Requiem with Yellow Butterflies

by James Halford

  That night, I sat up reading The Night of Tlatelolco by Elena Poniatowska. The author dedicates this work of oral history to her brother, Jan, who was killed in the 1968 massacre. Her account of the protests that year, through its selective collage of testimonial interviews, presents ‘a movement of pure and incorruptible men’ to whom ‘no homage…is excessive’.8 It is an idealised picture of the protesters, but a moving one. For the most part, participants tell the story in their own words: a political prisoner describes being interrogated and tortured; parents tell of their fears for their activist children. Poniatowska’s only overt authorial intervention comes at the very beginning, where she paints a dreamlike picture of the protesters as she sees them in memory:

  They are many. They come on foot, laughing. They come down Melchor Ocampo, Reforma, Juarez, Cinco de Mayo, young men and women linking arms in protest with the same joy they showed only a few days ago at the fair… they close in on the Plaza de las Tres Culturas [the site of the massacre]…they come towards me with hands holding banners, childlike hands because death makes hands childlike…all my life I will hear their steps advancing.9

  At 82, Poniatowska was still protesting. Only a few days before we arrived in Mexico, this tiny, frail woman addressed a huge crowd in the Zócalo for nearly half an hour – fainting afterwards from the effort. Her speech consisted of a brief, precise description of all 43 disappeared students from Ayotzinapa:

  Felipe Arnulfo Rosa, from a peasant family in the municipality of Ayutla, is 20 years old. He has a scar on the back of his neck from falling over backwards as a child… They call 19-year-old Carlos Lorenzo Hernández Muñoz ‘the little bean’…When they asked for blood donors in Tixtla he was first in line.

  She concluded by echoing the Ayotzinapa parents’ demand: ‘They were taken alive, we want them alive.’10

  Those words rung out across the country as the Day of the Dead approached. In Iguala, protesters torched the corrupt mayor’s office and spray-painted the slogan on its charred remains. But we were travelling north, away from all that.

  My father-in-law played Rachmaninov on the stereo as he drove his grey station wagon away from the strife-torn capital. He’d marched back in 1968, but he was older now, waiting on his first pension payment. In the back seat, with Lola the bulldog squirming in my lap, I wondered what it would take to make him march again. As we passed from the Federal District into Mexico State, urban sprawl gave way to fields of golden maize. Dense green knots of cactus grew at the roadside. A stall near the turn-off for the pyramids of Teotihuacan was selling ant eggs.

  We dropped Lola with R’s uncle then swung onto the newly built Circuito Mexiquense, heading west for the state of Michoacán. Although we were travelling further from Guerrero, where the mass disappearance took place, and from Mexico City, where the biggest protests would occur, Michoacán was far from conflict free. On the road to Pátzcuaro, we saw a small protest at a toll booth. Four scrawny young men in t-shirts and baseball caps stood in front of it, waving an indecipherable black banner. They were in their early twenties, but small for their age, without masks or weapons. They shouted slogans we couldn’t hear properly over the traffic noise.

  ‘This booth has been taken,’ said one of them as we approached. ‘Don’t pay the toll.’

  He was out of breath, his face pockmarked with acne.

  ‘Thank you, young man,’ said my father-in-law, handing over a coin.

  The official in the booth had left the boom gate open. He waved us through without looking up from his newspaper. Just beyond the unarmed protesters’ picket line, we saw eight black-clad soldiers with machine guns in the back of a pick-up truck. It was easy to imagine the situation turning ugly, as it had in Guerrero.

  For many of us in more fortunate circumstances, it’s hard to imagine a social context so desperate that parents and teachers encourage high-school-age students to hijack buses and block highways. Yet that is the context for the Ayotzinapa Normal School. It is located an hour’s drive from Chilpancingo, the capital of Guerrero state, and two hours’ drive from Iguala. For a week before the mass disappearance, the students (I have to fight the temptation to call them boys) had been stockpiling stolen vehicles and petrol at their school for their planned protest in Mexico City. They went into Iguala that night, by their own admission, to commandeer public buses.

