Portside

Last year, I drove south from Mexico City, along the highway toward Apango, a modest hillside town in the state of Guerrero. The highway ends at Acapulco, but there were no palm trees and no glamour where I was going. I turned onto a silent two-lane road, and drove past villages where indigenous languages such as Nahuatl are still spoken. It was the dry season, and the scrub-forest hills had turned every shade of dust and brown, punctuated only by the soft white flowers of the casahuate trees. In Apango, I asked for Estanislao Mendoza Chocolate, or Don Tanis, as he is respectfully known. I had travelled here to ask him about his son, who vanished one night in 2014, along with forty-two other students from a rural teachers’ college, never to be seen again.

When I arrived, Don Tanis was waiting anxiously in his doorway, a round-faced, neatly dressed man in his sixties with a lively manner and eyes so haunted it was hard not to look away. He showed me around his house, a collection of bare cinder-block rooms with a light bulb in the center of each one, which he built in the course of two decades as a seasonal migrant in California. There was a storage room for the year’s supply of corn—to sell, or to grind for the family’s tortillas—and, untouched all this time, the room where his son had lived: a sagging cot, a chair, some fading photographs and posters on the wall. “I wanted a ranch, with animalitos, and he was helping me set it up, but it’s all abandoned now,” Don Tanis said, studiously avoiding his son’s name, as he did throughout our conversation.

His son, Miguel Ángel Mendoza Zacarías, earned his living cutting hair and working construction jobs. He was tall, with a shock of hair that he was proud of, to judge from the self-portrait he drew on the outside wall of the house to advertise his services as a barber. He’d been thirty-three, a full-grown man, when he applied to the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College, in nearby Tixtla—older than most of his cohort. When I asked why he’d wanted to go, Don Tanis said, brightly, “It’s never too late to learn!,” adding, “He loved children, and he always wanted to teach.” I suspect he might also have wanted an opportunity to get away from working as cheap day labor. For people from Indigenous and campesino communities—in Mexico these are neighboring categories—Ayotzinapa provided free tuition and board, and the possibility of a job teaching somewhere in a rural district.

Yet students at rural colleges quickly learn that their diplomas will do little to close the chasm between their lives and those of the rich and powerful. They often become radicalized, usually in the old-fashioned Marxist-Leninist sense. This was particularly true at Ayotzinapa, thanks to a long guerrilla tradition: multiple campesino movements had flourished in Guerrero in the sixties and seventies, and two of their leaders, Lucio Cabañas and Genaro Vázquez Rojas, had close ties to the school. Although their respective movements were exterminated by military and police forces in a “dirty war,” their portraits are still painted on some murals at the school, alongside Lenin, Che, and Marx. The Ayotzis were a rowdy and aggressive bunch; revoltosos, people called them—troublemakers, punks—tolerated but hardly loved in the region. They often carried sticks, covered their faces with bandannas, and took over toll booths to demand payment “for the revolution.” Whenever they needed to travel as a group—to a protest march somewhere, or to a meeting at another rural teachers’ school—they would commandeer buses, leaving the passengers stranded on the asphalt.

On Friday, September 26, 2014, about a hundred students left their campus in two previously requisitioned buses, and went in search of several more, in preparation for an upcoming demonstration in Mexico City that takes place every year. It marks the anniversary of a massacre on October 2, 1968, when Army and paramilitary troops gunned down hundreds of demonstrators at an anti-government rally. The march in Mexico City has become an almost sacred ritual for thousands of young people across the country, and, for the young Ayotzis, their search for transportation must have felt heroic: ¡Dos de octubre no se olvida! In the capital of Guerrero, Chilpancingo, fifteen minutes away from the school, bus takeovers were a frequent, even negotiated event, but that morning the students were chased away by the police. After another failed attempt in the afternoon, they ended up on the outskirts of Iguala, a town some fifty miles from their turf. The students split into two groups. One group finally managed to take over a bus bound for the downtown Iguala terminal, and the driver persuaded them to let him deliver the passengers to their destination before he returned with the students to campus. But at the terminal he let the passengers out and swiftly locked the students inside. Soon afterward, the rest of the Ayotzis arrived to rescue their mates. Shouting and banging on the doors of buses, they commandeered three others in a matter of minutes, for a total of five, and prepared to head back to their school in triumph.

That was when the killing started.

It was a busy night in town; the mayor’s wife had just hosted a lively ceremony in the central square, cafeterias were still open, and people were strolling home. And yet, less than half an hour after the buses left the station, members of the Iguala police, in uniform and in plain sight, opened fire on the students. A statewide surveillance system registered the fear as frenzied messages zipped through: “Stay at home, there’s a shooting.” “They’re saying two people are dead.” “We’ve turned off the lights and put the lock on.” Rumors flew back and forth: “They’re burning taxis downtown.” By the next morning, six people were dead, including three students, and another was left in a coma. But the worst of the terror was still to come: in the days and weeks that followed, dozens of families would come to understand that forty-three of their children were missing. No one knew whether they were alive or dead.

