On the night of September 26, 2014, 43 students (normalistas) from the
Raúl Isidro Burgos rural teacher training college in Ayotzinapa,
Guerrero state, disappeared in Iguala, a small town 140 kilometers from
Chilpancingo, the state capital. In addition, six people were
murdered-including three normalistas, one of whom had his face and eyes
gouged out while he was still alive-and more than 40 were injured in
what has been called the "October 2 of the 21st century (1)."
A decade of lies
Despite major national and international mobilizations demanding truth
and justice, families and Mexican society as a whole continue to ignore
what happened to these young people, most of whom were between 18 and 21
years old at the time. Although there are 151 people being prosecuted,
120 of whom are in detention - among them, military personnel and former
Attorney General Jesús Murillo Karam - none of them are accused of being
directly involved in the crime; furthermore, there has been no trial and
the motive for the massacre has not been proven (2). The only truth
about this case is therefore the one that resonates in the streets: it
was the State!
This year's march was all the more important because a few days later,
on September 30, the term of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador
(AMLO) came to an end and the time had come to take stock of his
management. Despite the cold and the rain, thousands of demonstrators,
including many young normalistas from all over the country, once again
accompanied the parents of the 43. With the cry of "You are not alone!",
the march began on Reforma Avenue, at the Angel of Independence. On the
corner of Juárez Avenue, just behind the Antimonument +43, a memorial
was inaugurated in memory of the disappeared boys. There were no police,
but as we walked past the Bellas Artes building, we noticed that it was
closed with metal plates and, after crossing 5 de Mayo Avenue, we had to
stop because the government (supposedly left-wing) had put up cement
blocks that prevented us from entering the Zócalo. We soon realized that
the entire center was closed, something never seen before in the recent
history of the city. Fortunately, a few enterprising boys managed to
open a gap and we were able to get through. A surreal spectacle ensued:
the square was unusually deserted, and the rain-soaked ground reflected
the light emanating from the illuminated silhouettes of patriotic heroes
depicted on the surrounding buildings. Angry, some protesters threw
incendiary devices at the presidential palace and broke windows, but the
situation did not escalate. From an improvised podium, Mario González,
father of César Manuel González, asked: "What is the government afraid
of? Where is democracy? No barrier will stop us and we will continue to
demand justice for Claudia Sheinbaum[the new President], but we will not
give her the time we have given to this President who has betrayed us."
Harsh, implacable words that will remain in the annals of Mexican
history. Don Mario did not exaggerate. Throughout these ten years, he
and his comrades have shown great patience. Two federal governments, the
right-wing one of Enrique Peña Nieto (2012-2018) and then the "humanist"
one of AMLO (December 1, 2018 - September 30, 2024), have lied and
concealed information. It is true that, initially, AMLO ordered the
opening of the archives of the Ministry of National Defense (SEDENA),
the Ministry of the Navy (SEMAR) and the intelligence services (CISEN).
There has been much progress: he recognized that the forced
disappearances in Iguala were a state crime, created the Commission for
Truth and Access to Justice (COVAJ) - coordinated by Alejandro Encinas,
a long-time activist of the historical left - and set up the Special
Investigation and Litigation Unit for the Ayotzinapa Case (UEILCA) - led
by Omar Gómez Trejo, a respected former collaborator of the Office of
the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights in Mexico, who
enjoyed the trust of the victims' relatives. However, when in 2022 the
investigation involved the army and navy, the military high command
refused to provide the requested information and the President
backtracked. Gómez Trejo had to flee to the United States after, without
consulting him, federal prosecutors withdrew 21 arrest warrants
(including those of 14 military personnel and the former prosecutor of
Guerrero, Iñaki Blanco), out of the 83 he had requested. AMLO accused
him of... not making progress in the investigation! Encinas himself was
disqualified and resigned in 2023, officially to join the campaign of
Claudia Sheinbaum, then a presidential candidate.
What happened in Iguala on the night of September 26-27, 2014?
It is not easy to navigate the ocean of information that the internet
contains, because bits of truth are mixed with outright lies. Just type
the word "Ayotzinapa" into the Google search engine to get 12,700,000
entries. In what follows, I use the sixth report (2023) of the
Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts (GIEI) and the first
report of COVAJ (3).
The story begins a few days before September 26, when an assembly of the
FECSM - the Federation of Socialist Peasant Students of Mexico, which
brings together all the normalistas in the country - decides to entrust
Raúl Isidro Burgos' students with the task of "taking" 20 buses to
Mexico City and participating in the march that, every October 2,
commemorates the Tlatelolco massacre in 1968. "Taking" a bus means
temporarily appropriating it. It is a relatively common practice and
generally tolerated by the authorities: the students intercept a bus,
make an agreement with the driver, who takes them to the desired
location without too much trouble. On September 26, the normalistas only
had two buses, so they went to the Chilpancingo bus station in the
morning to take others, but they were unable to do so and returned to
school. Around 5:00 p.m., about a hundred boys, most of them
first-semester students, left Ayotzinapa on buses 1568 and 1531,
belonging to the Estrella de Oro company. The first arrived at the
Iguala toll booth No. 3 a few minutes before 8:00 p.m. The second
reached the place called Rancho del Cura, where the students stayed to
botear, that is, to ask passers-by for money. About ten of them
intercepted the Costa Line 2513 bus from Acapulco and took it to the
Iguala bus station, where they arrived around 8:30 p.m. However, the
driver locked them in the vehicle and alerted the authorities. The
normalistas then asked for support from their classmates, who arrived
shortly after 9 p.m. on buses 1531 and 1568. According to witnesses
cited by the GIEI, motorcycle "hawks" from the drug trafficking group
known as Guerreros Unidos (GU) had followed the two buses. On the other
hand, a motorist interviewed by the local newspaper El Sur said that
that night military personnel and members of the federal and state
police had searched all the buses and private vehicles at the entrance
to Iguala on the highway (4). After meeting their classmates at the bus
station, the normalistas took three more buses, two from Costa Line
numbered 2012 and 2510 and one from Estrella Roja whose number has not
been identified. They then decided to return to Ayotzinapa on the five
buses: the two they had taken from school, plus the three they had just
taken. Three units headed towards Galeana Street, which becomes Juan N.
