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JUNE 8, 2015

The Missing FortyThree: The Government’sCase CollapsesBY FRANCISCO GOLDMAN

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The Mexican government says that it has provided “thehistorical truth” about how forty-three studentsdisappeared in September. But the off icial account hasbeen greeted with skepticism and scorn.PHOTOGRAPH BY JESUS GUERRERO / AFP / GETTY

This is the sixth part in Francisco Goldman’s series on themissing students from the Ayotzinapa Normal School.He has also written “The Disappearance of the Forty-Three(http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/crisis-mexico-disappearance-forty-three),”“Could Mexico’s Missing Students Spark a Revolution(http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/crisis-mexico-forty-three-missing-students-spark-revolution)?,” “The Protests for the Missing Forty-Three(http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/crisis-mexico-protests-missing-forty-three),” “An Infrarrealista Revolution (http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/mexicos-infrarrealista-revolution),” and “Who is Really Responsible For the MissingForty-Three?” (http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/crisis-mexico-really-responsible-missing-forty-three)

hey’re shooting at us!” “We’re not armed!” “Call an ambulance!” “My phonedoesn’t have any credit left!” “Culeros!” “Is there anyone on the bus?” “They’ve

killed one of us!”

It was March of this year, and a small group of people had gathered in a room at theMarriott Hotel in Brooklyn, as part of Amnesty International U.S.A.’s annual human-rights conference (http://www.amnestyusa.org/events/human-rights-conference-2015),to discuss the case of the forty-three students from the Ayotzinapa Normal School, inMexico, who have been missing since late September of last year. Projected onto a screenin the darkened room were clips from mobile-phone videos taken by students whosurvived that night’s attacks in the streets of Iguala, edited into one piece. It won’t be easy,I think, for anyone in that audience to forget the immediacy of the terror, chaos, andviolence captured in those scenes, or the shouts of the students, terrified, angry, andsometimes defiant. One shadowy video shows a body, presumably a student, lyingcrumpled and still on the pavement, perhaps bleeding to death or already slain. In theweak glare of street lights, the constant gunfire in the darkness indicated that it was toodangerous for anyone to go to his aid.

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“Why are you picking up those bullet shells?” “Notify the press!” “Stop picking up thosebullet shells!” “You know what you did, you dog!” “We need an ambulance!” The shootingin the video was now heavy and loud, a dense, methodical barrage of gunfire, each shotlike a bomb blast. I counted thirty shots packed into about fifteen seconds.

As we listened, the woman who was showing the videos(https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=139&v=yYzy0TRNirE) interjected, in heavilyaccented English, “It was very dark, even the students couldn’t see who was shooting.Some of them did recognize [that] the federal police that works for the federalgovernment was doing the attack, was doing the shooting. This last part of the video, itwas very hot. It was recorded just before the students disappeared.”

The woman who spoke was Anabel Hernández(http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/05/30/mexico-drug-war_n_7476278.html), anoted Mexican journalist who is currently at the Investigative Reporting Program at theUniversity of California at Berkeley, which has been helping to support the reportingthat she and her colleague Steve Fisher have been doing on the Ayotzinapa story, for themagazine Proceso (http://www.proceso.com.mx/?p=390560). Hernández is in her mid-forties but looks ten years younger; she is a pretty, almost prim-seeming woman with acheerful demeanor and a voice that rises resonantly when she is impassioned orindignant, as she certainly became while explaining the significance of what we wereseeing and especially of what we were hearing.

“You fucking ball-licking dog!” “The police are leaving! The federales are staying, they’regoing to want to mess with us.”

ight months have passed since the forty-three students disappeared in the city ofIguala, in the Mexican state of Guerrero, on the night of September 26th and the

predawn hours of the following day. The crime (http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/crisis-mexico-disappearance-forty-three) ignited months of street protests(http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/crisis-mexico-forty-three-missing-students-spark-revolution) and sent Enrique Peña Nieto’s PRI government(http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/crisis-mexico-protests-missing-forty-three) into an unprecedented credibility crisis (http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/mexicos-infrarrealista-revolution) (hastened by the exposure of other atrocities andcorruption scandals) that prompted condemnation both from within Mexico andinternationally.

On January 27th, the Mexican Attorney General Jesús Murillo Karam announced(http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/28/world/americas/mexico-officially-declares-missing-students-dead.html) that, after an exhaustive investigation, his office, the P.G.R.,

could now provide “the historical truth” of how the crime had transpired. The case, heargued, should be considered essentially closed so that it could proceed to the prosecutionstage.