Their absence could easily have been forgotten: there is a low-range official estimate that more than eighty thousand people have disappeared in Mexico since 2006, with virtually no official attempt to find them. But, thanks to their parents and relatives, the missing students—who became known as los cuarenta y tres, or the Forty-three—became a cause. Unforgiving, stubborn, and extremely vulnerable, the families marched once a month through central Mexico City, putting themselves in front of television cameras, shouting, gathering at the entrance to government buildings, and refusing to budge, demanding the return of their sons. Within weeks, the number forty-three was painted on walls, buses, windows, doors—everywhere in Mexico, and, for a time, throughout Europe and the Americas. As far away as Australia, people marched. “We are missing forty-three,” they chanted, and, “Alive they were taken, we want them returned alive.” “I used to come across protest marches by students or workers and say, ‘Lazy bums, get back to work,’ ” Don Tanis told me. “Now I say, ‘I understand.’ ”

There’s a reason the number of disappearances started climbing in 2006. That was the year then President Felipe Calderón ramped up the so-called War on Drugs, bringing in the military to crack down on an assortment of powerful groups. As a result, some of the most notorious drug-clan leaders have been captured or killed, allowing Mexican Presidents, and their allies in the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, to boast of many victories. In reality, the effort has been about as effective as trying to get rid of ants by breaking up one nest: each drug leader’s death or capture leads to the rise of several small would-be lords. In the ensuing power struggle, paranoid traffickers turn on close associates and inflict ever more grotesque forms of violence on their enemies, and on civilians. Nearly three thousand clandestine graves have been discovered in the past five years alone. According to the investigative reporting group Quinto Elemento Lab, for example, just one grave site in the small municipality of Úrsulo Galván (population thirty thousand) held more than a hundred bodies. From 2018 to 2023, more than two hundred secret graves were found in the municipality of Tecomán, which has a little more than a hundred and fifteen thousand inhabitants. And these are only the graves that have been found.

Military patrols assigned to destroy crop fields can easily get corrupted by drug money. Soldiers uproot the poppy plants from a field or two and file a report: mission accomplished. The situation is stable, as long as no one oversteps the boundaries of a delicate agreement. The drug groups are also deeply entangled with officialdom at even the most local level. A bar owner I know in Mexico City was having trouble with a drug group that was demanding the right to sell drugs in his bar and threatening his life. Eventually, he was invited to have lunch with a local official, and discovered that the other guest was the boss of the drug group. Governors of the states of Quintana Roo and Tamaulipas have been convicted of drug-related crimes in Mexico and abroad. Judges and the security forces are also all too frequently in the pay of drug groups. It is up to the relatives of the disappeared, then, to look for their loved ones, searching the ground for any sign that it has recently been disturbed. Each new discovery floats in the news cycle for a day, or a week, and vanishes. Ya nos acostumbramos, people will say. We have become accustomed. Or you might translate the phrase as “It has become part of our customs.”

The families of the Forty-three didn’t want their children’s stories to unfold this way. On the evening of September 26th, Don Clemente Rodríguez Moreno, the father of an Ayotzi named Christian Rodríguez Telumbre, raced to the school when he heard that his son might be in trouble. “I wanted to grab a machete and go fight whoever was harming my son, but I was told that it wasn’t the prudent thing to do,” he said. He waited until morning to go to Iguala. “I thought, If my boy’s done something wrong, they’ll be holding him at the jail. But no one gave us any news there, or anywhere.” By dawn, Vidulfo Rosales, a lawyer and human-rights defender at the nonprofit Centro de Derechos Humanos de la Montaña Tlachinollan, in highland Guerrero, had also heard that there was trouble in Iguala. He got a ride in an old VW Beetle, but at Chilpancingo his volunteer driver refused to go any farther. “News of what had happened in Iguala had spread fast,” Rosales explained. “There were roadblocks everywhere, people were riled up.” When he finally reached Iguala, he worked frantically with colleagues, locating survivors, checking the morgue, the main hospital, and detention centers, and following the progress of official inquiries. It was only after days of anguish, as survivors got in touch with the school, that the extent of the tragedy became clear. Dozens of students remained missing.

Given the scandalous nature of the crimes, President Enrique Peña Nieto, a slick but empty politician, was forced to promise an investigation. Six weeks after the crime, his attorney general, Jesús Murillo Karam, discussed its status at a press conference. The students, Murillo declared, had been abducted by crooked municipal police from Iguala and neighboring towns. Following orders from the mayor, the police had handed their captives over to a local drug group, the Guerreros Unidos, or United Warriors. (The mayor did not respond to a request for comment. He was later convicted of an unrelated kidnapping and other charges and sentenced to ninety-two years in prison.) Several members of the group had already been arrested and confessed. Here, Murillo displayed photographs of a few men—shabby, dejected, filthy, and, as seasoned reporters immediately guessed, tortured. The men had taken the students to a trash dump near the town of Cocula, Murillo said, and killed those who weren’t already dead. Subsequently, the murderers built an open-pit fire with tires, gasoline, and wood to burn the youths’ bodies down to ashes so small that they would forever remain unidentifiable. No members of the armed forces or the federal police had been involved. It was an unfortunate episode.

