On the night of 26 September 2014, in the town of Iguala in the Mexican state of Guerrero, local police opened fire at several buses – some full of students, one carrying football players coming home from a match. Six people were killed. By midnight, 43 more students had disappeared, or, rather, had been forcibly disappeared. That's where the story fades to grey. The Mexican government at first claimed that the police had handed the students over to a local narcotrafficking outfit, which murdered them, incinerated their bodies and buried the bones in a mass grave. But the official story kept changing, and it was plain a cover-up was underway. As the case of the missing students became international news, parents and activists went looking. They found first one mass grave, then another and another and another. Not their children's. Other bones. It turns out that Mexico is riddled with secret mass graves (fosas clandestinas).
Forced disappearances call to mind the Cold War era dictatorships in South and Central America, but Mexico had its own dirty war. When the teenagers disappeared, they had been preparing to commemorate the most infamous episode in that war, the 1968 Tlatelolco Massacre. Ten days before the Olympics opened in Mexico City, at the president's orders, soldiers in plain clothes and rooftop snipers ambushed a student protest, killing at least three hundred. The government denied that a massacre had taken place, calling it merely a ‘confrontation'. Soldiers bundled away the bodies so that an accurate count of the dead has never been possible and families had no remains to bury. Each year on 2 October a memorial service is held in the plaza in the Tlatelolco area of Mexico City where the massacre took place. This is where the students attacked in Iguala planned to go, and this was why they commandeered the buses, boarding with their faces covered and forcing the drivers to take them where they asked. The practice is known as ‘kidnapping' buses, and was of a piece with the ethos of the school the teenagers attended.
The Raúl Isidro Burgos Rural Teachers College is known to everyone as Ayotzinapa, the name of the village where it is located. Ayotzinapa was one of a network of teacher training colleges founded in the 1920s, during the most radical period of the Mexican Revolution. The revolution led to two lasting changes: more land and rights for peasants (campesinos), and the emergence of a political party that brooked no opposition. Its name has always struck me as a contradiction, almost but not quite a joke: the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), the Institutional Revolutionary Party. It ruled, uninterrupted, from 1929 to 2000 by stealing elections, buying the press and stubbing out dissent. Mario Vargas Llosa called the Mexican system the perfect dictatorship, since it was dressed up in enough elections to pass as a democracy. The PRI of this period is sometimes described by historians as a dictablanda, a soft dictatorship, punning on dictadura. The PRI, a nominally left-wing party, resorted to dirty war tactics – forced disappearances, infiltration of socialist and communist groups – to maintain power at national, regional and local levels. In states like Guerrero the soft dictatorship was not so soft. Local elites had their enemies flown out over the Pacific and then pushed out of helicopters.
The radical strain of the revolution that produced the rural teacher training colleges quickly faded, and for decades the students have had a contentious relationship with the authorities. Ayotzinapa's walls are decorated with murals of Lenin, Che Guevara and Subcomandante Marcos – the leader of the 1994 Zapatista uprising. The colleges maintain their original teaching style, a hands-on education à la Montessori mixed with political consciousness-raising. Room, board and tuition are free, but the students lead a gruelling life. They clear weeds with machetes, feed pigs and hens, and grow corn, beans, vegetables and flowers, which they sell at market and share with the locals they call ‘aunt' and ‘uncle'. Students are from poor, often indigenous families. One student cited by John Gibler in his valuable oral history of the massacre, said that ‘we don't have any other options for study or pursuing a career, my small town is a bit more fucked-over than other places. I decided to come to this school, to study, to be someone.' Graduates become teachers in the countryside, one of the few avenues of social mobility that doesn't involve joining a gang or hiring a coyote – someone who smuggles people – and crossing to the United States.
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