On September 26, 2014, more than a hundred students from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College, a men’s school in the coastal state of Guerrero, commandeered five public buses and headed for Mexico City. They planned to join the annual protests there on the anniversary of the 1968 Tlatelolco student massacre, long the point of reference against which Mexico’s democratic movements have fashioned their own origin stories. We know now that four of the buses were intercepted in the city of Iguala by municipal policemen who, in a frenzied sequence of events, shot two students, allowed others to escape, and abducted forty-three before turning them over to members of a cartel. The precise fate of those students remains elusive, although the partially incinerated remains of three of them have been found and positively identified.
Some of the facts are clear. At the time of the abductions, Iguala’s municipal government was run by members of Guerreros Unidos, a criminal operation that obtained some revenue from local racketeering but whose primary business was exporting heroin to Chicago. The officers stationed in Iguala’s military compound also appear to have had an understanding with the organization, and some have been directly implicated in the student disappearances. But the cartel’s ultimate motive for embarking on such a massive attack on the Ayotzinapa students remains a subject of contention. To some, the killings and disappearances were driven by animosity toward the students’ leftist stance; to others, the students were attacked because they were suspected of having alliances with a rival cartel, Los Rojos.
Regardless of motives, though, and despite the closing of ranks between the cartel and its various governmental allies or employees, the scandal erupted and motivated a social movement so vast that it demolished the legitimacy of the government, galvanized what soon became a national movement of vindication of Mexico’s disappeared, and gave rise to the formation of a new political party, MoReNa, that swept Mexico’s presidential elections four years later.
Since then, government officials and subsequent administrations have consistently identified with the struggle of the Ayotzinapa students’ parents and pretended, at least, to make it their own. Guerrero’s governor, Evelyn Salgado Pineda—whose family has rumored connections to organized crime and so to the drug economy that we know underwrote the disappearances—decided to commemorate the ten-year anniversary of the night in Iguala with a “citizen’s campaign” to find the forty-three students, which included a publicity blitz featuring billboards of the students’ faces as well as a ten-million-peso bounty (roughly $500,000) to anyone presenting information leading to the by-then unlikely discovery of a student, dead or alive. For her part, president-elect Claudia Sheinbaum promised last fall to continue investigating the case during her upcoming term, as rallies against the government began to heat up and protesters blamed then-President Andrés Manuel López Obrador for making no more progress on the case than the previous Peña Nieto administration.
More than ten years later, Mexican political society seems compelled to “get to the bottom” of a case that has already generated a continuous stream of governmental and independent investigations, international commissions, works of investigative journalism, documentaries and even a TV series. Obsessions with “the truth” persevere. And, increasingly, the Ayotzinapa protesters have been singled out as a special class: they are martyrs of a cause, when the vast numbers of the other disappeared—some 110,000, according to a national registry—are merely nameless victims. Knowing the precise fate of the martyrs is deemed to be of paramount significance; truth and justice for the rest recedes from the horizon of public discussion.
Why does Mexican political society place such care in whether one particular general, captain, or colonel got away with the assassination of a student, when so many have gotten away with killings all over the country. Why do the forty-three still matter, when so many thousands of other disappeared people do not?
In 2018, I was invited to speak at my alma mater in Mexico City, the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana-Iztapalapa, in an event to honor the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the October 2 Tlatelolco massacre—and the fourth anniversary of that fateful night in Iguala. Before calling me up to the podium to deliver my remarks, the organizers asked those in the auditorium to stand and read out the names of each of the forty-three disappeared Ayotzinapa students in a kind of roll call. After each name, we—audience, organizers, and speakers—called out “Presente!” (“Here!”), a reminder that the missing were with us in spirit, present in our tribute to the student movement.
In part, this expression was entirely fitting: calling out their names in a commemoration of 1968 was an appropriate expression of student solidarity. But something troubled me that day. The individuation of the forty-three manifest in the recitation of the students’ names contrasted brutally with the namelessness, stratospherically high, and always imprecise number of all of the other disappeared persons all over Mexico.