That version of events—which Murillo took to calling the “historic truth”—has stuck in the minds of many. But the evidence so far indicates that the Ayotzinapa students did not die at the trash dump, and that multiple authorities, including the military, were involved. In 2021, investigators gained access to a video taken one month after the crime by a drone operated by the Mexican Navy. The video shows two Navy vehicles parked on the edge of the dump, next to three large white sacks. A group of men scurry about the terrain, eventually lighting a fire. Once the smoke clears, the sacks are no longer visible. Soon afterward, vehicles from the Navy, the Army, and the attorney general’s office arrive at the site. We know what happened next: Mercedes Doretti, a member of the renowned Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team, which was investigating the disappearances on behalf of the victims’ families, was summoned to the dump while she was en route to search for bodies a few miles away. Not long afterward, Murillo gave the press conference that presented the trash-dump version of events. Doretti’s team was presented with hundreds of bone fragments that supposedly came from the area, but almost all were too warped by heat to be used for DNA identification. Examining the drone video years later, it’s hard not to wonder whether the fragments had been brought to the dump in the mysterious sacks, as part of a coverup. (The Mexican Defense Ministry and the Navy did not respond to requests for comment, nor did Murillo, though he has publicly defended his investigation, and his lawyers maintain his innocence.)

Even before the images became public, Murillo’s account had failed to convince the missing students’ parents. Using common sense, they reasoned that, since it rained on the night of the attack, a fire could not have consumed their children’s bodies. “From the beginning, I knew it wasn’t true,” Don Tanis told me. Always soft-spoken, he lowered his voice even more, sensing that what he was about to say would shock me. “When you roast a pig, there is always a pool of grease at the end,” he said. “But at the trash dump there was nothing.” The families knew that the government was lying to them, but they could do little to press for further investigation by themselves. Fortunately, Don Tanis said, they had the early support of Centro Tlachinollan.

“By the fourth or fifth day, we realized that we couldn’t do this work by ourselves,” Rosales told me. Rosales is from the highland Guerrero town of Totomixtlahuaca, where he was one of only a few students who made it to high school. He went further, graduating from law school, joining Tlachinollan, and working on cases involving the torture, murders, and disappearances of Indigenous and human-rights activists. “We had certain procedures in place for those situations,” he said. “But slowly we saw that this was more than we were prepared for. There were the dead, dozens of disappeared, the aggressors, and the families.” Rosales drew in other organizations from Mexico City—chiefly, the Jesuit-founded Miguel Agustín Pro Juárez Human Rights Center, known as the Centro Prodh. In turn, those groups called on the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team. Meanwhile, the parents of the Forty-three were beginning to see themselves as a unit. “It was love for our children that brought us together,” Don Tanis told me. “We’d never even met before.”

In November, 2014, the parents had their first great triumph: the Mexican government agreed to bring in an international investigative team, given the cumbersome name of Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts—or giei, by its Spanish acronym. The following March, the giei arrived in Mexico. One afternoon last spring, I met with two of its members, Carlos Martín Beristain and Ángela María Buitrago, at a café in Mexico City. Beristain, a physician, has worked with trauma victims for human-rights commissions throughout Latin America. Buitrago, a Colombian prosecutor, put a number of generals responsible for monstrous human-rights violations in prison. The pair remembered the moment they first visited the Ayotzinapa campus. “Even before we entered the school grounds, there were people waiting to escort us in,” Buitrago said. “Parents, students, the school’s marching band. They placed one garland of flowers after another around our necks.” She added, “Every one of the parents who welcomed us repeated the same thing: the one thing they asked of us, they said, was to always tell them the truth—not to lie and not to sell out. I’m a lawyer, I believe in institutions. But when I heard that phrase, ‘Don’t lie, don’t sell out,’ repeated so many times, I thought this had to be the ultimate expression of a citizenry that no longer believed in anything at all.”

Soon, the giei members were learning the Mexican lesson. At the café, Beristain and Buitrago chuckled as they recalled officials from the prosecutor’s office giving a presentation and saying things like “You will never see a more complete investigation than the one we have carried out.” The giei members’ efforts were impeded at every turn. For months, they were blocked from obtaining copies of hundreds of documents. Salvador Cienfuegos, the Secretary of National Defense, refused to let them question anyone from one of Iguala’s military battalions. “I will not permit soldiers to be treated like criminals,” he told the press. It was almost fun to watch giei press conferences, because Buitrago called out the government’s lies in a way that is all but unheard of in Mexico’s institutional discourse. “We were given statements signed by personnel from the general prosecutor’s office that were false,” she declared at one point. “There were investigative proceedings in which all the information was tampered with.”

The giei was forced to spend much of its twelve-month mandate proving that the government’s account of events was untrue. “They told us with a straight face that the Guerreros Unidos had incinerated forty-three corpses with five gallons of fuel,” Buitrago said. Beristain added, “They took us to the site and showed us a tree from which two branches of very green wood had recently been cut,” claiming that the branches had also fed the fire. By the end of its first year, the giei had issued two reports totalling a thousand pages, both largely devoted to demonstrating why the “historic truth” version of events was impossible. The group’s contract was not renewed, and a farewell ceremony was held in an auditorium in Mexico City. “One man stood up and shouted, ‘Don’t leave!,’ ” Beristain said. “And then another stood up, and then they were all chanting, ‘No-se-va-yan!’ Don’t leave us! We nearly died then, all of us.”