  Just before nine-thirty in the evening, municipal police began to pursue two buses the students had taken from Iguala’s central station. When a police truck blocked the road, some of the students disembarked to try to push it out of the way. Blurry footage, shot by one of the survivors on his mobile phone, captures what happened next.

  Three or four panicked voices shout in darkness: ‘We’re unarmed. Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!’11

  Then a muffled boom like a director’s clapboard snapped shut, a wildly lurching camera, heavy breathing, the blurred red headlights of a bus.

  ‘One man down,’ cries the camera holder, his accent a countrified drawl.

  Silence. The camera swings across grainy blackness, falls upon a prone form in the road behind a police car.

  After the initial attack, the students still on the bus were loaded into patrol cars and taken away by police, the missing eventually totalling 43. Some of those in the street escaped. When they informed classmates at the school of the shooting, a second, crazy-brave convoy of buses was sent to Iguala, arriving at about 11 pm. Around midnight, the reinforcements, who were being interviewed by local press at the scene of the first shooting, were fired upon from long range by unidentified men in trucks. Three Ayotzinapa students and three bystanders died that night, in addition to the mass disappearance. Their bodies were left untouched in the street by a population too scared to intervene.

  The image of the dead left in the Iguala streets reminded me of a passage from Malcolm Lowry’s classic 1947 novel about the Mexican Day of the Dead, Under the Volcano. As R’s father drove west, squinting into the fast-dying autumn daylight, I dug out my copy and re-read the scene.

  Lowry’s alcoholic British consul is travelling by bus from Querétaro to Tomalin to watch a bullfight with his idealistic young friend, Hugh, when an Indian is discovered dying at the roadside. He has been stabbed and robbed. Upon discovering the injured man, Hugh is all for hauling him aboard the bus and taking him to hospital. A 29-year-old orphan with an inherited fortune, Hugh has fled Cambridge in disgust at the British class system, and refashioned himself as a socialist, drifting around the world in search of a cause (it’s 1938 and he’s flirting with the idea of martyrdom for the Spanish republic). But the world-weary consul warns Hugh against getting involved, taking a swig from his flask: ‘You’ll only get hauled into jail and entangled with red tape.’12 As the bus departs, leaving the Indian to die, Hugh studies the impassive faces of the Mexicans onboard, wondering why they haven’t taken action. He finally attributes their passivity to the lived memory of violence:

  Ah, how sensible were these old women…who had made a silent communal decision to have nothing to do with the whole affair…Perhaps they remembered the days of revolution in the valley, the blackened buildings, the communication cut off, those crucified and gored in the bullring…There was no callousness in their faces, no cruelty. Death they knew, better than the law, and their memories were long.13

  In Pátzcuaro, a special Day of the Dead market had been set up in the Plaza Vasco de Quiroga. The local Purépecha people still affectionately refer to the first bishop of Michoacán state as ‘Tata Vasco’ (father Vasco). His statue was decorated for the occasion with the giant, butterfly-shaped nets used by fishermen on nearby Lake Pátzcuaro. Orange cempasúchil petals were scattered in a circle around the fountain.

  Among the market stalls, my mother-in-law explained how to differentiate between cheap, factory-made textiles and proper handicrafts. She was hunting for a present to give my parents.

  ‘Do you think they’d like this?’ she kept saying, holding up one or another exquisitely embroide
red tablecloth or shawl.

  ‘Yes, very much.’

  But this wasn’t a decision to be rushed. Mum and Dad had sent them a handwritten letter welcoming R to the family, and a USB stick full of photos of her celebrating various occasions with us in Australia. Now, we worked our way clockwise around the plaza, seeking the perfect reply. It became clear, once negotiations began in earnest, that a second circuit would be required. My father-in-law and I retired to the bar.

