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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