Eight years after the disappearance of 43 students in Mexico, progress is being made. But the youngsters are still missing
He is tired, says Estanislao Mendoza. After all, he is already 63 and the past eight years have left their mark. In the body, but above all in the soul. It’s a day in the second half of September, just before the eighth anniversary of the crime against the 43 Mexican students of Ayotzinapa. Mendoza and many other parents of the missing young men have come to Mexico City from the southern state of Guerrero to hold marches and protests in the capital to commemorate the crime that went unpunished.
Mendoza is a short man with short gray hair under a baseball cap. He carries the rolled-up picture of his son, Miguel Ángel, and clutches it tightly. He weighs every word and says that these anniversaries are always particularly difficult, then you feel the loss even more clearly: “But we haven’t achieved anything yet. So we continue. Until we find our sons.”
Mexico’s missing: “Where are our 43 sons, who has them?”
Especially now that, after years of delays and cover-ups on the part of the Mexican government, there is finally movement in the clarification of the fact that caused worldwide horror in autumn 2014. More than 80 arrest warrants were issued for military, police and civil servants after a truth commission released its report in August.
“It’s good that arrests are finally happening, but what really interests us as parents is something else,” says Mendoza. “Where are our 43 sons, who has them?” Every day an unfamiliar number flashes on his cell phone, Mendoza hopes it might be his son. “But Miguel Ángel has probably forgotten my number over the years,” he says. He wants to accept the fact that he is dead, but none of the relatives want to put up with it.
Mexico’s missing: The only thing that is certain is that it was a “crime of the state”.
What really happened on the deadly night of September 26/27, 2014 in the city of Iguala is only partially known. The only thing that is certain – and the government recently recognized this – is that it was a “crime of the state”. In other words, the police and armed forces joined forces with organized crime to make the 43 young men, some of whom were still teenagers, disappear. A fatal alliance between the state and crime that has become the norm in Mexico over the past 15 years.
It’s almost 3000 days since the act. Still no perpetrator or mastermind has been convicted. And relatives like Estanislao Mendoza don’t stop looking for their boys, protesting in front of public prosecutors’ offices, barracks and embassies. They go to schools and universities and tell what happened back then so that the deed will not be forgotten along with so much other suffering in the country.
Mexico’s missing: The fatal long-distance bus for drug transport
On September 26, eight years ago, students hijacked long-distance buses to take them to a demonstration in Mexico City. This form of non-violent coercion towards bus companies has a long tradition among students in southern Mexico and is grudgingly tolerated.
But when the students wanted to own three buses that night, they probably chose the vehicles used by the Guerreros Unidos (United Warriors) cartel to transport drugs to the United States. From then on, the fate of the young men was sealed. However, what happened until the morning hours of September 27 and the days that followed remains a mystery. The 43 were probably divided into at least three groups and one of them was kept in a shed for several days. It was there that the commander of the 27th Infantry Battalion, stationed in Iguala, is said to have ordered the killing of six of the students. The retired general in question, José Rodríguez, has been in custody since the middle of the month.
Mexico’s missing persons: Involvement of all state institutions suspected
The government of then President Enrique Peña Nieto did everything it could to cover up the crime. Prosecutor General Jesús Murillo Karam and his chief investigator Tomas Zerón hastily fabricated what they called “historical truth” in order to quickly close the files. According to this, the 43 young people were handed over to the drug cartel “Guerreros Unidos” on the instructions of a corrupt mayor, who mistook them for criminals from a rival gang. The criminals then murdered the students and burned the bodies in a nearby town’s garbage dump. External investigators and human rights activists later refuted this version in detail.
Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who formulated the clarification of the crime in 2018 as a campaign promise, set up a truth commission after his victory as president. Bit by bit, the latter came to the conclusion that the disappearance of the students, in addition to the criminal will of the “Guerreros Unidos”, required the broad participation of all state institutions: the armed forces, the federal, state and municipal police and law enforcement agencies. The latter in particular manipulated crime scenes, falsified information and forced confessions under torture. The then Attorney General Murillo Karam was recently arrested, and his investigator Zerón fled to Israel.
Mexico’s missing: “They took them from us alive, we want them back alive!”
The exhaustion of the past few years has etched itself into Estanislao Mendoza’s face. There is deep sadness in his eyes, like that of almost all parents. Four fathers and one mother have died since 2014. But none of the loved ones you talk to these days think of giving up.
On Monday, like every September 26th, they marched through Mexico City to the central Zócalo square at the Presidential Palace. They carried the photos of their sons. And they called out the names of each of the 43 and the sentence: “They took them from us alive, we want them back alive!”
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