Álvarez Street and leads to the Periferico Norte, and the other two left
through the back door towards the Palace of Justice and the highway to
Chilpancingo. The tragedy began around 9:30 p.m. and lasted about four
hours, according to different scenarios. The first three buses (in
order: 2012, 2510 and 1568) were stopped on Juan N. Álvarez Street by a
patrol car that blocked their passage, while others blocked the side
streets. When the students tried to force the blockade, the police shot
them, wounding Aldo Gutiérrez Solano in the head, who did not receive
treatment in time and has been in a vegetative state ever since.
Afterwards, police officers from Iguala and Cocula kidnapped and then
made the young people from the third bus, the 1568, disappear. At the
same time, other police officers were chasing the 1531 bus, which they
stopped under a bridge where there were also federal police patrol cars.
All the students on board that bus disappeared. The fifth bus was
intercepted about 150 meters further on, also by federal police officers
who made the students get off and ordered them to leave, which they did
by quickly dispersing. Having no more passengers, that bus continued on
its way to Cuernavaca and disappeared without a trace. When the GIEI
asked to inspect it in 2015, the Attorney General's Office (PGR) showed
an Estrella Roja bus number 3278 whose characteristics did not match the
video images from the security cameras. This means that the fifth bus
also disappeared. Another incident occurred at 11:20 p.m., when a Los
Avispones football team bus traveling through the Santa Teresa area,
about fifteen minutes from Iguala, was attacked by Guerreros Unidos and
police officers from Iguala, Huitzuco and Tepecoacuilco who mistook it
for one of the normalistas' buses. The shooting left three dead - the
driver, a player and a passenger in a taxi - and several injured. Two
other attacks took place between 10:30 p.m. and 12:30 a.m. against the
survivors of the fifth bus who were actively trying to find their
comrades and who survived by taking refuge in private homes. The latest
attack took place again on Juan N. Álvarez Street, while teachers from
the Guerrero State Education Workers Coordinating Committee (CETEG),
students who had survived the previous attacks, and others who had
arrived from Ayotzinapa were holding a press conference to denounce the
events. Around a quarter past midnight, hitmen from Guerreros Unidos
arrived in several vehicles and unloaded their firearms on those
present. Several of them were injured, and Daniel Solís Gallardo and
Julio César Ramírez Nava were killed. Another student, Julio César
Mondragón, fled, but was intercepted, savagely tortured, and murdered.
His body was found the next day, his face scratched, about 500 meters
from the scene of the attack. Other young people and a teacher took
refuge in the Cristina Clinic, also located on Juan N. Álvarez. They
requested medical attention for a classmate in mortal danger, but did
not receive it. Instead, they were insulted and assaulted by the
municipal police and the military; a captain, José Martínez Crespo,
ordered the boys to put their cell phones on the table and give their
real names "otherwise we would not find them," which clearly amounted to
a death threat. Meanwhile, several public agencies, all located nearby,
monitored the normalistas' movements: the National Security and
Investigation Center (CISEN), the Army's Regional Intelligence Fusion
Center (CRFI), the Control, Command, Communications and Computing Center
(C-4), and the 27th Infantry Battalion, which has a long history of
forced disappearances in the years of the "Dirty War" (1965-1990).
Although it has been proven that the CRFI was wiretapping and
communicating with members of Guerreros Unidos, SEDENA has assured, at
the time of the events and still today, that the CRFI did not exist in
2014. It is fair to recall that a former military human rights defender,
General Francisco Gallardo (1946-2021), stated from the beginning that
in Iguala, where there are two army battalions (the 27th and the 41st),
it is practically impossible for 43 young people to disappear without
their knowledge and consent: "SEDENA intelligence services have
monitored all the movements of the dissidents, in this case the students
of Ayotzinapa. The army knows in real time where they are going and
whether or not they have taken a bus (5).» It has also been proven that
there was at least one infiltrated element in the teacher training
college, soldier Julio César López Patolzin, who was part of the
Information Research Organization (OBI), that is, he would occasionally
inform his superiors about the students' activities. Apparently, that
night he also disappeared, but it can be assumed that he managed to
escape and change his identity.
The GIEI theory
The Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts (GIEI) was created in
2014, following an agreement between the Inter-American Commission on
Human Rights (IACHR) and the government, under pressure from the
relatives of the disappeared. After a long and thorough investigation
that began in March 2015 and that involved different organizations, the
GIEI made valuable discoveries, although it was unable to find any trace
of the boys.