According to the government, on the night of September 26th, as many as a hundredAyotzinapa students, travelling in commandeered buses on the streets of Iguala and aperipheral highway, came under attack by gunfire from municipal police in a series ofincidents. Six people were killed, including three students, a woman riding in a taxi, andthe driver and a passenger on a bus carrying a Chilpancingo soccer team, which wasmistakenly targeted; another Ayotzinapa student, shot in the head, remains in a coma.One student was found dead the next morning, the skin of his face peeled off. And,before dawn, police abducted forty-three of the students and turned them over to a localdrug-trafficking gang known as Guerreros Unidos. The forty-three were transported, intwo trucks, to the Cocula municipal dump and left in the hands of three of the group’ssicarios, or gunmen. According the Attorney General’s account of the gunmen’sconfessions after they were captured, about fifteen of the students were already dead onarrival at the dump, either from gun wounds or because they’d asphyxiated during theshort journey. The gang members forced the still-living students to kneel, brusquelyinterrogated them, and then executed them. The forty-two corpses were laid on a pyre ofwood, tires, and plastic; doused in diesel and gasoline; and set aflame, in a fire thatburned for fifteen hours, until about four the following afternoon. Then the gunmengathered the incinerated remains into eight plastic garbage bags, which they tossed intothe nearby San Juan River.*

In Murillo Karam’s account, the students left Ayotzinapa on the 26th in two buses andheaded for the state capital, Chilpancingo, in order to raise funds by stopping traffic onthe highway outside the city and to commandeer more commercial buses for transportingstudents to Mexico City for the annual commemoration of the 1968 student massacre(http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=97546687) in the city’sTlatelolco Plaza, on October 2nd. “But they went directly to Iguala,” Murillo Karam said.“On their way, they’d been instructed that they were to go there to block a politicalevent.”

Why had there been an assault? According to the government, the mayor of Iguala, JoséLuis Abarca, triggered the police attack by ordering that the students be detained “comosea,” by any means. Abarca’s wife, María de los Ángeles Pineda (who had four brothers, atleast three of whom belonged to Guerreros Unidos, though two had been slain) waspresiding over the political event, which was meant to position her to succeed herhusband as mayor. But when the students reached Iguala, according to Murillo Karam,a halcón, or lookout, for Guerreros Unidos mistook the buses full of students for anincursion by Los Rojos, a rival drug gang, and he passed this information to both thegang and the municipal police. So the students had angered the mayor by coming toIguala to upend his wife’s event, but they were also mistaken by Guerreros Unidos and by

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the police for members of Los Rojos. Murillo Karam emphatically reiterated that nofederal forces were involved in that night’s events. Both the federal police and theMexican Army have bases (http://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-30793499) in Iguala, but there was no reason for the P.G.R. to investigate any possiblefederal role.

Murillo Karam declared that his office had already arrested ninety-nine people. He said,“This is the historical truth of what occurred, based on proofs supported by science, asincluded in the case record, and which has enabled us so far to take punitive action.” Hestressed that an Argentine forensic team participated in all of the crime-scene forensicsinvestigations.

Despite what probably seemed, to untrained observers, like plausible science, MurilloKaram’s infelicitously phrased “historical truth” was met with widespread skepticism andeven scorn. This was partly because of significant flaws in the government’s science,including, as scientists from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México noted, thefact that a fire capable of incinerating forty-two bodies is not even physically possible(http://latincorrespondent.com/mexico/serious-questions-remain-fate-mexicos-43-missing-students/) in the space where they say it occurred. It was also, even moreimportant, because so many obvious questions still hadn’t been answered. For example,why did the government insist that there was no reason to even question the Army, whenit is known that soldiers encountered the students on the streets that night? How couldthe Attorney General even speak of closing the case when the remains of only one of themissing students had been positively identified? The fact that the federal government—agovernment already plunged into a deep crisis of credibility—was obviously feeling anurgent need to close the case inevitably aroused suspicion. “Alternative theories emergedto explain how and where the bodies were disposed of,” the Intercept reported(https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/05/04/mexico-ayotzinapa-43-students-disappeared-part-2/). “Among the most provocative, widely cited in the media: the bodieswere destroyed in a trash incinerator or crematorium at an army base.”