The ritual in which we were participating expected unanimity. Anyone who might have been tempted not to call out “Presente!” when an Ayotzinapa student’s name was called would have felt uncomfortable; abstention would undoubtedly have been received as a kind of denial of a group of martyrs and the desecration of the righteous cause of Mexico’s student movements. Elaborate forms of solemnity and respect had developed in the case, in a way that contrasted with the lack of remark or ritual surrounding the general phenomenon of disappearances, which for the most part have no connection to student movements, 1968, or the hallowed cosmogony of Mexico’s democratic struggle.
This translates to some discomfort around the discussion of the case’s more delicate truths. That the students were on their way to a march commemorating 1968 is readily (and accurately) touted. But that they may have been killed because they accidentally hijacked a bus loaded with a shipment of drugs, a development that would make the students victims rather than martyrs? Discussion of that is to be strenuously avoided. The impulse to avoid any discussion of the role that drugs might have had in the affair is a justified response to the governmental impulse to revictimize the survivors, a practice rampant in Mexican criminal investigations and often echoed by the media and in society at large.
Indeed, the claim that a victim was in fact a criminal is routinely used as a reason not to investigate. Earlier this year, for example, the nonprofit Crisis Group issued an investigative report that documented a 2021 military offensive against the Jalisco Nueva Generación Cartel in southwestern Michoacán that left approximately 400 cartel soldiers dead. Because this campaign occurred during the López Obrador government, which claimed for itself a massacre-free “hugs-not-bullets” policy toward organized crime, this military offensive was not publicized. To erase its tracks, the military came to an understanding with some of the cartel’s competitors, who disappeared approximately 400 bodies of their rivals after the army had killed them. The disappeared therefore did not appear in the tally of homicides for the state of Michoacán, nor were they publicly mourned or claimed. In fact, because the battles were against a notoriously violent cartel, the massacre was at least tacitly supported by local populations. When victims are regarded as criminals, their deaths or disappearances are often thought to be a well-deserved comeuppance. Certainly for this reason, all inquiries into student wrongdoing on September 26, 2014—particularly, the question of whether or not their bus was loaded with heroin—became suspect and widely regarded as reactionary.
But the justifiable censure against the criminalization of the students—an inhibition of open discussions about how the students carried out their political aims—also had a kind of secondary, perhaps unintended, effect. A kind of hagiography developed around the students: they were always presented as dutiful children, admired friends, and socially conscientious luchadores. And those paying homage to them, including a host of politicians with reputed ties to organized crime, were handed the opportunity to make public displays as empathetic mothers and fathers.
Even so, this process of purification has found limits. In March last year, a rally was organized by Ayotzinapa students and family members outside of the National Palace to protest President López Obrador’s foreclosure of the case. Some of the protesters backed a pickup truck against one of the doors of the National Palace and broke it down, an act that was widely compared to the 2014 burning of a National Palace door in a protest for Ayotzinapa. López Obrador tried to head off that parallel, declaring that he would not repress the movement and that the students were being manipulated. Even so, a few days later, Yanqui Kothan Gómez Peralta, one of the students involved in the action, was shot and killed by Guerrero state police in Chilpancingo, allegedly because he and four others were driving a stolen vehicle. López Obrador, who had questioned the protesters earlier, lamented the killing and called for a thorough investigation. Regardless, the act suggested that there were unspoken limits to the ways you can protest, what you can defy and defile—and that in the end, those limits will be violently enforced.
July 2020 marked a breakthrough. The government announced that it had discovered the remains of one of the forty-three, a finding that led to the official rejection of Peña Nieto’s version of events that had been put together in 2015. What Peña Nieto had pompously presented as the Verdad Histórica—”the historical truth”—had in reality fudged, twisted, or ignored available data in order to spare Mexico’s military from any responsibility in the disappearance and murders of the students. In the process, several branches of federal justice became complicit with the process of disappearance. A special prosecution for the case named—and later dismantled—by López Obrador proved that the military was densely involved in the case, and it showed that the original federal investigation was part of a cover-up.
A few days after the revelations, at a virtual meeting organized by Mexico City’s Universidad Autónoma Metopolitana, which had started a project supporting families of the disappeared, the leaders of various collectives expressed the hope that the redoubled attention to the Ayotzinapa case would cast a spotlight on their movement more generally. Maybe the identification of one of the students, they thought, might compel the government to reckon with the tens of thousands of unknown others all throughout the country.