  Over a cold Negra Modelo, he proudly described a little of the region’s history. Don Vasco was brought to Michoacán in 1530 to clean up after the conquistador Nuño de Guzmán. First as a judge, later as bishop, Quiroga tried to resolve the Purépechas’ complaints in accordance with his humanist conception of justice. With Pátzcuaro as his new capital, he established a series of indigenous villages modelled after Thomas More’s Utopia. The Purépecha were granted self-governance and encouraged to develop handicrafts that would help them survive economically. Vasco de Quiroga’s model of ‘soft colonisation’, put into practice on a small scale in Michoacán, never spread to the rest of Mexico, as he hoped. But an administrative system based on Utopian principles survived his death by 300 years in the villages he founded.

  Sadly, as R’s father pointed out, finishing his drink, Michoacán is nowadays better known as the birthplace of Mexico’s drug war. At its outset in 2006, more than 7000 troops were deployed here to combat the cartels. The most powerful of these, La Familia Michoacana, responded by bowling five severed heads across the floor of a crowded nightclub.

  ‘Death they knew, better than the law, and their memories were long,’ Lowry had written of Mexicans. That deeply ingrained lack of faith in the rule of law has been evident in the public response to the Ayotzinapa case.

  The official government theory was first put forward in November 2014 by then Attorney General, Jesús Murillo Karam, who was dismissed a few months later for his unsatisfactory handling of the investigation. His office has persisted with the same explanation. They claim that the corrupt mayor of Iguala, José Luis Abarca, from the Partido de la Revolución Democrática, the chief progressive rival of the ruling Partido Revolucionario Institucional, ordered local police to intercept the students to prevent them protesting at a function hosted by his wife. Iguala’s former first lady, María de los Ángeles Pineda, has been revealed to have family ties to the main local drug cartel, Guerreros Unidos (United Warriors). Police are believed to have handed over the 43 students to members of United Warriors, who mistook them for members of a rival gang, the Rojos, and transported them in trucks to a garbage dump at Cocula that was regularly used to dispose of bodies.

  ‘They killed them,’ Murillo Karam told the Ayotzinapa parents at a meeting in an empty aircraft hangar at Tulancingo airport, shortly before he was dismissed. ‘They threw them into a ravine, they followed them down, they lit a fire that lasted fifteen hours, they burned them. Later they collected the remains, they put them in black plastic bags, and they threw them off a bridge into the San Juan River.’14

  Not one person I spoke to in Mexico believed him.

  The women returned from the market bearing a set of delicate white-lace placemats for my parents, and a bouquet of marigolds for the Mexican ancestors. Soon it would be time to lay the flowers in the crypt of the cathedral. But first we made our way to the beautiful old courtyard house where my father-in-law grew up: all high, crumbling, white-washed walls and dark, bare, shuttered rooms. It had been empty for five years since R’s grandfather died. For a long time, it was assumed the house would be handed down to the younger generation. But in 2014, the family reluctantly put it on the market. It was unwise, they decided, to hold on to the house out of sentiment, in such a dangerous region.

  The central courtyard contained an overgrown grassy area where cattle once grazed, and a small orchard. Whenever R’s grandfather visited Mexico City he would bring the family a bag of fresh lemons or figs. He used to bathe each morning with a bucket of cold water from the trough where the animals drank. Once, in winter, he broke the ice with a shovel and commanded his young son to wash himself with freezing water, until his mother cried: ‘You’re going to kill your boy!’

  R’s grandfather was a tough man by all accounts. Among the flower pots we found a rusty old knife with its serrated blade inscribed: ‘Vanity, all is vanity.’ Yet his granddaughters also remember him smiling as he allowed them to beat him, time after time, at checkers. Between the bathroom and the main bedroom was a handrail. After separating from his wife in middle age, he lived alone for the rest of his life in the huge empty house – a place full of stories that are not mine to tell.