n early March, Murillo Karam was removed from his post and replaced by ArelyGómez, a PRI senator who, since her appointment, seems to have been seeking to

lower the profile of the Ayotzinapa case. And for good reason: the narrative laid out byMurillo Karam, and unaltered by Gómez, lies in ruins. Over months, journalists, forensicsand judicial experts, and human-rights groups, with the help of witnesses and thepersistence of the students’ family members, have poked so many holes in the story,exposed so many incongruities, and provided so much contrary information that evenelements that once seemed settled as facts, such as the guilt of Mayor Abarca and hiswife, are now openly questioned. An international group of five legal and human-rights-abuse experts appointed by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights(I.A.C.H.R.), in accordance with the Ayotzinapa victims’ representatives and theMexican government, has been visiting Mexico since March to assist with the

investigation. On May 11th, the group issued a preliminary report(http://www.wola.org/sites/default/files/MX/IACHR%20Group%20of%20Experts%20Third%20Report_Ayoztinapa%20Case.pdf )their third so far, that did not hold much good news for the government. Among otherfindings, the I.A.C.H.R. experts corroborated earlier reports by journalists—including byAnabel Hernández—that federal policing authorities had been monitoring the studentsfrom the moment they left Ayotzinapa, at six in the evening on September 26th, and thatthese authorities knew that the students had come under armed attack in Iguala. Thereport stated that the students had not come to Iguala to interrupt or protest the mayor’swife’s political event at all, as Murillo Karam alleged. All along, students who survivedthe attacks have insisted that they were unaware of José Luis Abarca and his wife. They’dbeen diverted to Iguala that night after realizing that federal police and other forces weredetermined to block them from entering Chilpancingo to seize buses; they decided thatthey would have a better chance of succeeding in the smaller city. In fact, the studentsarrived in Iguala after the political event ended.

That same week in May, the National Security Archive, in Washington, D.C., madepublic (http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB515/) some documents that itobtained via the Freedom of Information Act, which revealed U.S. government andmilitary unease over the potential role of U.S.-funded Mexican forces in atrocities. In theweeks after the Ayotzinapa students disappeared, searches in the countryside aroundIguala turned up numerous clandestine graves filled with the bodies of dozens ofexecuted victims that did not match those of the missing students. One of the documentsthat was released, an October, 2014, internal report from the U.S. NorthernCommand, noted (http://www.sinembargo.mx/14-05-2015/1343862) that the numberof recently unearthed graves raised “alarming questions about the widespread nature ofcartel violence in the region and the level of government complicity.”

Furthermore, a few days after Murillo Karam’s statements, the ArgentineAnthropological Forensic Team (E.A.A.F.), on which he had relied heavily, took theunusual step of releasing a detailed sixteen-page communiqué(http://www.eaaf.org/files/comunicado-eaaf_7feb2015.pdf ) distancing itself from, andcriticizing, the P.G.R.’s investigation of the Cocula dump and the San Juan River. First,the E.A.A.F. reiterated an earlier statement that its team was not present when plasticbags filled with burned human remains were allegedly recovered from the San Juan Riverby Mexican Marine divers. They were only shown a plastic bag that was already open,which contained the bone fragments that eventually yielded the sole positive DNAidentification of an Ayotzinapa student.

Second, it was only after being shown that bag of burned bones, on October 27th, thatthe E.A.A.F. began cleaning and sorting and testing the remains from the Cocula dump.As required, the E.A.A.F. and the P.G.R. collaborated on subsequent forensic crime-scene investigations conducted in a small area of the dump, between October 27th andNovember 6th. At the end of November, the Argentines learned that, on November 15th,

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an evidentiary investigation had been conducted in the dump without them. In that day’sprocedure, the Argentines wrote, “P.G.R. experts recovered evidence consisting of 42ballistic elements, soil samples, and other non-biological evidence without havinginformed the E.A.A.F. or asked it to be there.” None of that evidence was found whilethe independent experts were there; it was discovered only after they left.

Among the verifiable evidence recovered in the Cocula dump, the E.A.A.F. discoveredthe burned remnants of a dental prosthetic inserted into a jawbone that also included theroots of a human tooth in a socket of the bone. The Argentine experts asked each of theAyotzinapa families if their missing student relative had worn a prosthetic denture, andin each case the answer was no. So the evidence indicated that the Cocula dump held theincinerated human remains of at least one person who was not an Ayotzinapa student.Also, the E.A.A.F. confidentially obtained a set of satellite images of the Cocula dumpshowing that three large fires, on three separate dates between 2010 and 2013, had ragedin the exact portion of the dump that the E.A.A.F. and the P.G.R. searched for evidenceand human remains. “These images,” the Argentines wrote, “show the presence ofmultiple episodes of fire in the dump at least four years before what the P.G.R. presentedas a unique burning event in its January 27, 2015 conference.”