At the meeting, after discussing the agenda, our conversation became more informal. One of the buscadoras present let out that the Ayotzinapa affair made her angry: she was happy they’d found the remains of one of the students because that would finally bring peace to his parents, but why were the forty-three Ayotzinapa students the only disappeared people that the government cared about? “What do we need to do for us to be considered emblematic?” she asked. “We’re the mothers, wives and sisters not of forty-three, but of more than 73,000 [the official count as of 2018] disappeared persons! We’ve been looking for them for years, and we’ve given our entire lives to find them!”
I was haunted by her question. How exactly had the disappearance of the Ayotzinapa students become emblematic, and what was it an emblem of? I called my friend Jesús Rodríguez Velasco, a philologist, and asked him to instruct me on the history of the emblem. The emblem, Velasco explained, is a modern invention, popularized in 1531 with the publication of Andrea Alciato’s Emblematum Liber. An emblem, as it was defined then, combines an image and a text in order for both, together, to synthesize an ideal. The ideal of “Peace,” for instance, was condensed in an emblem that included an empty helmet and a beehive. The empty helmet signaled that arms had been abandoned; the beehive represented work. Beneath those two figures, the word “Peace” named the idea. The emblem thus colonized the imagination with an image and an idea that stood in lieu of a rather complex argument—one that was not always true to the facts. After all, work often does continue during wartime, and arms are not always abandoned during peace.
Equipped with this understanding, I began to think of Ayotzinapa as an emblem that was made up by the image of a number—forty-three—and a text: “Fue el Estado” (“The State Did It”). Together, they summarized the idea of a group of students from a humble, peasant or indigenous, background who were politically active and were, for that very reason, murdered by the state. But this only gets us half of the way there. Another question remains: If the events at Iguala became an emblem, what does this emblem stand for?
In a remarkable—though predictably underdiscussed—book titled De Iguala a Ayotzinapa: La escena y el crimen (“From Iguala to Ayotzinapa: The Scene and the Crime”), Fernando Escalante Gonzalbo and Julián Canseco Ibarra write that the crimes of Iguala quickly came to be represented as a recreation, a kind of rerun, of the 1968 student massacre at Tlatelolco, an event that was the cornerstone of the grand récit of Mexico’s democratic transition, an era that in fact erupted in the aftermath of the deeply contested 1988 federal elections, in a competition that ruptured Mexico’s official party and was the first step toward its eventual demise. This linkage, the authors argue, is the reason why the event took on such an excess of symbolism: the disappeared students became symbols of a trampled civil society while their killers or abductors were cast in the role of the Authoritarian State.
Forty-three; Fue el Estado. The emblem promoted the idea that in 2014, Mexican democracy was a hijacked illusion—the transition from authoritarianism had not been completed—and the authoritarian state of 1968 remained. Ayotzinapa thus sparked a legitimacy crisis, one that provoked reactions from every major political faction. The Peña government in power at the time invested urgently in building a “Historical Truth” that might exculpate the federal government, while finding and prosecuting a set of local culprits. The opposition movement, led by López Obrador, mobilized the Ayotzinapa emblem in order to delegitimize what it called the “PRIAN”—that is, the Partido Revolutionario Institucional and the Partido Acción Nacional, the two political parties that had alternated in power since the beginning of the democratic transition. Ultimately, the emblem proved a potent force for the resistance. Riding under the flag of the Ayotzinapa, López Obrador defeated the PRI and PAN presidential candidates handily and rose to power in 2018.
Once in office, López Obrador sought to differentiate his government from that of his predecessors, investing heavily in his own version of the Ayotzinapa investigation to do so. Where Peña sought to place the blame on an amalgam of organized crime and local government, López Obrador’s campaign shifted it to various higher-level officials, in order to inculpate the upper echelons of his predecessor’s government. Ayotzinapa took on a new role: as the spark for regime transition, a bit like the “Nunca Más” (“Never Again”) movement did in the Argentina of the early 1980s. AMLO’s presidency would mark a deep break from the past, and the resolution of the Ayotzinapa case was to perform that difference.
