn’t some criminal organization that took them, and we’re supposed to think they’ve already been killed. It was the police who took them!”

  Parents and students blocked federal highways, marched through cities, smashed the windows of the Guerrero state congress and the governor’s offices and set them on fire. During all these protests, police were nowhere to be seen. Soon people across Mexico and the world took to the streets, the airwaves, and cyberspace to support the families. Shortly after the second round of national mobilizations, Governor Aguirre resigned. On October 29, the parents met with President Enrique Peña Nieto and his cabinet. The families told him that if he was incapable of finding their children alive, he should follow Aguirre’s example and step aside. (Recall that Aguirre was first appointed interim governor after Rubén Figueroa was forced to resign following the masscare of Aguas Blancas: the cyclical patterns of horror repeat under the reign of impunity.)

  On November 4, 2014, federal authorities arrested Abarca and Pineda in Mexico City, and shortly after, on November 7, the then–attorney general Jesús Murillo Karam announced that on the night of the attack, police delivered the students to a drug gang who then murdered and incinerated them in an open-air trash dump in Cocula, about 15 miles from Iguala. (He did not mention the rainstorm that lasted all night.) The supposed killers, according to Murillo Karam, then scooped up the human ash, deposited it into plastic bags, took those plastic bags to a nearby shallow river, emptied six bags into the river, and then threw in the last two bags unopened. After leading reporters through a series of supposed confessions, Murillo Karam cut short a reporter’s question and the press conference itself by saying, “Ya me cansé”—Now I’m tired. His words soon became the subject of viral social media mockery. The government announced that it would send the charred bone pieces recovered from a trash bag supposedly found on the bank of a river near the trash dump to a specialized DNA laboratory at the University of Innsbruck in Austria. The parents rejected the federal prosecutor’s claims and initiated a new round of heated protests, including more property destruction targeting Guerrero state government buildings. They then set out in three caravans traveling across the country to call for support. On November 20, 2014, the 104th anniversary of the Mexican Revolution, the three caravans reconvened in Mexico City and led many tens of thousands of people marching from three locations, eventually funneling into Reforma Avenue and the Zócalo, the central plaza and symbolic civil core of the nation.

  In the days both leading up to and following that march, Mexico City seemed to pulse with solidarity for the disappeared students. Newspaper front-pages, conversations, graffiti and stencil art, everywhere one turned, Ayotzinapa was there. Walk through the hip Roma neighborhood and you would see an unattended altar of candles and poster-board signs near the fountain in the Rio de Janeiro Park demanding justice for the 43. Walk through the working-class Obrera neighborhood and you would see a large windowless wall with five-foot-tall red block letters painted over a white background declaring, “Ayotzinapa: Fue el Estado”— Ayotzinapa: It Was the State. The sports tabloid Record ran a blacked-out front page with the headline: “#INDIGNATION: Mexico has had enough. Mexico is in mourning.”

  Early one Sunday, some 700 athletes organized an impromptu race down the length of Reforma Avenue, all runners wearing the number 043. During the multi-Grammy-wi
nning band Calle 13’s concert at the Palacio de Deportes, some 15,000 people periodically counted in unison to 43 then shouted: “¡Justicia!” Tom Morello, of Rage Against the Machine fame, dedicated a guest guitar solo to Ayotzinapa, flipping his guitar around to play with his teeth, and revealing the number 43 taped to the back of the guitar. During the show, the band invited a group of parents and students from Ayotzinapa on stage to speak. One of the parents was Mario Contreras.

  “Good evening,” he said, “I am the father of César Manuel González Hernández. My apologies: I am not a public speaker, nor any kind of leader. I am nothing more than a wounded father from whom they are trying to tear away the most beautiful thing life has given me: my son, whom I love and want to come home along with his 42 classmates.”