Composed of Colombians Ángela Buitrago and Alejandro Valencia,
Guatemalan Claudia Paz y Paz, Chilean Francisco Cox and Spaniard Carlos
Beristain, this group produced, between 2015 and 2023, six reports of
some 1,800 pages in total that dismantled the scenario developed at the
time of Peña Nieto by the then Attorney General of the Republic, Jesús
Murillo Karam (currently under house arrest), and by the head of the
Criminal Investigation Agency, Tomás Zerón de Lucio. On November 7,
2014, just weeks after the crime, Murillo Karam held a press conference
to present a supposed "historical truth" that GU hitmen, aided by the
police of Iguala and surrounding municipalities, had kidnapped,
murdered, and burned the students at the Cocula dump, then scattered
their remains in the San Juan River. However, the genetic study carried
out by the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team (EAAF)-a group of
independent experts that worked with the GIEI-revealed that the remains
found in the San Juan River did not correspond to any of the missing
students, but to other unidentified individuals. Videos were later
released showing Zerón personally torturing prisoners from Guerreros
Unido to make them adapt their confessions to the "historical truth."
Now a fugitive in Israel, Zerón had ties to powerful Israeli companies
such as NSO, which produces the infamous Pegasus spyware with which the
Mexican government spied - and apparently continues to spy (6) - on
members of the GIEI, Gómez Trejo and the relatives of the 43 disappeared.
The GIEI discovered that the Navy Ministry had concocted the San Juan
River scenario a few days before November 7. On the other hand, it
demonstrated that the hitmen had taken the boys to different locations,
not just one. A first group was taken by the Huitzuco police to an
unknown destination; another was lost on the way out of Chilpancingo;
and another was taken to the headquarters of the municipal police of
Iguala before Judge Ulises Bernabé García, who allegedly handed them
over to Guerreros Unidos. However, some sources deny this version, and
Bernabé is currently enjoying asylum in the United States.
Little by little, new information has emerged, revealing the horrible
reality of forced disappearances in Mexico. In the state of Guerrero,
with its long tradition of struggle by peasants, teachers and students,
this reality has manifested itself in an extreme and brutal way. In
March 2020, a protected witness located a mass grave in the area known
as the "barranca de la Carnicería" (butchery canyon), some 800 meters
from the Cocula landfill. In this place with such a sinister name,
experts discovered, among other unidentified human remains, three tiny
bone fragments corresponding to two of the disappeared students,
Christian Rodríguez Telumbre and Jhosivany Guerrero de la Cruz. To date,
this is all that has been found of the 43 boys.
How can we understand this terrible violence? The GIEI supports the
theory, also defended by Gómez Trejo and, with nuances, by the
journalists Anabel Hernández and John Gibler (7), that the massacre is
linked to the intense heroin trafficking between Iguala and the United
States managed by GU. It has been proven that, every Friday (September
26 was also a Friday), a bus carrying a hidden drug shipment left the
Iguala bus station for Chicago. Unknowingly, the normalistas would have
boarded a bus, the fifth, carrying a huge quantity of heroin, which
would have unleashed the wrath of GU and its accomplices. I do not deny
that this theory seems convincing. Guerrero was at the time the leading
poppy producer in Mexico, and it is possible, even probable, that the
fifth truck did indeed carry a shipment of heroin. Is this enough to
explain the murderous fury of that night? I have legitimate doubts,
especially because the available information shows that the operation
began before the students took that bus to Iguala, and not after.
Similarly, the attack on the Los Alvispones bus could indicate that the
hitmen were not looking for drugs, but were targeting the boys themselves.
A counterinsurgency operation
The extreme violence against the normalistas in general and those in
Ayotzinapa in particular did not begin in 2014. On November 30, 2007,
students from the Raúl Isidro Burgos school who were holding a sit-in on
the Autopista del Sol highway, near Chilpancingo, were expelled and
brutally repressed by the federal and state police - resulting in 56
arrests and two injuries, one seriously. On December 12, 2011, students
Jorge Alexis Herrera Pino and Gabriel Echeverría de Jesús were killed in
another violent eviction in the same place. It is estimated that at
least ten students from the same normal school were killed before and
after the night of Iguala; the last crime occurred on March 7, when a
state police officer killed student Yanqui Kothan Gómez Peralta, in the
vicinity of Ayotzinapa. Anabel Hernández reports that in November 2012,
during the transition between the mandates of Felipe Calderón
(2006-2012) and Peña Nieto (2012-2018), their teams met to discuss
national security issues. Among these, drug trafficking was not
mentioned, but Raúl Isidro Burgos' students came in second place,
preceded only by the problems of governance in Michoacán (8). In other
words, both Calderón and Peña Nieto considered the normalistas a danger
to their governments. But that's not all: documents from the Mexican
armed forces hacked by the hacktivists of Guacamaya Leaks reveal that,
years before the disappearance of the 43, the Mexican army was already
monitoring the school and considered its students subversives (9). Why?
For multiple reasons. First, there is the fierce and unhealthy hatred
that the repressive apparatus, the ruling classes and the media powers
have for the students of the rural normal schools. A legacy of the
Mexican Revolution, these schools were born with the project of offering
poor rural communities a decent education that would help improve their
lives. Although violence has accompanied them practically since their
creation, it has intensified in recent decades due to the tenacious
revolutionary aspirations of the young peasant normalistas, their way of
life and their resistance (10).
Furthermore, in Mexico, forced disappearances have a long and terrible
history. They began after the Tlatelolco massacre in 1968 and, in
Guerrero, they were practiced in a particularly brutal manner against
the guerrillas of Lucio Cabañas and Genaro Vázquez Rojas. During the
period known as the "dirty war", the army committed countless crimes
against humanity, torturing, disappearing and murdering hundreds of
people with the aim of annihilating the political-military organizations
that existed in the region.
With the 21st century, new forms of "dirty war" have gradually emerged.