So in eight months, the investigation into what happened in Iguala has turned up dozensof bodies, so far, in clandestine graves throughout the surrounding countryside, andevidence of burned human remains unrelated to the case in the Cocula dump. Thegovernment has yet to discover any confirmed trace of the missing students other thanone piece of charred bone that was positively identified.

eanwhile, a number of investigative journalists, including Anabel Hernández, thewoman who showed the video of the attack, were doing important work to take

apart the government’s case. Hernández is the author of the monumental investigativebook “Los Señores del Narco,” which she wrote after the authorities did nothing toinvestigate the kidnap and murder of her father, an engineer. The book, published inEnglish as “Narcoland: The Mexican Drug Lords and their Godfathers,” provokedserious death threats against Hernández and her family. A mother of two, she decided toleave Mexico for a while.

That day in Brooklyn, Hernández was joined on the podium by Felipe de la Cruz, agraduate of the Ayotzinapa Normal School and a father of a survivor, who has emergedas a leading spokesman for the families, and by Vidulfo Rosales, a prominent Guerrerohuman-rights leader and attorney representing the families. As part of an initiativecalled Caravan 43 (http://america.aljazeera.com/watch/shows/live-news/2015/3/caravan-43-comes-to-the-us.html), De la Cruz, Rosales, and otherAyotzinapa family members have been travelling throughout the United States and othercountries to talk about the case and to participate in local marches and protests. Rosalesexplained that at a national assembly of rural normal-school students held in Morelos in

mid-September, before the disappearance, the Ayotzinapa School had been charged withthe responsibility of providing temporarily commandeered buses to transport students toMexico City on October 2nd. They needed twenty-five buses, but, as the day approached,they had acquired only eight; that was why, on September 25th, the first weekend leavefor the activist freshman students was cancelled, and the next day they set out in twobuses, at 6 P.M., from Ayotzinapa, with the intention of bringing back more. During thefour hours between when they left the school and when the police attacks in Igualabegan, at about 10 P.M., Rosales said, the students’ movements were being monitored viathe C4, a federal command and information-gathering post in Chilpancingo to which,he said, only federal police, the Army, and state police have access. In the case records ofthe Guerrero state prosecutors, Hernández found documentation of the monitoring,showing that the command post had recorded the identification numbers of the twobuses the students were travelling in. The purpose of the monitoring may merely havebeen to prevent the students from commandeering buses in Chilpancingo. But thevirulent hostility of state and federal authorities in Guerrero toward the politicallyradical, poor, mostly indigenous Ayotzinapa Normal School students is an established“historical truth.” On a previous occasion, when Ayotzinapa students gathered to stoptraffic to fundraise on the Autopista del Sol, a highway that runs past Chilpancingo toAcapulco, in December, 2011, police murdered two students and wounded five.Hernández said in Brooklyn that she believes the September 26th attack was planned allalong.

The most striking revelation from the smartphone videos Hernández showed was thepossible presence and even direct involvement of federal police in the lethal attacks. Toset that scene, Hernández first recounted the movements of the students and the buses inIguala that night, and the series of confrontations they had with police and othergunmen. On the Periférico Norte, a highway outside the city, the driver of a bus seized byten students asked to be allowed to drive to the Iguala station to drop off his passengersbefore turning his bus over. Once there, the driver stepped outside and then locked thedoors to his bus, trapping the students inside. He then went to speak to the stationmanager, who phoned the municipal police chief, who phoned the Iguala federal policechief to tell him, Hernández said, that students were making trouble in the bus station.Hernández said that she had documentary proof that these calls had been made,collected from the records of the investigation conducted by Guerrero state prosecutorsin the days after the crime. Meanwhile, the trapped students phoned their companionsout on the highway, who soon arrived in their two buses. The students—approximatelyeighty of them, many with their heads shaved and wearing bandannas over their faces—were able to overwhelm the small contingent of private security at the station. Theyseized three more buses, giving them five in all.