But AMLO’s version of the story, like Peña’s before him, was just that—a story. López Obrador was deeply invested in coopting the army to his cause, and therefore he sought to spare the military from any deep blame in the case. Indeed, because the army is directly under presidential control, López Obrador relied on it extensively, as he sought to use the presidency to spearhead a process of political change. And López Obrador’s romance with the military—whose budget increased 8.6 times between the start and end of his presidency—led not only to fissures inside his own government, but also, and by extension, with the parents of the forty-three. This was indeed the context in which the purity of the Ayotzinapa students’ supporters became less unassailable.
A series of reports issued by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights’ Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts (GIEI) between 2015 and 2022 are the most authoritative baseline for the facts of the case. The GIEI’s first report, in particular, helps understand Ayotzinapa’s singular position in Mexico’s contemporary history. The report did not elide the fact that Ayotzinapa students hijacked buses on the evening of September 26. Instead, it normalized that practice as a widely accepted form of political protest since the 1968 democratic transition. “The activities of doing monetary collections (boteo) and commandeering buses have been a traditional student practice in normal schools across Mexico,” the report reads. “Hijacking buses by rural normal schools in various states is a practice that is both frequent and tolerated.”
Perhaps. But shutting down highways to compel drivers to contribute money and commandeering buses was not simply “tolerated”—it required some degree of coercion. And it had, in the recent past, led to violence. Months before, students commandeering a bus had gotten into an altercation with the police. In another instance, two Ayotzinapa youths were run over by a truck and killed after students blocked a highway to level a forced collection on passing drivers. Predictably, bus companies presented complaints against hijacking, too: it involved detaining bus drivers, who were then expected both by the students and by their employers to stay with the bus, often for many days. Thus, although the practice of commandeering buses was at least to a degree viewed as “normal,” it was also true that whenever the students came across the federal police, they preferred not to.
The GIEI’s third and final report, which included newly available information from military dispatches, suggests that the students were not only being surveilled, but that they had long been infiltrated by an army informer who was even with them on the night of September 26. We now know that the army was well-appraised of the students’ activities almost in real time, and so was complicit in the events that transpired on the night of Iguala.
Perhaps for these reasons, the students involved in bus hijacking were often masked; they understood that commandeering buses was both tolerated and resisted by the police and the army, and that it was unpopular amongst bus companies, bus drivers, and drivers being stopped on roadblocks. The GIEI provided one testimony by a bus driver whose bus was amongst those that were hijacked on the evening of September 26, 2014, that described how the students stopped the bus and pounded on its sides, demanding that the driver ask that bus’s twenty-eight passengers to get off on highway, well outside of town, and let the students in. After a long wait, the passengers negotiated with the students, who were let on the bus on the condition that the passengers be taken to the station and left there, while the students made off with the bus.
More violence would follow. When the bus arrived at the Iguala bus terminal, the ten students who were on it were encircled by guards from the bus terminal and trapped inside the bus. Their comrades came to deliver them, armed with stones “in order to defend ourselves because of the police’s aggression,” as one survivor explained. Throwing rocks at the police, maybe getting beat up or arrested—all of this was a predictable part of a cat and mouse game, one that even had the undertones of political initiation. As the second- and third-year students told the first-years who were accompanying them to rescue the comrades entrapped in the bus at Iguala’s terminal, “Whenever there is repression, the police beat us or arrest us.” It was the delicate choreography of these violent confrontations—a dance undertaken by the students, the police, and the military—that regulated and negotiated the outcomes for the demonstrations, a kind of pressure valve that ensured the hijackings would not lead to students’ deaths.
But by 2014, twenty years after NAFTA took effect, that particular form of student politics—a combination of coercion and negotiation—was falling out of official favor, a fact expressed in the gradual closure of rural normal schools like Ayotzinapa, that had been founded for the sons and daughters of peasant beneficiaries of land reform, under the project of socialist education that developed in the aftermath of the Mexican Revolution. Of the thirty-six rural normal schools that had been founded between 1926 and 1939, only seventeen now remained. Indeed, the neoliberal political project still operative in 2014 included greater state commitment to protect property rights, and citizens’ rights, including the right to circulate freely on federal highways. The older political forms of negotiation like that pursued by the Ayotzinapa students—the forcible occupation of public space in order to initiate and arbitrate various arrangements—were still recognized, but they were being put under pressure.