Assassinations, beheadings and forced disappearances have multiplied but
without apparent motive, and the victims are no longer guerrillas but
ordinary citizens. The enemy is now the population as a whole and the
spread of violence is directly linked to the greed of big capital,
especially in the extractive sector. Raúl Zibechi describes the war of
extermination of common goods as "massacre as a form of domination
(11)". The parts of humanity that oppose the theft of these goods,
whether because they live on them, because they resist dispossession, or
simply because they are "left behind", deserve to be annihilated. The
unbridled violence that was unleashed in the night of Iguala is part of
the modes of accumulation/theft of the dominant classes. The State is no
longer just the committee that governs the collective interests of the
bourgeoisie: it also administers the activity of criminal gangs that
either kidnap, extort and traffic drugs, or act as auxiliaries of the
repressive apparatus and invest in legal businesses.
In our 2015 book, Manuel Aguilar Mora and I pointed out that Guerrero is
rich in minerals of high economic value. In particular, the Iguala
region is located in what is known as the "gold belt," a kind of El
Dorado, nestled in a region of terrible poverty and extremely high
social risk that includes Tlatlaya in the State of Mexico, Iguala and
the Mezcala River region. In 2014, GU was operating in the same sites as
the powerful Canadian mining companies Goldcorp and Torex Gold. In Nuevo
Balsas, municipality of Cocula - the town whose police were involved in
the kidnapping of the normalistas - the gold mining company Media Luna,
a subsidiary of Torex Gold, had serious conflicts with the local
population at the time, some of which led to kidnappings and murders.
According to El Sur of February 12, 2015, the company paid 1 million
pesos per month to organized crime (12). Another study highlights that
one of the largest gold deposits was discovered in the immediate
vicinity of Ayotzinapa. It can be profitable to clean up the villages
using whatever is there, say its authors, Francisco Cruz, Félix Santana
Ángeles and Miguel Alvarado: "In Guerrero, but also in the rest of the
country, where the supermines are, the army is there as a prelude to the
arrival or strengthening of organized crime" (13). This obviously does
not prove that the mining companies are directly responsible for the
disappearance of the students, but it is part of the context of extreme
violence that prevailed - and continues to prevail - in this state. The
conclusion is that the night of Iguala was not organized by drug
traffickers. It was a preemptive attack, a counterinsurgency operation,
designed and ordered at the highest levels of the federal and state
governments, with the help of hired killers from organized crime (14).
The local police forces, in collusion with the Guerreros Unidos hitmen,
carried out the disappearance and massacre on September 26 under the
supervision of the federal police and the army. Colonel Rodríguez Pérez,
commander of the 27th Battalion, was aware of everything that happened
that night. A task force commanded by his subordinate, Captain José
Martínez Crespo, already mentioned, was permanently present at the
different sites of the attack to observe and supervise the operation.
According to COVAJ itself, Rodríguez Pérez (arrested in 2022 and
released last July) personally ordered the assassination of six of the
43 disappeared normalistas (15). The normalistas represented a danger
and had to be made an example of. They were doubly guilty: they were
transgressing social norms and, even more serious, they were close to
enormous mineral wealth. Fabian Gonzalez, one of the students'
spokespeople, expressed it with crystal clarity on the day of the march:
"September 26 was a blow to the rural normal schools, not only the one
in Ayotzinapa, but all the others, in order to impose their definitive
closure. It was not organized crime. Organized crime participated, but
it was the state (16)."
And now?
AMLO, Claudia Sheinbaum's political mentor, has given the military
economic, political, and even cultural power that it never had before
and that it is unlikely it will give up (17). In the Ayotzinapa case,
not only did the government of the so-called "fourth transformation"
(4T) stop the investigations when they were about to reveal the real
perpetrators, it also lied blatantly on at least two occasions. First,
he claimed that the aforementioned soldier López Paltozin was not an
active member of the OBI, although this is proven in the presidential
report itself (18). He also denied that Omar García Harfuch - former
Secretary of Citizen Security of Mexico City when Claudia Sheinbaum was
head of government, and today Federal Secretary of Security and Citizen
Protection - was involved in the crime of Iguala, although it has been
proven that he was a commissioner of the Federal Police in Guerrero and
participated in the fabrication of the "historical truth". That's not
all. A day before the commemoration of the Night of Iguala, AMLO signed
a constitutional reform that transfers the National Guard under the
command of the army, an opaque and unaccountable institution that will
thus have even more power. Article 129 now states that "in peacetime no
military authority may exercise more functions than those provided for
in this Constitution and the laws derived from it." What does this mean?
That the government will be able to militarize practically anything it
wants thanks to the overwhelming majority it has in Congress and the
Senate (19).
The former President went so far as to accuse, without evidence, the
Miguel Agustín Pro Center and the Tlachinollan Human Rights Center-two
well-known human rights organizations-of manipulating the relatives of
the 43 to discredit the government. On one occasion, he offered to
receive them but without their lawyers; and on another occasion, he
claimed that there was a conspiracy orchestrated from the United States
to discredit the Mexican army.
Ten years after the night of Iguala, the details of the crime remain
hidden in the archives of the army, navy, and secret services. For their
part, the families of the disappeared continue to demand the disclosure
of the 868 confidential messages that have not been provided. Will there
be progress with Claudia Sheinbaum, the first female President of
Mexico? The prognosis is reserved. In the meantime, Ayotzinapa lives and
the fight continues.