  At the back of the garden was a separate, half-finished, two-storey dwelling. The building was meant to be guest quarters for his three children, who had all moved to the capital to attend university. But a dispute with the builders meant it was never completed. We climbed a set of unrailed stairs to the second floor and looked over the red roofs of Pátzcuaro towards Bishop Quiroga’s vanished lakeside Utopia. The clean air tasted marvellous after Mexico City. In the street outside, a security camera turned silently atop a tall pole. There were signs someone had been there before us. Empty beer bottles were scattered over the balcony, and I found a length of cut-off garden hose from a home-made bong. Over the fence, in the neighbours’ yard, roosters clucked in cages. While the house sat empty, cockfights had been held in the backyard without permission. Now the property was on the market, the real estate agent had requested the birds be kept off the property.

  ‘I hope it sells soon,’ said my father-in-law, there on the balcony. But he lingered in the doorway when it was time to leave.

  In the crypt of Pátzcuaro cathedral, cleaners were sweeping and mopping the floor in preparation for hundreds of visitors that night. My father-in-law led us along a narrow passageway of floor-to-ceiling vaults: the dead stacked densely, one on top of the other. With a key, he opened a safe in the wall. Inside was a square, wooden container, little larger than a shoebox, containing his father’s ashes. He picked it up, held it in his hands, and bowed his head. Though they’d invited me, I felt I was intruding. Death and grieving are rarely so public in my culture. Stooping under the low roof, I rounded a corner to give them their privacy. Briefly alone, for the first time in weeks, I blundered into a vertiginous corridor, very brightly lit, where the dead seemed to go on forever. How would the parents of the disappeared feel that night, I wondered, as the rest of the country laid marigolds in cemeteries and crypts? How could they mourn without a body to anchor their grief in space and time? Today, the first of November, was the day of the innocents, and was dedicated to the memory of children who had died.

  If the government’s version of events was being heavily scrutinised back in 2014, it has since been completely discredited. A group of independent forensics experts from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, the GIEI, found the bodies of The Forty-Three could not possibly have been burned in the Cocula dumpsite as the Mexican government claims. Their 608-page report found insufficient evidence to prove there had been a fire of the magnitude necessary to burn a single body – let alone the inferno required to reduce such a large number of corpses to ashes.15 The GIEI also found evidence that the confessions from gang members on which the government based its version of events may have been extracted by torture. The coordination of the attack and its targeting of civilians contrasted starkly with past gang violence in the region.

  If you read between the lines of the experts’ carefully worded report, a different scenario emerges. It seems likely that the students unwittingly brought on the attack by hijacking a bus carrying a shipment of narcotics bound for the USA (federal investigators excluded a fifth hijacked bus from their investigation despite numerous witness accounts). Evidence suggests that all captured buses were carefully monitored by federal police and the army across the night in question. Both agencies were present during the attacks by municipal police and at the very least did nothing to preve
nt them. It is most likely the bodies were burned in a crematorium so as not to leave a trace, the report states, stopping just short of a direct accusation.

  But Jorge Antonio Montemayor Aldrete, a physicist at the UNAM, has had no such reservations. He argues the corpses could only have been burned at one of the military bases in the area – several of which are equipped with crematoriums. Aldrete has invited the Guerrero military bases near Iguala to disprove his theory by producing their gas bills.

  None have complied.16

  Shortly before midnight, in the cathedral over the crypt, the Michoacán Symphony Orchestra performed Brahms’s German Requiem. Above the orchestra and the altar with its grisly black Christ, the Virgin of Health wore a red gown embossed with glittering jewels. Behind her glass case, the gown’s long train extended to the back wall, above head height, so that the faithful could walk beneath it. The fabric was hung with hundreds of tiny aluminium figures, bent in the posture of prayer, each one a request for the Virgin’s intercession. Tonight, a full orchestra and choir took the place of the usual petitioners. Since the concert was free, people from across the social spectrum were in attendance, from tourists and expatriates to local families.

  As the choir sang, R traced the German text in the program with her finger, allowing me to follow the Spanish translation alongside. With her two siblings, she had attended the German international school in Mexico City. On the strength of that education, all three had gone on to university studies abroad, and had established professional careers in the USA or Australia. This was the Mexican dream. But what kind of dream is it that scatters a family across three countries? I had not realised, until this trip, how painful the separation was for all of them. There are many ways to lose your children.