The students then tried to flee the city, and two of those buses made it out to thehighway. Three buses, trailed by police, became lost trying to make their way out ofIguala and were stopped, with some distance between them, by their attackers on Calle

Juan N. Álvarez. Nearly all of the disappeared students were taken from two buses thatwere the targets of the heaviest gunfire: one that had reached the highway, and the lastbus to be trapped on Juan N. Álvarez. “As you saw in the video,” Hernández said, “themunicipal police closed the road in front to not let the three buses continue. The federalsclosed the road in back.” Hernández said that the witness testimonies of Iguala residents“say that the federal police were there.” Students riding in the first two buses wereeventually able to flee down side streets or protect themselves from gunfire by hidingunder buses. It was the third bus that was found later with its windows shattered, andpools of blood on its seats and floors. Witnesses saw students being pulled from the busand taken away in patrol trucks. While Hernández and the lawyer Vidulfo Rosales areconvinced that federal police were at least present at the scene, other journalists who havebeen investigating the events in Iguala caution that there is not yet definitive proof ofthat. As commonly occurs in Mexico, these could have been other men, drug-gangmembers, disguised in federal-police uniforms, or members of a special unit of themunicipal police, known as “los bélicos,” who worked directly for Guerreros Unidos, andwhose uniforms resemble those of the federales. It is one more aspect of the case thatneeds to be investigated.

Yet the P.G.R. under Attorney General Murillo Karam apparently did not even collectthe students’ phones and videos as evidence. “The P.G.R. didn’t make a completeinvestigation,” Hernández said. I asked her how she had she come by the videos (portionsof these were later posted on Proceso’s Web site to accompany her reporting). She told methat she’d spoken to Ayotzinapa students who’d told her that they’d turned their phonesover to Guerrero state prosecutors in the first days after their companions disappeared.When she went to the Guerrero state prosecutors’ office to ask for the videos, Hernándezsaid, the officials she spoke to were at first disconcerted that she even knew of theirexistence, but then they turned the phones over to her.

Hernández also gained access to the case files of state and federal prosecutors andinvestigators and to the depositions of witnesses and the confessions of those arrested.Most of those confessions, Hernández said, were signed by ordinary citizens—a fireman,a schoolteacher, a clothing salesman—who’d never had anything to do with eitherGuerreros Unidos or the local police. In Proceso’s May 17th issue, Hernández and Fisherpublished an extended report based on their analysis of twenty-seven of the ninety-nineconfessions of people detained in the Ayotzinapa case. The reporters found wildlycontradicting and irreconcilable versions of what occurred that night, and much evidence—from the prisoners’ medical reports and from the accounts of relatives who had spokenthose imprisoned—that these confessions had been extracted by often severe torture(http://www.noticiasnet.mx/portal/oaxaca/general/agropecuarias/260313-ayotzinapa-cae-golpes-version-oficial).

On the same day as the Ayotzinapa panel in the Brooklyn Marriott, MarcelaTurati published a special report in Proceso (http://www.proceso.com.mx/?

p=399067). Its opening paragraph quoted from a somewhat crudely jotted and crypticlogbook entry of the Mexican Army’s 27th Infantry Battalion, based in Iguala, on theevents of September 26th:

“At approximately 10:30 PM three more patrullas [referring to patrol pickuptrucks or cars] arrived at the place from which descended police dressed inblack, hooded and masked, who told the students to get down, which is whythe students mentioned that they had wounded companions, withoutspecifying how [they were wounded]; at approximately 10:35 PM, the policewho arrived tried to pull the students out.” This information was contained inone of the reports that the Secretary of National Defense turned overto Proceso in compliance with the Transparency Law. . . . Military personnelknew that night [what had happened to the students] and were possiblypresent, as indicated in the logbook.

The documents finally obtained by Proceso (not without a series of difficulties andobstructions) were redacted and fragmentary, filled with blackened pages, contradictoryinformation, and omissions; ninety-seven numbered and catalogued documents weremissing. Yet, Turati wrote, “the reports reveal that from 11:00 PM on the 26th to 6:00AM of the 27th two units from the battalion’s Reaction Force were patrolling the streets;they saw the corpses, they went to the hospitals and encountered the wounded, theyknew about the gunfire and attacks.”