Claudio Albertani, Mexico City, October 7, 2024
(translated from Spanish by Vanina)
http://oclibertaire.lautre.net/spip.php?article4282
_________________________________________
A - I N F O S N E W S S E R V I C E
By, For, and About Anarchists
Send news reports to A-infos-en mailing list
A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
Raúl Isidro Burgos rural teacher training college in Ayotzinapa,
Guerrero state, disappeared in Iguala, a small town 140 kilometers from
Chilpancingo, the state capital. In addition, six people were
murdered-including three normalistas, one of whom had his face and eyes
gouged out while he was still alive-and more than 40 were injured in
what has been called the "October 2 of the 21st century (1)."
A decade of lies
Despite major national and international mobilizations demanding truth
and justice, families and Mexican society as a whole continue to ignore
what happened to these young people, most of whom were between 18 and 21
years old at the time. Although there are 151 people being prosecuted,
120 of whom are in detention - among them, military personnel and former
Attorney General Jesús Murillo Karam - none of them are accused of being
directly involved in the crime; furthermore, there has been no trial and
the motive for the massacre has not been proven (2). The only truth
about this case is therefore the one that resonates in the streets: it
was the State!
This year's march was all the more important because a few days later,
on September 30, the term of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador
(AMLO) came to an end and the time had come to take stock of his
management. Despite the cold and the rain, thousands of demonstrators,
including many young normalistas from all over the country, once again
accompanied the parents of the 43. With the cry of "You are not alone!",
the march began on Reforma Avenue, at the Angel of Independence. On the
corner of Juárez Avenue, just behind the Antimonument +43, a memorial
was inaugurated in memory of the disappeared boys. There were no police,
but as we walked past the Bellas Artes building, we noticed that it was
closed with metal plates and, after crossing 5 de Mayo Avenue, we had to
stop because the government (supposedly left-wing) had put up cement
blocks that prevented us from entering the Zócalo. We soon realized that
the entire center was closed, something never seen before in the recent
history of the city. Fortunately, a few enterprising boys managed to
open a gap and we were able to get through. A surreal spectacle ensued:
the square was unusually deserted, and the rain-soaked ground reflected
the light emanating from the illuminated silhouettes of patriotic heroes
depicted on the surrounding buildings. Angry, some protesters threw
incendiary devices at the presidential palace and broke windows, but the
situation did not escalate. From an improvised podium, Mario González,
father of César Manuel González, asked: "What is the government afraid
of? Where is democracy? No barrier will stop us and we will continue to
demand justice for Claudia Sheinbaum[the new President], but we will not
give her the time we have given to this President who has betrayed us."
Harsh, implacable words that will remain in the annals of Mexican
history. Don Mario did not exaggerate. Throughout these ten years, he
and his comrades have shown great patience. Two federal governments, the
right-wing one of Enrique Peña Nieto (2012-2018) and then the "humanist"
one of AMLO (December 1, 2018 - September 30, 2024), have lied and
concealed information. It is true that, initially, AMLO ordered the
opening of the archives of the Ministry of National Defense (SEDENA),
the Ministry of the Navy (SEMAR) and the intelligence services (CISEN).
There has been much progress: he recognized that the forced
disappearances in Iguala were a state crime, created the Commission for
Truth and Access to Justice (COVAJ) - coordinated by Alejandro Encinas,
a long-time activist of the historical left - and set up the Special
Investigation and Litigation Unit for the Ayotzinapa Case (UEILCA) - led
by Omar Gómez Trejo, a respected former collaborator of the Office of
the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights in Mexico, who
enjoyed the trust of the victims' relatives. However, when in 2022 the
investigation involved the army and navy, the military high command
refused to provide the requested information and the President
backtracked. Gómez Trejo had to flee to the United States after, without
consulting him, federal prosecutors withdrew 21 arrest warrants
(including those of 14 military personnel and the former prosecutor of
Guerrero, Iñaki Blanco), out of the 83 he had requested. AMLO accused
him of... not making progress in the investigation! Encinas himself was
disqualified and resigned in 2023, officially to join the campaign of
Claudia Sheinbaum, then a presidential candidate.
What happened in Iguala on the night of September 26-27, 2014?
It is not easy to navigate the ocean of information that the internet
contains, because bits of truth are mixed with outright lies. Just type
the word "Ayotzinapa" into the Google search engine to get 12,700,000
entries. In what follows, I use the sixth report (2023) of the
Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts (GIEI) and the first
report of COVAJ (3).
The story begins a few days before September 26, when an assembly of the
FECSM - the Federation of Socialist Peasant Students of Mexico, which
brings together all the normalistas in the country - decides to entrust
Raúl Isidro Burgos' students with the task of "taking" 20 buses to
Mexico City and participating in the march that, every October 2,
commemorates the Tlatelolco massacre in 1968. "Taking" a bus means
temporarily appropriating it. It is a relatively common practice and
generally tolerated by the authorities: the students intercept a bus,
make an agreement with the driver, who takes them to the desired
location without too much trouble. On September 26, the normalistas only
had two buses, so they went to the Chilpancingo bus station in the
morning to take others, but they were unable to do so and returned to
school. Around 5:00 p.m., about a hundred boys, most of them
first-semester students, left Ayotzinapa on buses 1568 and 1531,
belonging to the Estrella de Oro company. The first arrived at the
Iguala toll booth No. 3 a few minutes before 8:00 p.m. The second
reached the place called Rancho del Cura, where the students stayed to
botear, that is, to ask passers-by for money. About ten of them
intercepted the Costa Line 2513 bus from Acapulco and took it to the
Iguala bus station, where they arrived around 8:30 p.m. However, the
driver locked them in the vehicle and alerted the authorities. The
normalistas then asked for support from their classmates, who arrived
shortly after 9 p.m. on buses 1531 and 1568. According to witnesses
cited by the GIEI, motorcycle "hawks" from the drug trafficking group
known as Guerreros Unidos (GU) had followed the two buses. On the other
hand, a motorist interviewed by the local newspaper El Sur said that
that night military personnel and members of the federal and state
police had searched all the buses and private vehicles at the entrance
to Iguala on the highway (4). After meeting their classmates at the bus
station, the normalistas took three more buses, two from Costa Line
numbered 2012 and 2510 and one from Estrella Roja whose number has not
been identified. They then decided to return to Ayotzinapa on the five
buses: the two they had taken from school, plus the three they had just
taken. Three units headed towards Galeana Street, which becomes Juan N.
