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Over 100,000 Mexicans are currently missing (Photo by RODRIGO ARANGUA / AFP)
On Friday 26 September 2014, a group of Mexican students boarded buses in the town of Iguala. Members of the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College, in the southern state of Guerrero, they were hoping to reach Mexico City for an event marking the anniversary of the infamous Tlatelolco massacre. On that day in 1968, hundreds of students were gunned down by the security forces, while others were tortured and falsely imprisoned. Some were simply disappeared, and never seen again. The outrage itself would soon be followed by a monumental cover-up, and ultimately become the defining event of recent Mexican history.
Little did the Ayotzinapa students know that history was about to repeat itself. As night fell, their buses were stopped by police barricades. There, on a lonely stretch of highway, they were set upon by officers and members of the local drug cartel. Many of the students were shot, a number were hospitalised, and one was found dead by the roadside, a part of his face ripped away. It was only the following morning, however, that the full scale of the horror became clear: 43 students couldn’t be accounted for. A decade on from their disappearance, they’re presumed dead. Their bodies have never been recovered.
If the Tlatelolco massacre became the defining moment of Mexico’s authoritarian past, “the 43” have come to symbolise the country’s stumbling democratic transition. There are, after all, over 110,000 desaparecidos (“disappeared ones”) right across Mexico, anonymous men and women who vanished one day and never came home. You’re reminded of them everywhere you go, their faces peering out at you from countless monochrome posters. Each, of course, represents a private tragedy. But just like Tlatelolco, the case of the Ayotzinapa students has gained vigour through the years, and ten years on represents abuse of state power at its most absolute.
Though Mexicans were disappeared in the Nineties, the modern epidemic of vanishings really started in 2006. That year, President Felipe Calderon declared a war on drugs. As gangs defended their turf, from both the police and each other, the republic was drowned in an ocean of blood. Over the next 18 years, Mexico suffered some 431,000 homicides, from random shootings to organised beheadings. Alongside the violence, disappearances have been normalised too. Alongside those 113,000 desaparecidos, after all, 4,000 clandestine graves have also been found.
Mexico’s drug cartels are clearly to blame for the mayhem — yet it’s not quite right to see them as straightforward criminals. Their influence is so powerful that it’s nowadays impossible to draw clear lines between cops and crooks. At every single level of government, from the police to the judiciary, there have been countless examples of collusion between officials and the cartels. Indeed Los Zetas, one of the most powerful and brutal of all the gangs, actually emerged out of an elite battalion of soldiers. Trained in counterinsurgency and drug war tactics, the troops then used that knowledge to become one of the most feared cartels around.
Given these blurred lines, it makes sense that investigations into the missing 43 have gone nowhere, and have instead been met by denial, impunity and red herrings. Only six weeks after the outrage, Mexico’s attorney general famously presented what he called the “historic truth” — and announced the students’ bodies had been incinerated by a cartel, with their remains thrown down a nearby ravine. Yet forensic investigators from Argentina, leading experts in finding desaparecidos after their own country’s history, soon dismissed these claims.
In 2021, meanwhile, drone footage showed the apparent site of mass murder being prepared. First taken by the Mexican Navy, it later shows their presence alongside soldiers and the attorney general. The families of the victims had long suspected official involvement in the massacre, a position later taken by an independent enquiry into the event. Led by the Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts (GIEI), it concluded that the disappeared 43 amounted to a “state crime”.
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SubscribeImplying the British government ‘disappears’ people a-la Latin American narco-state is a bit of leap. They’re prosecuting their own aging ex-soldiers for heat-of-battle incidents for heaven’s sake. To then give as an example someone who was disappeared by the IRA is disingenuous in the extreme.
I think you’re right about that. The horrifying systematic nature of state complicity the author lays out in South America is one thing, although it immediately brings to mind the issue of migration into the US – the thorny “border security” open wound that each US election picks at. It’s obvious why many Mexicans would seek to escape such tyranny, but also poses an additional security threat of those involved taking their murderous ways into the US.
It then transpires the author is publicising an art exhibition. He’s entitled to draw attention to that, and i’ve no doubt there’s a good deal to be said in its favour as a means of keeping the memory alive of those who’ve disappeared and their loved ones. The art itself (if the link is followed) may or may not be to one’s taste, although the form of abstraction does resonate personally but how much impact it’ll have in the relative gentility of Bath, UK is another matter. I hope it’s a ‘success’ in its own terms.
I wonder if that’s why the author seeks to draw parallels with the Troubles? As if to say: it’s happened here too, hence it’s legitimate to hold the exhibition here. As you say, it seems a stretch too far, even if a few examples could be provided which still gives no credence to the involvement of the British state in any deliberate policy or practice. Not to be naive about this, but it just reads as if the author has that didactic purpose with his concluding paragraphs.
One final point. I’d challenge his assertion that humans aren’t “natural born killers”. History would strongly suggest orherwise. The events of less than a year ago in Israel, where the killers gloated online about their deeds, is just one reminder that there’s a strain of viciousness (however engendered) in humans that just can’t be ignored. State sponsorship of that strain merely facilitates it, not induces it.
Agree the final two paragraphs are distinctly odd, as you say they come across as a plug in an otherwise factual analysis.
The rest of the article is useful, though.
‘Cartels and the state are equally to blame.’ This suggests that they are independent organisations. They are not. Historically, the Mexican cartels have operated within parameters set by the Mexican state (not to be confused with its elected government). The cartels have often called on the Mexican armed forces for support in resolving their disputes. Cartels have come and gone, while the Mexican state remains. Mexico and not Colombia is the true narco-state.
Tangential to this piece but I’m yet to read a convicing explanation for the sheer level of violence in South and Central America.
Other places have drugs, poverty, colonialism, resource curse, dailances with socialism and despotic leaders but S American cities always crowd out the others in lists of most violent places in earth.
Why?
The author did not mention the full context that prevents finding a true (or at leasst most accurate possible) description of the Ayotzinapa case. The outgoing president Andés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) has embraced the military in ways not known in Mexico before him. He has granted the military full control of many civilian areas: customs, ports and airports, they are now owners of an airline and have access to a lot of public resources in complete opacity. Thousands of soldiers plan, direct and work in large infrastructure projects involving thousands of millions of dollars. AMLO has also militarized public security, replacing the previous Federal Police (a sort of Mexican FBI), with a National Guard taken from recruited military personnel without real police training. AMLO has also declared since 2018 a policy of “abrazos no balazos” (hugs not bullets) as his strategy to deal with cartels, based on the assumption that they prosper and get recruits because of poverty. Meanwhile, his administration ends with 200,000 casualties. Even if we assume that 90% of them were criminals or cops or soldiers, 20,000 innocent civilian deaths is a war zone statistic.
Under these conditions, AMLO has protected the military from any search or inquiry, has refused the investigators of the Ayotzinapa case any access to material or evidence that involve the military in that tragedy. The parents of the 43 students (teacher trainees) and people helping and advising them decry this situation. The outgoing president and his government are turning Mexico into a dictatorship where state officials, the military and the cartels witll be able to act with full impunity. Many hope that his successor Claudia Sheinbaum (a women with a PhD in engineering) would change this disastrous situation, but she has given clear signals that she will follow AMLO’s authoritarian policies.