In the early morning of the 27th, the surviving students were searching the streets fortheir missing companions; others had already begun to give declarations to the state’sPublic Ministry. But, at the end of the night, when the two Rapid Reaction units (one ofwhich had an initially aggressive encounter with students who had taken refuge in aprivate clinic, including a badly wounded student for whom soldiers called an ambulance—an incident that has been confirmed by several journalists) finished their patrolling,they reported that the night had passed “sin novedades,” without unusual activity. Butother reports—like those Hernández uncovered about the C4—showed that the Armyknew precisely when the students arrived at the bus terminal and about thecommandeering of buses there. It also knew about the clashes in the streets betweenstudents and police, when students poured out of the buses and threw rocks at the policecars that had followed them from the bus station. And it knew that the police hadresponded with gunfire.

On the night of May 18th, I had a long conversation with Marcela Turati about theAyotzinapa case. People aren’t going to forget or forgive what happened in Iguala, shesaid. The case is unique, partly because of the way it has come to stand for so many other

similar massacres and atrocities: the massacre of forty-five indigenous people in Acteal,Chiapas, in 1997; the seventy-two dead Central American migrants found in SanFernando, Tamaulipas, in 2010; the hundred and ninety-three people massacred by Zetasat the La Joya ranch in the same area a year later; the twenty-two young peoplemassacred by the government in a warehouse in Tlatlaya just last year; the massacre ofsixteen civilians in Apatzingán in January of this year. The list, which could go on and on,includes cases that Turati, still only in her thirties, has covered closely in her prize-winning career (http://www.icij.org/journalists/marcela-turati-munoz). “What surprisesme,” she said, “is the way the patterns are repeated, the way the state operates at all levels—the P.G.R., the Foreign Ministry, down to the lowest levels—to cover up; all thosemechanisms of impunity; the way they always coordinate to protect the image of Mexicoabroad.” If any forces are found to have done something wrong, she said, these are alwaysdescribed as errors or mistakes. After massacres, she said, there’s always an excuse for notbeing able to identify the bodies: the corpses are too mixed up, or they’re too badlyburned. “Ayotzinapa is different,” she said, “for two reasons. First, the presence of theArgentine forensics group—that the government felt the pressure to open up to theArgentines. And the I.A.C.H.R.”

Of course, the government can ultimately ignore the judgments or recommendations ofeither or both of these groups. But they did decide to let them in, perhaps aftercalculating that to keep them out would be more damaging. They did, in the end, inhowever flawed a manner, turn military documents over to Proceso to comply with thetransparency law. The government knows that it cannot completely turn its back on aworld of at least symbolically agreed-upon modern democratic, legal, and human-rightsnorms. And so, even if justice is never achieved in the Ayotzinapa case within theMexican legal system, it is likely to have a long life in international courts and forums.

The May 11th preliminary report issued by the Interdisciplinary Group of IndependentExperts appointed by the I.A.C.H.R. in many ways corroborated the reporting ofMexican journalists such as Hernández and Turati, and also added information. Itharshly criticized the fragmentation of the government’s investigation into more than “13different criminal cases in six different courts in various cities of the country.” And itwent on to note that men arrested by the government have been scattered among courtsand prisons as far flung as Tepic, on the western coast, and Matamoros, on the Texasborder, the latter being one of the drug war’s most violent cities. Most of the detainedmen were represented by public-assistance attorneys from Guerrero, who were unlikely tobe able to travel to Matamoros.

Those points were emphasized the day before the report was released at a pressconference (http://www.sinembargo.mx/11-05-2015/1341492) conducted in MexicoCity by two members of the panel of experts: Carlos Beristáin, a Spanish physician andpsychologist who specializes in the effects of war trauma and political violence oncommunities, and Claudia Paz y Paz, the noted former Guatemalan Attorney General

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who brought the genocide case against the former military dictator Efraín Ríos Montt.At the press conference, the experts insisted that the crime was one of “forceddisappearance,” not of mere “kidnapping,” as the government prosecution was charging.Due process, the panel found, had been violated throughout the case, especially by theuse of torture. Beristáin said that they had spoken to people detained in the case whosaid that they had been tortured. The experts reported that they had found instances,throughout the government’s investigation, of torture, attempted murder, cover-up,obstruction of justice, and threats against the normal-school students and survivors, all ofwhich needed, they said, to be investigated. The experts revealed that their requests todirectly interview members of the 27th Battalion, submitted in the course of a monthand a half, had been rebuffed by the government and military authorities. They said thatthey were also asking to speak to federal police.