Álvarez Street and leads to the Periferico Norte, and the other two left
through the back door towards the Palace of Justice and the highway to
Chilpancingo. The tragedy began around 9:30 p.m. and lasted about four
hours, according to different scenarios. The first three buses (in
order: 2012, 2510 and 1568) were stopped on Juan N. Álvarez Street by a
patrol car that blocked their passage, while others blocked the side
streets. When the students tried to force the blockade, the police shot
them, wounding Aldo Gutiérrez Solano in the head, who did not receive
treatment in time and has been in a vegetative state ever since.
Afterwards, police officers from Iguala and Cocula kidnapped and then
made the young people from the third bus, the 1568, disappear. At the
same time, other police officers were chasing the 1531 bus, which they
stopped under a bridge where there were also federal police patrol cars.
All the students on board that bus disappeared. The fifth bus was
intercepted about 150 meters further on, also by federal police officers
who made the students get off and ordered them to leave, which they did
by quickly dispersing. Having no more passengers, that bus continued on
its way to Cuernavaca and disappeared without a trace. When the GIEI
asked to inspect it in 2015, the Attorney General's Office (PGR) showed
an Estrella Roja bus number 3278 whose characteristics did not match the
video images from the security cameras. This means that the fifth bus
also disappeared. Another incident occurred at 11:20 p.m., when a Los
Avispones football team bus traveling through the Santa Teresa area,
about fifteen minutes from Iguala, was attacked by Guerreros Unidos and
police officers from Iguala, Huitzuco and Tepecoacuilco who mistook it
for one of the normalistas' buses. The shooting left three dead - the
driver, a player and a passenger in a taxi - and several injured. Two
other attacks took place between 10:30 p.m. and 12:30 a.m. against the
survivors of the fifth bus who were actively trying to find their
comrades and who survived by taking refuge in private homes. The latest
attack took place again on Juan N. Álvarez Street, while teachers from
the Guerrero State Education Workers Coordinating Committee (CETEG),
students who had survived the previous attacks, and others who had
arrived from Ayotzinapa were holding a press conference to denounce the
events. Around a quarter past midnight, hitmen from Guerreros Unidos
arrived in several vehicles and unloaded their firearms on those
present. Several of them were injured, and Daniel Solís Gallardo and
Julio César Ramírez Nava were killed. Another student, Julio César
Mondragón, fled, but was intercepted, savagely tortured, and murdered.
His body was found the next day, his face scratched, about 500 meters
from the scene of the attack. Other young people and a teacher took
refuge in the Cristina Clinic, also located on Juan N. Álvarez. They
requested medical attention for a classmate in mortal danger, but did
not receive it. Instead, they were insulted and assaulted by the
municipal police and the military; a captain, José Martínez Crespo,
ordered the boys to put their cell phones on the table and give their
real names "otherwise we would not find them," which clearly amounted to
a death threat. Meanwhile, several public agencies, all located nearby,
monitored the normalistas' movements: the National Security and
Investigation Center (CISEN), the Army's Regional Intelligence Fusion
Center (CRFI), the Control, Command, Communications and Computing Center
(C-4), and the 27th Infantry Battalion, which has a long history of
forced disappearances in the years of the "Dirty War" (1965-1990).
Although it has been proven that the CRFI was wiretapping and
communicating with members of Guerreros Unidos, SEDENA has assured, at
the time of the events and still today, that the CRFI did not exist in
2014. It is fair to recall that a former military human rights defender,
General Francisco Gallardo (1946-2021), stated from the beginning that
in Iguala, where there are two army battalions (the 27th and the 41st),
it is practically impossible for 43 young people to disappear without
their knowledge and consent: "SEDENA intelligence services have
monitored all the movements of the dissidents, in this case the students
of Ayotzinapa. The army knows in real time where they are going and
whether or not they have taken a bus (5).» It has also been proven that
there was at least one infiltrated element in the teacher training
college, soldier Julio César López Patolzin, who was part of the
Information Research Organization (OBI), that is, he would occasionally
inform his superiors about the students' activities. Apparently, that
night he also disappeared, but it can be assumed that he managed to
escape and change his identity.
The GIEI theory
The Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts (GIEI) was created in
2014, following an agreement between the Inter-American Commission on
Human Rights (IACHR) and the government, under pressure from the
relatives of the disappeared. After a long and thorough investigation
that began in March 2015 and that involved different organizations, the
GIEI made valuable discoveries, although it was unable to find any trace
of the boys.
