Four months ago yesterday, in the Mexican state of Guerrero, forty-three students from the Raúl Isidro Burgos Rural Teachers' College of Ayotzinapa were forcibly disappeared in the town of Iguala while travelling to a protest against discriminatory hiring and funding practices.
At around 9.30pm, on the order of Iguala’s mayor, the students’ buses were intercepted by local police forces, which opened fire, killing six and wounding twenty-five. According the official investigation, the students who failed to escape the fire fight were captured and delivered to Guerreros Unidos, a criminal organisation involved in the trafficking of marijuana and heroin. In taped confessions, three gang members later claimed to have taken the students to a local dump, killed those who hadn’t suffocated to death on the way and burned their bodies for fourteen hours before throwing their remains in the San Juan River. Last month, experts in Innsbruck, Austria, confirmed that DNA recovered from a fragment of burned bone found at the dump matched that of one of the missing students, but that sixteen other samples provided had not contained enough information to make any other positive matches.
Not everyone accepts this version of events. A number of the students’ families remain adamant that the remaining forty-two victims are still alive. An increasingly vocal line-up of survivors, journalists and researchers have claimed that there is evidence to suggest that federal forces knew about the attack as it was taking place and may even have been involved in it. Indeed, last month, Proseco magazine's Anabel Hernández and UC Berkeley Investigative Reporting Fellow Steve Fisher published an article based on official documents, eye-witness reports and videos suggesting that the attack “was orchestrated and executed by the Federal Police, with the Army’s complicity or open collaboration”. Interviewed in The Observer yesterday, Omar García, 24, who survived the attack, said that the connections between federal forces and criminal organisations in the state were well-established and that, while such forces may not have taken the students, “they enabled [the abductions] to happen. “Our history shows us that it is the state who ‘disappears’ community leaders and activists,” García said, “and that’s what happened on 26 September."
The Iguala abductions captured the international media's attention in a way few Mexican stories have in years. At the beginning of this decade, when I first visited the country to cover the drug war, Mexican bloodshed was a mainstay of world pages everywhere. The 2010 San Fernando massacre of seventy-two undocumented Central American migrants, its sequel the following year, which saw an even larger number of mass graves discovered in the same area, and the 2011 Monterrey casino bombing all attracted a great deal of coverage. But since 2012, when the Sinaloa cartel won its bloody war against the Juárez cartel and the city that gives the latter its name ceased to be the murder capital of the world, Mexico has seemed to warrant fewer and fewer column inches in newspapers and magazines. (One would assume that the attention once lavished on Mexico’s drug war would have followed the cartel violence south to Central America, where San Pedro Sula, Honduras, currently holds Juárez’s former record for annual homicides. But after the blood stopped dripping on the US-Mexico border and started dripping in even poorer countries, so too did the ink.)
What Iguala did was remind the world that the Mexican drug war didn’t simply end when the Sinaloa-Juárez sideshow did. Nor did it end with the election of President Enrique Peña Nieto two years ago. The president’s campaign promise to abandon the militaristic strategy of his predecessor, Felipe Calderón, which by some estimates resulted in more than 83,000 deaths by the time the latter left office, was understandably welcomed by many. But the return to the pre-Calderón status quo of the PRI years—the oxymoronically-named Institutional Revolutionary Party ruled between 1929 and 2000 and more or less turned a blind eye to the cartels’ business dealings so long as they didn't cause trouble for the government—hasn’t resulted in the return to relative stability that voters were hoping for.
Indeed, it has resulted in what Human Rights Watch has called Mexico’s worst human rights crisis since the October 1968 massacre in Tlatelolco, which saw up to three hundred student protesters killed and thousands more imprisoned. The parallel is made all the more pertinent—and concerning—by the accusations of federal involvement in Iguala and the suggestion, made by Hernández and Fisher, that “the attack and disappearance of [the] students was directed specifically at the ideological and governance structure of the institution [they belonged to]”. Even if this isn’t the case, however, and while one might argue that Peña Nieto is paying for the lingering aftershocks of Calderón’s failed drug policies, there can be no doubt that recent events have thrown his own failure to correct the country’s trajectory into sharp relief. Accusations of corruption and nepotism at the highest levels—the signature trait of PRI rule—have only made matters worse and added fuel to an already combustible situation. In cities and towns throughout the country, the near-constant series of protests that began in support of the students four months ago has gradually transformed into a broad-based movement against Peña Nieto in particular and politics as usual in general. In Guererro, the rise of vigilantism and the formation of militias calling for self-rule represent a direct challenge to state authority of a kind unseen in the country since the heyday of the Zapatistas in the 1990s.
While Mexico may not have changed much in the past ten years, in other words, Mexicans themselves clearly want it to. A third way is required between Calderón’s strategy of militarisation, which unleashed the bloodshed in the first place, and the PRI’s return to the methods of la dictadura perfecta, which cannot hope to contain it. Former president Vicente Fox has spoken out in favour of legalisation for years. Faced with the death toll of his time in office, Calderón, too, has called for a debate on the issue. Peña Nieto has said he doesn’t support such measures, even in the face of changing attitudes in the United States, but that will doubtless change over the course of his remaining four years in office: legalización becomes an easy word to say once one has left Los Pinos.
Of course, legalisation alone will not be nearly enough. Without an overhaul of the country’s law enforcement, judicial and prison systems—without the crackdown on corruption and impunity that is always promised but somehow never delivered—it is only a matter of time before another Iguala or San Fernando or Monterrey takes place. Which is why it is to be hoped that the popular rage of the past four months can be maintained over the next four and the next: it might be the only thing keeping another massacre from landing the country on the world pages again.
Share