In 2018, Andrés Manuel López Obrador became the first independent candidate to be elected President in more than seventy years, and he promised to clean up the mess of his predecessor. He created the Presidential Commission for Truth and Access to Justice in the Ayotzinapa Case, headed by Alejandro Encinas, an old ally of his and a former mayor of Mexico City. A young, obsessive lawyer named Omar Gómez Trejo, who had been working on the case at the U.N. and with the giei, was chosen to head a new special investigative unit. At the parents’ insistence, López Obrador agreed to bring back the giei. It was a moment of optimism. “You had the attorney general’s office, the President, the giei, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, the United Nations, and, principally, the families’ legal representatives, all working to obtain the truth, to insure that justice was done, to know what happened to the boys,” Gómez Trejo told me. Beristain said, “I was confident that this time we were going to be able to do it.”

Last year, I was surprised to find myself in possession of a confidential and valuable document: the more-than-six-hundred-page court filing presented before a judge in August of 2022 by Gómez Trejo’s team. It was the result of the two years that he, along with the giei, had spent digging through files and interviewing hundreds of suspects, survivors, government officials, bystanders, and relatives of the disappeared. Thanks to the intricacies of the Mexican legal system, the document is all but incomprehensible at first read. But, beneath the legalese, it’s packed with information, particularly regarding the drug-trafficking organization involved in the disappearances: the Guerreros Unidos.

The G.U. was born because a major drug boss, Arturo Beltrán Leyva, was shot and killed by Mexican marines, in 2009. As generally happens, Beltrán Leyva’s underlings split into several small clans. One of these called itself los Rojos (“the Reds”), and established itself in Guerrero state, near the Ayotzinapa campus. The Rojos ran a nice little business, moving drugs like heroin into the United States. Another set of people, two of them brothers who, according to a story in the Chicago Sun-Times, had in the past delivered pizzas for a Chicago restaurant called Mama Luna’s, formed a breakaway group called the Guerreros Unidos. By 2012, the pizza boys and their colleagues had set up shop in places including Iguala, a town equipped with a bus terminal big enough that unusual activity might go unnoticed, but not so large that it would call attention to itself. This was key to the group’s success, because its specialty was fitting secret compartments in passenger buses, such as those travelling from Iguala to Chicago. The compartments would be stuffed with drugs and the buses loaded with passengers. In Chicago, the bus would be met by an associate, named Pablo Vega, who had grown up in a nearby suburb and worked in local factories. He and others would unload and distribute the merchandise, replace the product with cash, and send the bus back to Iguala. (Vega did not respond to a request for comment, but he has pleaded guilty to drug-conspiracy charges.)

In 2022, Gómez Trejo gained access to some twenty-three thousand BlackBerry text messages collected by the D.E.A. from Vega’s phone and those of his associates. The texts, which were first reported in the Mexican press, and later in English by the Times, make stupefyingly boring reading on first pass; they consist mostly of terse instructions about where to park the “aunt”—the bus—and how many “vases” to deliver. But a picture eventually emerges of an inept bunch. On one shipment, the loaded bus crashes, “because it was raining.” Someone leaves a loaded pickup illegally parked, and they can’t get it back, because the driver is nabbed by immigration. A key collaborator vanishes, and days go by while the group makes a lame attempt to find him. (“What’s his name?” “I just know him as el Cuate.”) Vega’s wife harangues him constantly, and, when she does, he messages a girlfriend and asks for a ‘foto sexi.’ A shipment succeeds and tens of thousands of dollars get distributed, but less than three months later the water is cut off at Vega’s home, because he can’t pay the bill. His sister-in-law, the widow of the presumably height-challenged G.U. founder known as el Minicooper, mopes about, complaining that she’s always the last to be taken into account. Someone announces that he’s selling tennis shoes to make ends meet. Worst of all, the group’s members, who are supposed to be united by mystical links of shared lineage, constantly suspect one another of treason. (A lawyer who has represented members of the group did not respond to a request for comment.)

Perhaps because the competition wasn’t that bright, either, the Guerreros Unidos eventually managed to consolidate its fledgling operation, and even imbue it with a sort of mystique. As “Juan,” a G.U. member who eventually turned state’s witness, explained to investigators in a sworn deposition, “The purpose of every person who belongs to the organization” is “to send drugs to Chicago, and to keep watch and do what is necessary. . . . That is why there should be support by public officials like police officers at every level.”(Juan could not be reached for comment.) The G.U. often cleaned its cash through real-estate deals and other traditional money-laundering methods. The clan saw to it that another associate, Francisco Salgado Valladares—a pig-eyed man in charge of a ferocious group of Iguala police known as los Bélicos—was appointed vice-chief of the force. (Salgado Valladares is currently a fugitive from the law, and could not be reached for comment.)