Composed of Colombians Ángela Buitrago and Alejandro Valencia,
Guatemalan Claudia Paz y Paz, Chilean Francisco Cox and Spaniard Carlos
Beristain, this group produced, between 2015 and 2023, six reports of
some 1,800 pages in total that dismantled the scenario developed at the
time of Peña Nieto by the then Attorney General of the Republic, Jesús
Murillo Karam (currently under house arrest), and by the head of the
Criminal Investigation Agency, Tomás Zerón de Lucio. On November 7,
2014, just weeks after the crime, Murillo Karam held a press conference
to present a supposed "historical truth" that GU hitmen, aided by the
police of Iguala and surrounding municipalities, had kidnapped,
murdered, and burned the students at the Cocula dump, then scattered
their remains in the San Juan River. However, the genetic study carried
out by the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team (EAAF)-a group of
independent experts that worked with the GIEI-revealed that the remains
found in the San Juan River did not correspond to any of the missing
students, but to other unidentified individuals. Videos were later
released showing Zerón personally torturing prisoners from Guerreros
Unido to make them adapt their confessions to the "historical truth."
Now a fugitive in Israel, Zerón had ties to powerful Israeli companies
such as NSO, which produces the infamous Pegasus spyware with which the
Mexican government spied - and apparently continues to spy (6) - on
members of the GIEI, Gómez Trejo and the relatives of the 43 disappeared.
The GIEI discovered that the Navy Ministry had concocted the San Juan
River scenario a few days before November 7. On the other hand, it
demonstrated that the hitmen had taken the boys to different locations,
not just one. A first group was taken by the Huitzuco police to an
unknown destination; another was lost on the way out of Chilpancingo;
and another was taken to the headquarters of the municipal police of
Iguala before Judge Ulises Bernabé García, who allegedly handed them
over to Guerreros Unidos. However, some sources deny this version, and
Bernabé is currently enjoying asylum in the United States.
Little by little, new information has emerged, revealing the horrible
reality of forced disappearances in Mexico. In the state of Guerrero,
with its long tradition of struggle by peasants, teachers and students,
this reality has manifested itself in an extreme and brutal way. In
March 2020, a protected witness located a mass grave in the area known
as the "barranca de la Carnicería" (butchery canyon), some 800 meters
from the Cocula landfill. In this place with such a sinister name,
experts discovered, among other unidentified human remains, three tiny
bone fragments corresponding to two of the disappeared students,
Christian Rodríguez Telumbre and Jhosivany Guerrero de la Cruz. To date,
this is all that has been found of the 43 boys.
How can we understand this terrible violence? The GIEI supports the
theory, also defended by Gómez Trejo and, with nuances, by the
journalists Anabel Hernández and John Gibler (7), that the massacre is
linked to the intense heroin trafficking between Iguala and the United
States managed by GU. It has been proven that, every Friday (September
26 was also a Friday), a bus carrying a hidden drug shipment left the
Iguala bus station for Chicago. Unknowingly, the normalistas would have
boarded a bus, the fifth, carrying a huge quantity of heroin, which
would have unleashed the wrath of GU and its accomplices. I do not deny
that this theory seems convincing. Guerrero was at the time the leading
poppy producer in Mexico, and it is possible, even probable, that the
fifth truck did indeed carry a shipment of heroin. Is this enough to
explain the murderous fury of that night? I have legitimate doubts,
especially because the available information shows that the operation
began before the students took that bus to Iguala, and not after.
Similarly, the attack on the Los Alvispones bus could indicate that the
hitmen were not looking for drugs, but were targeting the boys themselves.
A counterinsurgency operation
The extreme violence against the normalistas in general and those in
Ayotzinapa in particular did not begin in 2014. On November 30, 2007,
students from the Raúl Isidro Burgos school who were holding a sit-in on
the Autopista del Sol highway, near Chilpancingo, were expelled and
brutally repressed by the federal and state police - resulting in 56
arrests and two injuries, one seriously. On December 12, 2011, students
Jorge Alexis Herrera Pino and Gabriel Echeverría de Jesús were killed in
another violent eviction in the same place. It is estimated that at
least ten students from the same normal school were killed before and
after the night of Iguala; the last crime occurred on March 7, when a
state police officer killed student Yanqui Kothan Gómez Peralta, in the
vicinity of Ayotzinapa. Anabel Hernández reports that in November 2012,
during the transition between the mandates of Felipe Calderón
(2006-2012) and Peña Nieto (2012-2018), their teams met to discuss
national security issues. Among these, drug trafficking was not
mentioned, but Raúl Isidro Burgos' students came in second place,
preceded only by the problems of governance in Michoacán (8). In other
words, both Calderón and Peña Nieto considered the normalistas a danger
to their governments. But that's not all: documents from the Mexican
armed forces hacked by the hacktivists of Guacamaya Leaks reveal that,
years before the disappearance of the 43, the Mexican army was already
monitoring the school and considered its students subversives (9). Why?
For multiple reasons. First, there is the fierce and unhealthy hatred
that the repressive apparatus, the ruling classes and the media powers
have for the students of the rural normal schools. A legacy of the
Mexican Revolution, these schools were born with the project of offering
poor rural communities a decent education that would help improve their
lives. Although violence has accompanied them practically since their
creation, it has intensified in recent decades due to the tenacious
revolutionary aspirations of the young peasant normalistas, their way of
life and their resistance (10).
Furthermore, in Mexico, forced disappearances have a long and terrible
history. They began after the Tlatelolco massacre in 1968 and, in
Guerrero, they were practiced in a particularly brutal manner against
the guerrillas of Lucio Cabañas and Genaro Vázquez Rojas. During the
period known as the "dirty war", the army committed countless crimes
against humanity, torturing, disappearing and murdering hundreds of
people with the aim of annihilating the political-military organizations
that existed in the region.
With the 21st century, new forms of "dirty war" have gradually emerged.