ate this spring, as I was frantically packing in order to leave New York City at dawnthe next day for nine months, I received a phone call from a Columbia University

grad student involved in hosting members of Caravan 43 on their visit to the city.Following protests held in New York, most of the caravan had returned to Guerrero, buttwo women, relatives of two of the disappeared Ayotzinapa students, had stayed in orderto speak at an indigenous-peoples forum at the United Nations. Would I like to meetthem, he asked. They arrived at my door in Brooklyn a few hours later, and we walked toa small nearby park, where we squeezed ourselves around a tiny table outside an adjacenttiny café, and spoke over lemonades, surrounded by chatting young Cobble Hill momsand baby carriages. María de Jesús Tlatempa Bello is the mother of José Eduardo BartoloTlatempa. Her son’s cousin, Jesús Jovany Rodríguez Tlatempa, is also among thedisappeared students. When I asked María de Jesús to write her name in my notebook,she appended a sentence of her own: “They are disappeared, their compañeros weredetained by police and they didn’t take more because they didn’t fit into the patroltrucks.” The other woman, Anayeli Guerrero de la Cruz, is the sister of the disappearedstudent Jhosivani Guerrero de la Cruz. She has two cousins among thedisappeared normalistas as well: Emiliano Alen Gaspar de la Cruz and EverardoRodríguez Bello. “We’re from the community of San Juan Omeapo municipality ofTixtla,” she wrote in my notebook. How carefully and lovingly they wrote down thosesentences and their relatives’ names. Tears flowed freely—these were women whosehearts had been torn out. To lose a son, a brother, and to have to consider the grisly fatesthat, according to the authorities, had befallen them. In her wonderful novel “Prayers forthe Stolen,” Jennifer Clements describes (http://arts.gov/writers-corner/bio/jennifer-clement) the women of Guerrero as “proud to be the angriest and meanest” people in theworld. It wasn’t the first time I had been around Ayotzinapa family members and sensedthat they will never stop fighting to learn the truth of their sons’ and brothers’whereabouts, or for justice.

The two women told me about their close-knit families and rough rural lives, about the

The two women told me about their close-knit families and rough rural lives, about thepride they felt over a son and a brother having made it through the arduous selectionprocess for Ayotzinapa Normal School students. José Eduardo worked with his father asa stonemason but wanted a career as a teacher. You have to be poor, from the working oragricultural class, and usually indigenous to become an Ayotzi, they told me. Teachersand older students perform home visits to assess applicants for these qualities and skills.You have to know how to till your own fields and raise your own crops. The teachers whograduate from the school, who usually go out into isolated and impoverished ruralcommunities to teach, can’t be begging their neighbors for food; they have to be self-reliant. So one trial for final admission is to show that you can grow your own food. FromDay One at the severely underfunded school, the students have to practice self-reliance.José Eduardo and Jhosivani were first-year students, like most of those who disappearedin Iguala. They had finished the trial period and were to begin their first classes on theMonday following that weekend of September 26th and 27th. María de Jesús vividlydescribed for me the last time she saw her son, about a week before that: he was leavingher kitchen to go back to the school after having surprised her by coming home one dayfor lunch.

Two days before our meeting, María de Jesús and Anayeli spoke about the students at theUnited Nations, before the Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues. They called uponMexico to invite the U.N. Special Rapporteur on the rights of indigenous peoples to visitthe country and learn about the forced disappearances and state violence. When the twowomen from Guerrero left the forum and went into the adjacent lobby, they saw that alarge and festive cocktail reception was being held to celebrate the reinstallation there ofa restored mural by Rufino Tamayo. The Tamayo mural, created in 1968, is called“Fraternidad.” Among those attending in the ceremony were Juan Manuel GómezRobledo, the Mexican Foreign Ministry’s Undersecretary for Multilateral Affairs andHuman Rights, and Susana Malcorra, the United Nations Secretary-General’s chief ofstaff. The mural shows a shadowy circle of men clasping arms around a large bonfire.According to an account of the event published in El Universal, when Malcorra spoke,she said that “in many ways, this marvelous mural underlines Mexico’s role at the U.N.,and its contributions toward securing a sustainable future of peace for all.”

*This paragraph has been updated to clarify details on the exact nature of the assault, and thenumber of students who were transported to the dump.

Watch: “Guerrero: The Monster in the Mountains,” a video about the missing students.

Francisco Goldman is a contributing writer at newyorker.com, and theauthor of “The Interior Circuit: A Mexico City Chronicle.”