The group brought in others: a butcher here, a car-wash operator there, in addition to dozens of gofers, petty drug peddlers, and lookouts who kept an eye on the whereabouts of every resident, visitor, and passerby in the G.U.’s areas of control. Their bosses wanted reports, particularly on military movements—long sequences of the twenty-three thousand messages are devoted to minute-by-minute descriptions of the exact whereabouts of the Army’s daily patrol units—and, above all, of any sign of the presence of rival groups, referred to as “contras.” (Unfamiliar cars entering the group’s territory were stopped and searched for signs of the enemy.) Pursued by fear of their rivals, the G.U. killed senselessly, adding by the month to Guerrero’s very high body count. The clan soon had police and military officers in its pay. The BlackBerry messages include boasts that a member called el Güero Mugres—Filthy Blondie, roughly—has the military “in the bag,” and that the group has established friendly relations with a certain Captain Crespo. Someone crows that he has acquired other military contacts (“putos,” he calls them) and complains about how much money they are demanding. When Gómez Trejo read these texts at the D.E.A.’s Chicago office during the several days he spent on the task, he was euphoric. They were, he told me, “objective and resounding proof tying an authority of the state to organized crime—not a declaration by a witness but objective, verifiable proof.”

It remains unclear why the Guerreros Unidos would carry out an attack on a hundred unarmed students. Perhaps, as the giei came to believe, one of the three buses that the students took from the station was loaded with product. Another theory—there are many—holds that the G.U. was convinced the Ayotzis had been infiltrated by the Rojos, and there is some evidence to support that this was their motivation. The G.U. had been fighting with the Rojos the week before, and perhaps it expected an attack. The day after the Iguala attack, one G.U. member texted another, “The contras came all mixed up with the Ayotzinapas, and shit came dooown!” A massacre on defenseless youths carried out by paranoid, incompetent, and bloodthirsty goons: that makes sense.

Shortly after nine o’clock on the night of September 26, 2014, Ayotzinapa students on five buses—the two they had arrived in and the three they had commandeered in Iguala—were heading home when they noticed police following them. The buses split up as their terrified drivers tried to turn onto narrow downtown streets that led back to the highway, but police cars managed to stop most of them. When patrols tried blocking their way, students threw rocks at them and the officers drove off, firing warning shots. A student whom I’ll call Luis told me, “I got scared, but then I thought, Well, they’re leaving, they’ve left. But when I turned around, I saw that there were more police, and they were shooting directly at us.”

Eventually, three of the buses arrived at an intersection with the ring road that surrounds Iguala. Luis and several other students, including a boy named Aldo Gutiérrez Solano, tried to move a police car that was blocking the road, but the steering wheel was locked. Gutiérrez suddenly fell to the ground. Luis remembers looking dumbly at the red-hot spent casings all around him, and thinking at first that they were fireworks. Then he saw blood pooling under Gutiérrez’s head. “He’s dying!” students yelled, asking the police to help, still not grasping the situation. (Gutiérrez fell into a coma and remains in a vegetative state.) A student somewhere screamed, bleeding from a bullet wound to the hand. Another, called Pulmón—Lung—was in the throes of a severe panic attack, unable to breathe. Luis hid between two of the buses as the police fired on a third. “We saw how they started bringing the compañeros down from the bus, hands behind their necks,” he said. “I counted twelve or fifteen of them.” A half-dozen police pickups had moved into place behind that bus, lights flashing. Officers forced the students to lie face down on the sidewalk, Luis said, then loaded them in the backs of their pickups. He would never see his classmates again.

The students travelling in the other two buses were stopped by the Iguala Palace of Justice, beyond the ring road. Police attacked one of the buses, shooting tear gas through the windows to force students out. An anonymous witness cited in the court filing saw policemen tear switches off nearby trees and hit students with them as they staggered off the bus. These students were handcuffed and loaded onto pickups, some of them belonging to police officers from nearby Huitzuco. Members of the federal police stood by as the scene unfolded. An intelligence agent from one of the nearby battalions pulled up on a motorbike, took a few photos on his cell phone, and went back to inform his superiors. The military also had other ways of staying abreast of the situation. Troops were constantly monitoring the statewide surveillance system, which included footage from security cameras throughout Iguala. The Army had at least one soldier acting as an informant, who had infiltrated the student body and was with the group that disappeared. It may also have been monitoring the cell phones of several members of the G.U., using the surveillance software Pegasus. But no one in the military intervened. This is the part that guts Gómez Trejo. “If they knew, why didn’t they save those boys?” he asks himself to this day.

Two busloads of students were about to vanish forever, and yet the violence was far from over. On a road out of Iguala, members of the Guerreros Unidos and the police, some from Huitzuco, mistakenly attacked a bus carrying a junior-league soccer team, from Chilpancingo, which was heading home to celebrate a victory. Before the attackers realized that there were no Ayotzis on the bus, they shot and killed the driver, a fifteen-year-old player, and a woman in a passing taxi. Around the same time, a group of Ayotzis raced to Iguala from the campus and from Chilpancingo to see what was happening to their schoolmates. They were holding an impromptu street-corner press conference when several vehicles arrived, and armed men dressed in black jumped out and opened fire on them. The shots were registered on a reporter’s audio. Two students lay on the ground, dead. Another victim, a first-year Ayotzi named Julio César Mondragón, was found the next morning, lying dead outside a soccer field, according to officials. Like other students trapped in Iguala, he had texted his family an ongoing account of the night. His last message to his partner was a farewell: “Take care of yourself and of my daughter, tell her that I love her, bye.” He had been severely beaten, and had multiple broken bones. Much of his face was missing.