The 2014 popular upswell against “The State” for the disappearance and murder of the Ayotzinapa students was also then, to some degree, a defense of that traditional way. This modality of oppositional politics resonated widely, not least in López Obrador’s own biography, which included blocking PEMEX’s oil wells in his native state of Tabasco in 1996, when AMLO was a young party militant of the oppositional PRD, as a way of pressuring the national oil company to compensate local communities for environmental damages. When AMLO won the elections of 2018, thanks in no small part to the massive protests that followed the Iguala massacre, the Ayotzinapa-style politics that relied on forced occupation and on a kind of negotiated extortion once again became dominant, at the expense of clearly established and well-protected property rights.
The GIEI’s report missed the significance of the contradiction between these two alternative forms of politics. By normalizing the student’s practice of carrying out roadblocks and commandeering buses, the GIEI had transformed the students into the sort of social actors who are meant to make up the ideal-typical “civil society” that is regularly conjured up by human rights activists. In other words, it turned Ayotzinapa’s students into protesting citizens.
And in one sense, that is exactly what they were. But the form of political action on which these students relied—blocking a federal highway and trying to force passengers off of buses, and then taking the bus and the bus driver for a several-day trip to Mexico City and back to their school in Ayotzinapa—was not akin to simply expressing discerning views in a free-speech corner. Rather, the tactics were more hard-edged, reliant on temporarily capturing private or public goods.
The explosive reaction to the disappearance of the students was a watershed event, in which a form of politics that had been under sustained pressure and was in apparent decline nonetheless emerged triumphant, and was even anointed after the victimization of the students with the prestige that had long been invested in the much-idealized concept of “civil society.” Ayotzinapa’s students were thus identified as protagonists of Mexico’s democratic pulsations. And it was, indeed, “The State” that had for years prior to the events at Iguala worked to suppress a particular form of underclass politics that relied on the forced occupation of space. That particular state form succumbed in the 2018 federal elections, in no small part thanks to the social movement that sprang up around the disappearance of Ayotzinapa’s students.
Even so, there is a reason why the government and media’s overwhelming concern with the forty-three has not translated into a proportional concern with the rest of Mexico’s disappeared. And there is a reason why even notoriously corrupt government officials piously lower their gaze before the parents of the forty-three, and claim to identify with them. There is a reason why the GIEI claimed, in the epigraph to its first report, that these students’ disappearances might have happened to anyone, while in actual fact not a single number can be added to the sacralized emblem of “The Forty-Three.” There is a reason why, when shortly after the students’ disappearances, sixty-five clandestine graves containing 132 corpses were discovered around Iguala, that toll was never added to the number forty-three. There is a reason why even the 2024 murder of Yanqui Kothan Gómez Peralta, the Ayotzinapa student protester, did not alter that magic number either. There is a reason why Chilpancingo’s municipal president and Guerrero’s governor can stand beside the families of the forty-three and raise monuments to the students, even while both politicians have had well-publicized accusations of having direct connections to organized crime, just as Iguala’s municipal president José Luis Abarca did back when the students were abducted and shot. If everyone agrees that the culprit of the atrocity was the state, why are the agents of that state able to lead homages to the fallen so freely?
The answer is that although the coalition backing the 2014 protests was truly broad, including human rights supporters with sensibilities akin to those of the members of the GIEI, it contained a core contradiction: between a state that was pushing—inconsistently but regularly—for clearer property rights and the implementation of rule of law on a society that had a large informal and illicit economy, and a state that has been pushing—inconsistently too but also regularly—for the return of negotiations based not so much on legally defined rights as on ad hoc negotiations around the occupation of public space.
And even if a resolution were to be found, there would still be the broader problem of disappearances, a phenomenon that plagues both of the state forms that Mexico has relied on during these past ten years. Cartels disappear people in order to build vertical monopolies—first in the drug trade, and later in a set of other activities, including gasoline theft, illegal mining, fishing and logging, racketeering, and human trafficking. The deadly competition between the cartels began during the neoliberal transition, but has continued and even expanded since 2018, under a government that declared neoliberalism finished. After Ayotzinapa, the families of Mexico’s massively high, deliberately undercounted, and every day growing numbers of disappeared found some fleeting recognition from the state. Still, the vast majority were unable to become emblematic, as their family members put it. Their disappearances are the product not only of the state of yesteryear, but that of today.
Independent and nonprofit, Boston Review relies on reader funding. To support work like this, please donate here.