  But the solidarity also seemed to contain an element of fear. If the police are the drug gangs, and the state and federal authorities can or will only search for missing people in shallow graves and discarded trash bags, and all three major political parties are implicated in massacres of this scale, then what is to be done? The horror unleashed in Iguala stripped away the façade of a Mexican Moment led by Peña Nieto and the PRI, and created a widespread call for fundamental political change, while at the same time thrashing whatever hope remained of achieving such change through existing institutions and the electoral process.

  One of the Ayotzinapa caravans traveled to Oventik in Zapatista territory on November 15. Through their spokesperson, Subcomandante Insurgente Moisés, the Zapatistas thanked them:

  “Perhaps they have not told you, but it has been all of you, the families and compañeros of the murdered and disappeared students, who have been able, with the strength of your pain, with this pain turned into a dignified, noble rage, to lead many people in Mexico and the world to awaken, to question, to debate. For this we thank you.” They also shared what their vision of change looks like: “We think that the moments that will change the world are not born in the calendars of the powerful, but are forged through the daily work, stubborn and continuous, of those who choose to organize themselves instead of joining the fashions of the day. There will be profound change, real transformations in this and other wounded lands.” But such transformations, he said, “will not involve a change of administration but rather a change in the social relations, where the people govern, and the government obeys.”

  In the absence of an immediate institutional path in Mexico, there does seem to be, uncertain and shaky, a coming together of many paths of people to give the support that the state will not, or cannot, provide. One of the signs I saw in the November 20 march in Mexico City, handwritten on posterboard, read: “We do not know each other, but we need each other.” By December, the Ayotzinapa basketball court had itself been transformed. One end of the court was filled with boxes upon boxes of donated food—canned tuna, rice, cooking oil, pasta, peppers, salsa—as well as clothing, medicine and books. Strung between the columns holding up the high tin roof were scores of photographs of protests and solidarity actions in cities across Mexico and the world. Families from the nearby towns of Tixtla and Zumpango del Río had set up buffet stations on folding tables with home-cooked meals available around the clock. In the space of a month the piercing absence of 43 students had been joined, for the time being, by the presence of many.

  They call themselves the Other Disappeared, Los otros desaparecidos. They are the mothers and fathers, the brothers and sisters of men and women who were taken away in or near Iguala during the years and days before the attacks against the students, and never seen again. In many cases, witnesses identified police, soldiers, or “armed men” as assailants. The families of these disappeared had either been too afraid to speak out publicly or had slipped into desperation upon authorities’ refusal to look for their loved ones. After police and unidentified gunmen killed six people and disappeared 43 Ayotzinapa students on the night of September 26–27 in Iguala, and after Guerrero state officials revealed mass graves containing 28 bodies that turned out not to be the students, the families of the “other disappeared” men and women decided to go out looking for their missing loved ones on their own, and underground.

  Starting in November 2014, the group gathered every Sunday at the San Gerardo church with machetes, shovels, and iron rods and headed out into the sun-scorched hills surrounding Iguala looking for signs of shallow graves: recently turned earth, spots with a different color of soil, dips in the ground, anomalous articles of trash. When they found a place with one or more of these characteristics, they hammered a pointed iron rod a few feet into the dirt, pulled it back up, and smelled the tip. During one of these trials in February 2015, I too smelled the rod’s point. “Slowly,” they cautioned me. It was as unmistakable as it was assaulting: the smell of death.

  In the first seven months of looking they found more than 100 bodies in places where state and federal investigators had supposedly searched and found none. They identified dozens more possible grave sites that still await excavation by federal investigators. And, as I write these words, every Sunday they head out again. Mayra and Mario Vergara, sister and brother, have spent every day since mid-November 2014 looking for the body of their brother, Tomás. During the week they divide their time between accompanying the federal authorities out to the sites they and other volunteers have identified, and scouting new locations based on anonymous tips. On Sundays they lead the group of family members looking for their sons and brothers, daughters and sisters, back out to fully comb areas they previously scouted. They call each of the human remains discovered “Tomás” until investigators are able to identify the bodies using DNA analysis.