Patrol cars roamed the streets in the predawn silence of Saturday the twenty-seventh. From a rooftop where he had found safety, Luis heard them whistle, calling out to the remaining Ayotzis. (We know you’re hiding!) One panicky group scrambled to get medical care for a schoolmate who had been shot through the jaw. Eventually, they found themselves inside a small clinic, and begged the staff for help, but didn’t get any. The young men cowered in the waiting room and on the upper floors, terrified that their attackers might find them. Instead, sometime after midnight, military vehicles arrived, and a cluster of soldiers muscled their way in, fanned out, and pointed machine guns at the students. They were led by an imposing man in uniform, José Martínez Crespo, who is currently in military prison, accused of collaboration with the G.U. Some students thought the soldiers were there to help. “I felt joyful when I saw them,” one student—part of a group of more than twenty who agreed to testify anonymously—told investigators.

But Crespo ordered photographs taken of the scene—twenty-five despondent, exhausted young men staring at the floor. According to one student’s testimony, he made some of them strip to the waist and ordered a soldier to write down everyone’s name. “Make sure you give the real ones,” Crespo said. “Otherwise, they’ll never find you later.” Others recalled him saying, “You sons of bitches, you think you are so tough. Now you are faced with a real motherfucker. Let’s see how tough you really are.” (Crespo’s lawyer said that he is innocent of any wrongdoing. Members of the military, including Crespo, denied in their depositions that they held the students at gunpoint or recorded their names.) It remains unclear what Crespo’s intentions were. But at last he left with the other soldiers, saying that he was off “to see about some corpses nearby,” most likely the two students killed during the press conference. The students in the clinic managed to flee, and survived the night.

By midnight, forty-three Ayotzis were in the hands of local police forces. There is one last glimpse of them before we lose sight of them forever. A driver from one of the commandeered buses told investigators that he saw a number of the students at a local police facility, lying prone on the floor. Another witness, who happened to walk into the facility the following morning, testified that he saw a photograph of the students on a screen, and heard a magistrate on duty (a position like that of a hoosegow sheriff) joking about how the Ayotzis had been roughed up, and boasting that he himself had beaten them during their interrogation. (The magistrate, who was granted asylum in the U.S. in 2020, has denied that the students were brought there that night, and declined to comment for this piece.)

Investigators pulled this account together slowly in the course of years, cross-checking hundreds of interviews with survivors, eyewitnesses, and participants in the events. But the answer to a key question sought by the students’ parents—what happened to their children after they were last seen that night long ago?—remains elusive: of those seven or eight missing hours, only fragments can be pieced together and the story behind them guessed at. Various documents, including text messages and testimony in the court filing, indicate that the police forces of Iguala, Huitzuco, and another neighboring town, Cocula, distributed the students among various members of the Guerreros Unidos. (The Iguala and Huitzuco police departments did not respond to requests for comment. The Cocula department could not be reached.) A document released by the Mexican Defense Ministry, which investigators were unable to corroborate, shows a text exchange between two people whom the ministry identified as an Iguala police official and a leader of the Guerreros Unidos. “There are twenty-one people inside the bus that’s leaving,” the policeman says, and the leader replies, “Yes, hand me all the detainees.” By this time, some of the students may already have been dead from injuries sustained during their beatings. The survivors could talk and create problems. What should be done with them?

Some investigators believe that the decision to kill the students was made before dawn, when members of the Cocula police visited the house of one of the G.U.’s leaders for several hours—the only encounter that night between officers and the group which has been corroborated. Others believe that the plan was already under way by then. According to Juan, the G.U. member who turned state’s witness, the order they received from above was “pártanles su madre,” which can be translated either as “beat the shit” out of the students or, given the context, “do away” with them. What Juan claims—and this is a ghastly thing to have to write—is that some of the students were killed, sometime in the early hours of September 27th, and cut into pieces. (Why not just shot, one wonders. Why not that small mercy?) When investigators inspected the safe house where they were taken, they found incisions on the floor that seemed to have been made by axes or machetes, and that were consistent with Juan’s testimony. One man, a lowly gofer, testified that he and others were instructed to get cleaning supplies and pick up the mutilated corpses, which were stuffed into plastic garbage bags.

According to these statements, the students’ remains were taken to local funeral homes to be cremated. Juan told investigators that it took several days to insure that the remains were cremated thoroughly enough that no one would be able to identify them. Other remains, he has said, were never cremated, and were disposed of in the surrounding area. Some students may have been kept alive longer, or done away with differently. But Juan, a participant in some fashion in the events of that evening, is not the most reliable witness, and investigators have been unable to fully confirm his account. What is true is that the G.U. seems to have been at pains to make the students truly disappear. “We didn’t think that this business would be so mediático,” Juan said, irritated by the publicity.

