is closer than you think.
—Ariel Dorfman, May 1, 2017
(Día de los trabajadores)
PROLOGUE
SOMETIME AROUND 9:00 P.M. on September 26, 2014, scores of uniformed police officers and a number of non-uniformed gunmen initiated a series of attacks against five buses of college students in Iguala, Guerrero, Mexico; a bus carrying a third-division, youth soccer team; and several cars and taxis driving on the highway about 15 kilometers outside of Iguala. The attacks took place, at times simultaneously in multiple locations, for over eight hours. Municipal, state, and federal police, along with civilian-clad gunmen, all collaborated that night to kill six people, seriously wound more than 40 (one of whom remains in a coma), and forcibly disappear 43 students from the Raúl Isidro Burgos Rural Teachers College in Ayotzinapa, Guerrero. The killers tortured, murdered, and cut off the face of one student, and then left his remains on a trash pile a few blocks from one of the scenes of attack.
From the beginning, the Guerrero state and Mexican federal governments lied about the attacks that took place that night in September. They minimized the significance of the disappearances and told stories of “confusion”—for example, that the “narcos” mistook the Ayotzinapa students for a rival drug gang. They tried, in various different ways, to blame the students for the violence they suffered. Federal authorities have propagated a soap opera–style depiction of a “corrupt” mayor and his “mafia” wife who ordered their “gangster” police to prevent the Ayotzinapa students from protesting a political event that night, when in fact there was no such protest, nor even a plan to conduct such a protest. In reality, the students had no idea that said event was taking place, and the event concluded without the slightest interruption long before the students entered Iguala that night. Only a few days after the attacks, when it became clear that police had forcibly disappeared the 43 students, and upon observing the government’s initial response (lies, rumors, trivializing the attacks, ignoring the parents), it also seemed clear that the government would do everything in its power to make it impossible to find the 43 students, and equally impossible to know what happened that night in Iguala. Almost three years later, as I write these words, the 43 families are still looking for their sons.
On October 3, 2014, I traveled from my room in Mexico City to Guerrero and spent most of the following nine months accompanying the families and students during their protests and mobilizations, interviewing survivors and witnesses of the attacks in Iguala. As the first anniversary of the attacks approached, I wanted to share the results of my reporting with the families of the disappeared, murdered, and wounded, with the many survivors of the attacks, as well as with those mobilizing alongside them across the country. I asked myself: How can I write about this? How can I best share what I have learned? What narrative form will best convey the stories that the survivors shared with me? And I thought to myself: This is not the time for me to write. What needs to be shared, urgently, are both the words and the storytelling of the people who lived through the attacks.
This book is composed with interviews with survivors of the attacks against the students of the the Raúl Isidro Burgos Rural Teachers College in Ayotzinapa during the night and predawn hours of September 26–27, 2014. I conducted the interviews between October 4, 2014, and June 19, 2015. The majority of survivors requested that I protect their identities with the use of pseudonyms; I have respected that request.
I have kept a few important words in Spanish. A compañero (or compa) is a companion in struggle and friend. A paisa (short for paisano) is a person from the same region or country, though the Ayotzinapa students also use it to refer to each other regardless of the region of the country they are from. A campesino is someone who lives in the countryside and works the land. A zócalo is a central plaza in a town or city. The students often use the words tío and tía (uncle and aunt) to refer in a respectful and tender way to adults. I have kept those words in Spanish when they are used in that way and translated them into English when the speaker is talking about an aunt or uncle.
Every year Ayotzinapa students elect a student governing committee with a secretary general and several sub-committees tasked with overseeing political organizing, cleaning, cooking and other activities. In what follows the students often refer to these various committees and to the “secretary” meaning the student governing committee’s secretary general.
This book is an oral history of one night: a night of state terror. For the first edition, published in Mexico, in Spanish, in April 2016, I did not write an essay to accompany the oral history. I wanted my listening to act as accompaniment. I hoped that readers would do something similar: accompany, listen to the stories shared here, stories that describe a night of chaos and horror, erratic communications, confusion, shock and disbelief. For the English translation I have included this short prologue and an afterword providing some historical and political context on the region, the school, and the students’ particular mode of organizing (including the “commandeering” of commercial buses, a practice mostly, if bitterly, tolerated by the bus companies and drivers), and discussion of the aftermath of the attacks, particularly the legal and administrative continuation of the atrocity.
Before the police attacks in Iguala, inspired by the Zapatista idea of “to lead by obeying” or “mandar obedeciendo” and reflecting upon years of reporting on social struggles and state violence, I had begun to ask myself questions like these: What would it mean to write by listening, to escribir escuchando? What form would a writing that listens take? What would a politics of listening entail? I held these questions to myself as I began to work. The book you now hold in your hands is an attempt to write by listening.
An Oral History of Infamy
CARLOS MARTÍNEZ, 21, SOPHOMORE. I’m from a municipality in the region of the Costa Grande in Guerrero that is similar to Tixtla. It’s a very pretty place, with rivers and lakes. Starting some time ago it began to urbanize, which has led to some problems. But even so, the essence of the place and the people remains. I’m the second of three siblings. I have an older sister and a younger sister. I am the middle child. I live with my mother. My father left years ago, so, it was really quite difficult to aspire to a different career.
I started working afternoons when I was in junior high school. I started working first at a mechanic’s shop, then a hardware store, and then a taco stand. I did all that to try and support my studies, since it was hard on my mother, alone, having to provide for three kids. After much work, I was able to get a scholarship to study in Acapulco after finishing high school. I stayed there for a year studying accounting, but it was very expensive. I had to pay for inscription fees, books, rent, food, public transit, school projects, and all sorts of things. It was too much to cover with just the scholarship. After a while, I heard about the school here, Ayotzinapa, and I came here. I came hoping to be able to study, which is what I’ve always wanted.
I have a compañero, a friend who studied here and is now a teacher. I met him when I was working for a time in Atoyac de Álvarez. I met him there and he told me about this school, about it being a boarding school, about the classes, the cultural and athletic clubs, a bunch of things. But in the end what really grabbed my attention was that the school is truly free: a school where