  Mayra, 37, and Mario, 42, grew up in Huitzuco. They have another sister who is a professor. Their father was murdered in a street fight 20 years ago. Their mother, Mario says, “cannot accept Tomás’s disappearance, my mom is dying in life.” Mario and Tomás began to work full time after their father’s murder. Mario runs a small pool hall, and Tomás drove a taxi. On Thursday, July 5, 2012, the family gathered to celebrate Mayra’s birthday, but Tomás didn’t show up. Around ten o’clock that night someone called to say that Tomás had been kidnapped. That was when they started looking for him. They called other taxi drivers. They called the hospital where their grandfather had been recently admitted; Tomás had last been there sometime between 10 and 11 in the morning. That was the last time anyone saw him. They couldn’t sleep that night. The following morning someone came to tell them that they had seen Tomás’s taxi on the outskirts of town. Mayra went to the location and found that Tomás’s cell phone, his wallet, the coins he used for change were all there in the taxi. There was no sign of violence. Later that day they got another call:

  “I saw that you went to get his car. Do you believe this is a kidnapping now?” They asked for 300,000 pesos, then about 23,000 dollars. They said that if the family contacted the authorities they would kill Tomás. One of the family’s uncles in Mexico City, however, said that the family should contact the federal anti-kidnapping unit.

  “It was a civil war here in our house,” Mario told me, “whether to call the police or not. I can’t remember who convinced us to make the call or how we finally decided.” The next morning they contacted the federal anti-kidnapping unit, which was then part of a federal organized crime investigative task force known as the SIEDO, and by the afternoon they had two agents in their house. The agents worked with the family on what they considered to be the fundamentals of kidnapping negotiations: always ask for proof of life, negotiate a lower ransom payment, and never make a full payment quickly. These were matters of “business” the agents said, and one must follow the rules of brokering tough business deals. When the kidnappers called, Mario asked for the “proof of life” only to hear the kidnappers unleash torrents of foul abuse:

  “Bitch, we make the rules, we’re in charge, we give the orders, shut the fuck up!”

  Meanwhile the agents claimed to be tracking the calls.

  “Every time there was
a call,” Mario said, “the agents told me that they were sending information to Mexico City so they could trace the call from there. We never saw any results from those investigations. Maybe they exist, maybe they don’t, but we never saw anything.” The agents continued to hold daily “training” sessions with Mario, pretending to be the kidnappers.

  “They are here training you, and training you, and meanwhile your family member is on the other side,” Mario said. The kidnappers asked for 300,000 pesos and Mario, following the coaching of the federal agents, offered $50,000. The kidnappers berated him:

  “You have a pool hall, you fucker!” To which Mario would say:

  “I’ll sign it over to you, take it.”

  “Sell it, you piece of shit, and give us the money!”

  “The tables are all old, no one is going to buy it quickly. Take it, I’ll sign it over.”

  “You have cars! We’ve seen that you have a ton of cars!”

  “Take them. They’re all old.”

  The family was working hard to put together the 300,000 pesos, but the federal agents told them: “If you pay them the 300,000 quickly, they’re just going to want more.” Two months went by like that. Finally they reached an agreement to pay 80,000 pesos. It was a Saturday afternoon when the kidnappers called and said: “You know what, asshole? Time’s up. Have the money ready tomorrow and it’s done. We’ll give you orders tomorrow.”

  The next day, Sunday, the kidnappers called and told Mario to be at the Corralón de Bandera in a certain number of minutes. “That was another problem with the agents,” Mario said. “They didn’t want anyone from the family to go make the payment. In moments like that you freeze up, you don’t know what to do.” The family scrambled to find someone to make the payment who was not a direct relative, who was trustworthy, who would take the risk, and whom the federal agents would accept. The kidnappers called back, leveling insults and threats. Mario, upon the agents’ insistence asked again for the proof of life and, after another barrage of insult and threats the kidnappers said, “Okay, here’s your brother.”