Eight years later, on August 18, 2022, the families of the Ayotzis gathered for a meeting with the President. López Obrador had met with them multiple times before. He was always courteous and friendly, sitting with them to hear their suggestions and concerns about the investigation. But María Luisa Aguilar Rodríguez, from Centro Prodh, told me that when they walked into the room she knew something was wrong. The President spoke at a podium flanked by a good part of his cabinet, including his attorney general and the defense minister—figures the parents distrusted. Encinas, the families’ onetime ally, read what he described as the government’s “conclusions.” The investigators—Gómez Trejo, the giei, the Argentines—and the parents and their representatives have said that they were not advised of the contents of the report. Encinas denounced police and military participation in the events. For the first time, he defined what happened in Iguala as a “crime of the state”—an important acknowledgment by a Mexican administration. But he also presented unverified information that seemed to hark back to the “historic truth,” such as a series of WhatsApp messages sent by local officials and members of the Guerreros Unidos, which emphasized the role of the mayor and included graphic descriptions of what had allegedly happened to the students. (Encinas said that he had informed investigators of the report the day before, and denied pushing the “historic truth.”) López Obrador did not take any questions. “The families were utterly undone,” Aguilar said. “The mothers were distraught. Men who do not allow themselves to cry in public were weeping.”

Up to that moment, it had seemed that justice was within reach. As the meeting with the President was starting, Gómez Trejo’s team was requesting warrants for the arrest of eighty-three participants in the events. Among them were G.U. members; soldiers; police officers; the magistrate at the Iguala police facility; a judge in Chilpancingo who was accused of facilitating the destruction of state surveillance footage from the night of the event; the state attorney general at the time, Iñaki Blanco; José Martínez Crespo; and the commanders of the two Iguala battalions. (A lawyer representing the commanders of the military battalions said that they are innocent.) Gómez Trejo left immediately for Israel, in an effort to obtain the extradition of the former attorney general Murillo’s chief of criminal investigations. He returned to a different world. His investigators had been sent away for “retraining.” A team of auditors took possession of every file in his office. He was told that he would not be allowed to open any new lines of investigation. And, at the request of the attorney general’s office, the same judge who had authorized the arrest warrants days earlier now rescinded twenty-one of them, including the ones for the state attorney general and the judge in Chilpancingo. A few days later, Gómez Trejo resigned, and his security detail was removed. Later, I learned that, as Gómez Trejo weighed his resignation, a high-ranking official took him aside, draped an arm confidentially over his shoulder, and said that Gómez Trejo had really managed to piss off the President. López Obrador had negotiated the arrest of five military members with the high command of the armed forces, the official told Gómez Trejo, but he had issued orders for twenty. (The attorney general’s office declined to comment. López Obrador did not respond to a request for comment.)

It was a startling indication of the power of the Mexican military. Under López Obrador, the Army has been given control of the construction and administration of airports, roads, railroad lines, customs offices, and tourist agencies, to name only a few of its powers. In 2020, General Salvador Cienfuegos, who had tried to stop the giei investigators from interviewing members of the military, was arrested in the Los Angeles airport on charges that, as Secretary of National Defense, he had helped the H-2 drug clan with its operations trafficking cocaine and methamphetamine. (Cienfuegos did not respond to a request for comment, but his lawyer has issued a statement saying that he is innocent.) The arrest created a diplomatic standoff. President López Obrador reportedly threatened to suspend the D.E.A.’s operations in Mexico, although he later denied having done so, and U.S. prosecutors were forced to return Cienfuegos to Mexico, where he walked off the plane a free man. “We view this not as an act of impunity, but of respect towards Mexico and our armed forces,” Marcelo Ebrard, Mexico’s then Foreign Secretary, said. Two months later, Mexican justice officials declared that there was no evidence that the General had any relationship with the H-2 group. In October, President López Obrador gave him a medal.

Gómez Trejo moved to the U.S. with his wife and child, fearing for his family’s safety. When I had lunch with him in New York recently, he looked rested—not as haggard as when he first moved here. He’s working as an international consultant on human-rights issues. Two members of the giei, feeling that they would be legitimizing fraud if they stayed, also stepped down and left the country. The remaining two, Buitrago and Beristain, held a press conference this past July, demanding answers, then resigned a few days later. The President appointed a new special investigator, who quietly reinstated several of the twenty-one arrest orders that had been revoked. There is now a sense that, for all practical purposes, the investigation into the disappearance of the Forty-three has come to an end.

One recent afternoon, I spoke with Santiago Aguirre Espinosa, a member of the parents’ legal team, who, along with his colleague Aguilar, spent years in Guerrero at the Centro Tlachinollan. They are both perpetually cheerful and extremely slender, possibly because they seem always to be racing from one appointment to another. I asked what Aguirre made of the last nine years of effort. “From the point of view of the families, their main objective was to find their sons, and that was not achieved,” he replied. “They are angry and sad, and some of them have doubts as to whether their fight was worth it.” For his part, Beristain, who has now returned to his home in Spain, lamented that the extent of the military’s involvement in the saga remains unclear. There are hundreds of pages of military records that are still missing, he said—pages the giei believes can shed light on what exactly happened to the students, and why two administrations have felt the need to cover it up.

These days, the President has taken to denouncing Centro Prodh and Centro Tlachinollan’s Vidulfo Rosales at his daily press conferences. Encinas’s phone, and those of several human-rights defenders, have been infiltrated by Pegasus. As his six-year term in office draws to a close, the President’s relations with his perceived adversaries grow more fraught. Recently, the Times reported on a now closed investigation into the drug trade’s possible dealings with close associates of the President, and he lashed out at the paper’s Mexico City bureau chief, reading her name and phone number out loud during his morning press conference two weeks ago. This may be illegal, but “I would do it again,” he said the next day: the President’s “moral authority is above the law.” In an exceedingly rare interview—two hours with a Russian journalist from a minor Spanish cable channel—he recognized that Ayotzinapa remains a pending assignment. “There is still time,” he affirmed. “The most important thing is to find them.”