Assassinations, beheadings and forced disappearances have multiplied but
without apparent motive, and the victims are no longer guerrillas but
ordinary citizens. The enemy is now the population as a whole and the
spread of violence is directly linked to the greed of big capital,
especially in the extractive sector. Raúl Zibechi describes the war of
extermination of common goods as "massacre as a form of domination
(11)". The parts of humanity that oppose the theft of these goods,
whether because they live on them, because they resist dispossession, or
simply because they are "left behind", deserve to be annihilated. The
unbridled violence that was unleashed in the night of Iguala is part of
the modes of accumulation/theft of the dominant classes. The State is no
longer just the committee that governs the collective interests of the
bourgeoisie: it also administers the activity of criminal gangs that
either kidnap, extort and traffic drugs, or act as auxiliaries of the
repressive apparatus and invest in legal businesses.
In our 2015 book, Manuel Aguilar Mora and I pointed out that Guerrero is
rich in minerals of high economic value. In particular, the Iguala
region is located in what is known as the "gold belt," a kind of El
Dorado, nestled in a region of terrible poverty and extremely high
social risk that includes Tlatlaya in the State of Mexico, Iguala and
the Mezcala River region. In 2014, GU was operating in the same sites as
the powerful Canadian mining companies Goldcorp and Torex Gold. In Nuevo
Balsas, municipality of Cocula - the town whose police were involved in
the kidnapping of the normalistas - the gold mining company Media Luna,
a subsidiary of Torex Gold, had serious conflicts with the local
population at the time, some of which led to kidnappings and murders.
According to El Sur of February 12, 2015, the company paid 1 million
pesos per month to organized crime (12). Another study highlights that
one of the largest gold deposits was discovered in the immediate
vicinity of Ayotzinapa. It can be profitable to clean up the villages
using whatever is there, say its authors, Francisco Cruz, Félix Santana
Ángeles and Miguel Alvarado: "In Guerrero, but also in the rest of the
country, where the supermines are, the army is there as a prelude to the
arrival or strengthening of organized crime" (13). This obviously does
not prove that the mining companies are directly responsible for the
disappearance of the students, but it is part of the context of extreme
violence that prevailed - and continues to prevail - in this state. The
conclusion is that the night of Iguala was not organized by drug
traffickers. It was a preemptive attack, a counterinsurgency operation,
designed and ordered at the highest levels of the federal and state
governments, with the help of hired killers from organized crime (14).
The local police forces, in collusion with the Guerreros Unidos hitmen,
carried out the disappearance and massacre on September 26 under the
supervision of the federal police and the army. Colonel Rodríguez Pérez,
commander of the 27th Battalion, was aware of everything that happened
that night. A task force commanded by his subordinate, Captain José
Martínez Crespo, already mentioned, was permanently present at the
different sites of the attack to observe and supervise the operation.
According to COVAJ itself, Rodríguez Pérez (arrested in 2022 and
released last July) personally ordered the assassination of six of the
43 disappeared normalistas (15). The normalistas represented a danger
and had to be made an example of. They were doubly guilty: they were
transgressing social norms and, even more serious, they were close to
enormous mineral wealth. Fabian Gonzalez, one of the students'
spokespeople, expressed it with crystal clarity on the day of the march:
"September 26 was a blow to the rural normal schools, not only the one
in Ayotzinapa, but all the others, in order to impose their definitive
closure. It was not organized crime. Organized crime participated, but
it was the state (16)."
And now?
AMLO, Claudia Sheinbaum's political mentor, has given the military
economic, political, and even cultural power that it never had before
and that it is unlikely it will give up (17). In the Ayotzinapa case,
not only did the government of the so-called "fourth transformation"
(4T) stop the investigations when they were about to reveal the real
perpetrators, it also lied blatantly on at least two occasions. First,
he claimed that the aforementioned soldier López Paltozin was not an
active member of the OBI, although this is proven in the presidential
report itself (18). He also denied that Omar García Harfuch - former
Secretary of Citizen Security of Mexico City when Claudia Sheinbaum was
head of government, and today Federal Secretary of Security and Citizen
Protection - was involved in the crime of Iguala, although it has been
proven that he was a commissioner of the Federal Police in Guerrero and
participated in the fabrication of the "historical truth". That's not
all. A day before the commemoration of the Night of Iguala, AMLO signed
a constitutional reform that transfers the National Guard under the
command of the army, an opaque and unaccountable institution that will
thus have even more power. Article 129 now states that "in peacetime no
military authority may exercise more functions than those provided for
in this Constitution and the laws derived from it." What does this mean?
That the government will be able to militarize practically anything it
wants thanks to the overwhelming majority it has in Congress and the
Senate (19).
The former President went so far as to accuse, without evidence, the
Miguel Agustín Pro Center and the Tlachinollan Human Rights Center-two
well-known human rights organizations-of manipulating the relatives of
the 43 to discredit the government. On one occasion, he offered to
receive them but without their lawyers; and on another occasion, he
claimed that there was a conspiracy orchestrated from the United States
to discredit the Mexican army.
Ten years after the night of Iguala, the details of the crime remain
hidden in the archives of the army, navy, and secret services. For their
part, the families of the disappeared continue to demand the disclosure
of the 868 confidential messages that have not been provided. Will there
be progress with Claudia Sheinbaum, the first female President of
Mexico? The prognosis is reserved. In the meantime, Ayotzinapa lives and
the fight continues.
Claudio Albertani, Mexico City, October 7, 2024
(translated from Spanish by Vanina)
http://oclibertaire.lautre.net/spip.php?article4282
_________________________________________
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