Six years after the massacre, Clemente Rodríguez and his wife, Luz María Telumbre, received a visit at their home in Tixtla from Gómez Trejo, Encinas, and two members of Centro Prodh. The group was there to tell them about a two-inch fragment of bone that Gómez Trejo’s team had found in a dry gully. The Argentine team had certified that the DNA recovered from the fragment belonged to Christian Rodríguez Telumbre, one of only three positive identifications that have been made in all this time. “We tried to bring some dignity and a sense of ceremony to the event,” Gómez Trejo told me, of the visit. But it was hopeless trying to replace a twenty-year-old who skipped gaily around his parents’ house, practicing steps from the folklore dances he was crazy about, with a broken bit of bone. When I met Doña Luz María in Mexico City last spring, at the start of one of the parents’ marches, I asked her about this moment. She is a beautiful woman with an easy, affectionate manner, but there was no hiding the paper-slicing edge in her voice when she answered. “I said thank you,” she told me, “and I asked what part of the body this huesito”—little bone—“was from.” She was informed that it was part of Christian’s right foot. “But I’ve seen people who lost a foot and are still alive,” she said, not raising her voice. “I am not satisfied. I want my son.”

It was Day of the Dead in Mexico City when I ran into Don Clemente, later that year. I asked if he was going to place a picture of his son on the family altar in Tixtla that night. There was a long silence before he finally said, “I can’t.” He was in town to give a talk at a local school, and as usual he had brought some of his friends’ and family’s handicrafts to put out for sale. He used to sell five-gallon jugs of drinking water for a living, but the constant travelling to agitate for his son’s return has ruined the family’s livelihood, and they now made money weaving straw, or embroidering textiles, and selling these crafts during events and marches. Don Clemente has a sidelong sense of humor, but I watched his face crumple as he tried to find words to explain his son’s absence on the altar. “I don’t have a body to mourn,” he said. “I don’t know the place where he is. I have nothing to hold that is him.” The hope that their children would be returned to them alive was at the center of the parents’ movement. It was the motivation that kept them going through years of doubt, and fear, and struggle, away from their families and their fields. Alive they were taken away. We want them returned alive. What parent wants to kill his own child in his heart? Don Tanis gently corrected me when I referred to his son in the past tense.

Recently, I drove back to Guerrero along the same long highway that had taken me to Don Tanis’s home, but this time I stopped in Tixtla, to talk to Rafael López Catarino, or Don Rafa, whose son, Julio César López Patolzin, was the Army informant who was disappeared along with the other students. Unavoidably, his father became something of a pariah among the other families once his son’s role in the school was made public, and it seemed to me an unusually cruel fate to lose a son and be unable to seek the comfort that the other parents obviously find in one another’s company.

Don Rafa, curmudgeonly and limping, took me around the land his son can no longer help him farm. He showed me a picture of Julio César at his high-school graduation, a boy stiffly uncomfortable in his formal shirt and vest, holding a diploma. He handed me a sheet of paper with the heading “Life Project” at the top of a list his son had written, in careful block letters in bright-blue ink. “I would like to travel around the country learning different things and meeting new people,” it began. Farther down, he wrote that he would like to study at Ayotzinapa so that he could become a physical-education teacher. He also wanted to join the military, and to study to become an Army doctor. And he wanted to earn money, “so that I can help my parents the way they have helped me.” In the end, Julio César did join the Army. He spent some of his time patrolling the mountainous region of Guerrero. Eventually, his father said, Julio César was injured and could no longer go out on patrol. He told his father that he wanted to leave the Army and study, but it must have been hard to give up the salary of a foot soldier. One can imagine his commander zeroing in at that point to offer him a deal: Go to Ayotzinapa if you want, and keep your salary. But help us. He must have protested at the unfairness of his fate before he was taken away.

Don Rafa is a gruff man, but he insisted on riding back on the road to Chilpancingo with me so that I wouldn’t get lost. There was a new crop of Ayotzis at the toll booth, exacting fares for “the revolution.” The G.U. was diminished, as were the Rojos, and rival groups had eclipsed them. In Chilpancingo, a new mayor had been filmed having breakfast at a restaurant with a drug boss. (The mayor did not respond to a request for comment. She has denied that any deal was made at the meeting.) Don Rafa generally struck me as a harsh realist, but he told me that Julio César’s godmother, recently deceased, had come to his daughter in a dream. “She had looked for Julio César everywhere on the other side,” Don Rafa told me, “and found no sign of him. She said we should keep looking for him in this world.” Still, he seemed to be in deep mourning. “I used to tuck him in at night when he was a baby and watch him sleep,” he said. “What a thing, huh?” he added, as he got out of the car. “We care for and nurture our children so that the government can rip them away from us.”  

[Alma Guillermoprieto, who first contributed to the magazine in 1989, has written about Latin America for more than forty years. She has published four books.]

Published in the print edition of the March 11, 2024, issue, with the headline “The Forty-three.”